USC professor at the intersection of children and justice - latimes.com

USC professor at the intersection of children and justice - latimes.com

"The interview begins on a cheerful note. USC law professor Thomas Lyon asks a 4-year-old to tell him about her last birthday. She says she took ice cream, chocolate and cake, "mixed it up and ate it." Then she shared some with her brothers.

Lyon gently turns to the tragic matter at hand. "Tell me why you came to talk to me; tell me what happened," he asks the child, the only eyewitness to a homicide. At first she mumbles "hmm" a few times and rocks in her chair as Lyon repeats the question. And then she starts talking about seeing her mother stab the child's great-grandmother in their home. "She was killing her by the bike," the girl says. "I see," Lyon continues. "And how did she kill her?" "With a sharp knife," she says.

With that exchange, Lyon, then a consultant for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, elicited key information the police could not. That videotaped session is often viewed around the country by social workers, lawyers and law enforcement authorities who want to improve how they interview children in custodial, abuse and criminal cases.

Lyon, a Harvard-trained attorney with a doctorate in psychology from Stanford, is a leader in the field. His work has helped show that open-ended, nonjudgmental questions can prompt more detailed narratives from children, whether about birthdays or murder. His federally funded research also shows that getting a child to promise to be honest actually makes it more likely that they will tell the truth.

Lyon, who is 50 and the father of two teenagers, said there is no trauma in his past that propels his interest in child abuse. In fact, he said, warm memories of his Nebraska upbringing made him want to work with children during his adult career. After law school, he worked in the Los Angeles County Counsel's children's division and then studied child psychology. At USC, where he's taught since 1995, he holds a rare dual professorship in law and psychology, combining a passion for justice with a wonkish pursuit of data.

"Actually I find abuse work often terribly depressing, but what keeps me in it is how great the kids are despite the abuse they suffer. They still tend to be really resilient, really interested in things, really excited about stuff," he said. "And that's inspiring."

His field has generated debate among psychologists and lawyers for decades. The McMartin preschool case in the 1980s — in which children's allegations of sexual abuse and satanic rituals were found to be unreliable — underscored how controversial the topic of children's memory can be. Afterward, much research focused on avoiding coercive questioning and false accusations."