The content of Dark Areas includes topics and subject matter that may not be suitable for all audiences. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of AudioChuck or its employees. Information discussed by the host and interviewees includes content related to crimes against children, abuse, acts of terrorism, and violence. Listener discretion is advised. Have you ever kept a secret all to yourself? Some piece of information that only you and maybe one or two other people know about? Do you remember what it felt like when you finally told someone else about it? Was it liberating? Was it frightening? I would hope that most of us only have a few benign secrets, inner thoughts, or actions that don't really impact others all that much. My optimistic mind wants so badly to believe that's the case, but my realistic mind knows there are thousands, even millions of people with very dark secrets. Sometimes the keepers of those secrets, the only other people who can reveal them are children. Young people who have witnessed and experienced horrors in their homes, families, schools, and communities, who finally muster the courage to liberate themselves from harboring other people's dark secrets.

In this episode of Dark Areas, I'm sitting down with a child forensic interviewer who works every day to pull dark secrets from children who should not and cannot carry them. It was raining while I waited outside of the door of the Dragonfly House in Moxville, North Carolina. If you're wondering where Moxville is, it's in the middle of nowhere, dead center of the state about an hour north of Charlotte. Blue-collar country for sure. The Dragonfly House is a children's advocacy center where minors are brought when they indicate they've been a victim of sexual or physical abuse. The door I was knocking at looked like the front door of a home. It even had a cute little doorbell. There were also several locks and signs instructing visitors how to verify who they were there to see and why using the main entrance was prohibited. Thankfully, all the staff members on duty were expecting me. After the center's director ushered me inside and I exchanged a few greetings with employees, I started setting up my laptop and recorder in a beautifully decorated room that looked like it had been plucked right out of a Southern living catalog. The furniture was plush, the rug was soft, and the atmosphere was really inviting.

The only things that stuck out to me were several cameras mounted in the corners of the room, black orbs that gleamed in the light. As I was setting up my gear, I realized after a few minutes that I couldn't hear anything else in the building anymore. Nothing. No chatter from the employees I just met in the hallway, not even the powder of rain on the roof. The room, I was then told, was entirely soundproof. The cameras, the soundproofness, it all made me even more eager to get started with Kim Kraver, a forensic interviewer who spent the last seven years conversing with children who report claims of physical and sexual abuse. These claims are what forensic interviewers refer to as outcries or disclosures.

It is just when a child has finally felt comfortable to talk about, make a statement or multiple statements about what has happened to them. They're reaching out for help. They're finally… They found somebody that maybe you might listen to them and maybe you might help them get some safety. So they make this statement or they make these statements, and that gets the ball rolling.

What keeps the ball rolling is when whoever first overheard a disclosure, maybe a school teacher, a coach, or a family friend brings that information to the attention of law enforcement. Then law enforcement and the Department of Social Services arranges for the child to have a more in-depth conversation with Kim.

Basically, the child sees me first. They come into the office, they meet our advocate, they get told what's about to happen, and then they come and sit with me, and we sit down and we have a conversation. I try to normalize that it is a conversation, not what has happened to them, because that's not normal, but normalize that we are just having a conversation together. And we sit down and I'm trying to gather information for the investigators. I'm also just trying to reassure the child that this is okay, this is a safe place.

The reason the interview room at the Dragonfly House is soundproof is because everything that's said in this space is sensitive. No one else in the building who could be there for their own appointment should be able to hear the details of a disclosure. On a typical day, Kim meets with multiple children, all with different backgrounds and disturbing stories to tell.

To see anywhere from three children on a really busy day five. I interview children ages three to 17, so covers the whole gamut. Every single child that comes through here is so different. I can have three year olds who can narrate absolutely everything that has ever happened to them. And then I can have a 16 year old who to them, this is normal and it's just been going on forever. And so they're just like, why are we even talking about this? There is no right or wrong way for children to exhibit trauma. They're going to exhibit it very differently. And I think that is super important for people to know. We work with sexual abuse, we work with physical abuse, witness to violence, witness to murder, neglect. We cover the whole abuse. And so it's so different. And it's so different for every child. You've got kids on developmental. You've got three-year-olds, you've got three year olds, you've got 17 year olds that are obviously going to communicate differently. But then everything in between different just everything about the way that people communicate. So they're all different. There's no similarity to what that child may disclose.

After learning that, I had to know, was Kim a mother herself?

I am. I have two little boys, 10 and seven. We probably have the private part safety conversation every couple of months, and I get lots of eyerolls because they could recite it to me by heart. They're so tired of hearing it. But I feel like I'm a little more hypervigulent in terms of monitoring for them, which I don't think is a bad thing. I think there is unfortunately a lot of parents and caregivers who do not monitor their children in terms of internet, just computers, phones, all of that.

With that in mind, I also had to know, how does she cope with this job? I mean, after all, we're talking about some seriously heavy, disturbing trauma she has to listen to all day long from children, no less.

Somehow I feel like my brain has developed this safety mechanism for me that once I talk to a child, I can erase it, not the experience, but just erase what they've said that I'm not carrying it all the time inside. I don't know how that happened. When it happened, I'm thankful it did happen because then I don't take it home.

Like she said, Kim treats every one of her interviews as if it's a clean slate. First things first, she wants to make sure a child is comfortable when they're opening up to her.

I hear some pretty shocking stuff. I hear some really awful stuff. I have cried in an interview before, though, because I'm human, too. And we have had children just break down, and it is heartbreaking. And so I would be lying if I didn't feel anything. I feel lots of things. But it is really important that they don't feel that shame.

That last piece about the child not feeling any shame, that is critical to Kim's job. And the reason for all the cameras? To record and archive the interviews so that law enforcement can potentially use them in an eventual prosecution of the child's offender.

The child comes in and they sit with me in a separate room and the law enforcement and all the investigative agencies are sitting in another room watching. It is video recorded and it's live streamed and they watch that. So they get to take their notes. They get to think of other questions that may need to be asked. And I take a break and I go out and I touch base with them and I come back in and I'm the one still that the child gets to talk to you. It's a funnled approach. We'll just start really vague. Why are you here today? And then come in a little bit and come in a little bit. If at some point I get too narrow in that funnel, we're probably not going to be able to... Because then I can start to get leading. And you don't want that because these interviews are used in court. They're legally sound. So you don't want defense attorneys or other attorneys to have fuel to try to tear the interview apart.

Because everything that comes out of Kim's interview with a child is going to be picked apart in court. She can't come into one of her interviews thinking like a cop. She's not trying to play detective to see if the child is being truthful. Kim's job isn't to determine an alleged perpetrator's guilt or innocence. She's just there to listen to the child, get information from them, and pass that information along to law enforcement. It's the police's job to determine if what the child disclosed matches up with the rest of the evidence in their investigation. Kim says she'd be lying, though, if she said that law enforcement didn't sometimes try to pressure her into seeing a disclosure through their eyes only.

The investigators, I've been working here a while, and I've done quite a few interviews for them, so they know what I can and can't ask by now. I'm not asking the leading questions. They may want me to, but I can't. And they respect that. They sometimes try to push me a little, but I can push back.

In a lot of cases, Kim has found that it's the child's own words and actions in their interview that are the most compelling evidence as to whether or not what they're saying is the truth or a fabrication.

That was one of my most mind-blowing interviews just because here's this little three-year-old boy who is just acting like a 27-year-old rough, tough, gang member.

There are just some things children of certain ages should not know about or say. So if they tell Kim craver what an adult's genitalia looks like, feels like, or what a dead body smells or looks like, then there's a high probability they've exposed to a very specific abusive situation and most likely other criminal acts. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to provide so much detail.

One of the things we do in the beginning is we go over rules, what is a truth? What is a lie? Can you promise to tell me the truth? And I do recognize that they may say yes, and they may not be telling me the truth. You're looking for inconsistencies in the story. You're looking for detail. Sensory detail is huge, though. When they can provide some sensory detail, you know that happened.

Can you think of times where you've sat with very young children and what they're telling you? You know they only heard that confirms the.

Abuse is happening. Oh, absolutely. There was one little boy, and he was three. Three is not my favorite age to interview just because they're very challenging. A lot of times they're not developmentally there. A lot of them have speech impediments. They're just really challenging. But this three-year-old, he was a little boy, and the way he talked, the language he used, past. I mean, it was just cusswords and cusswords and really crude conversation about women. I mean, he heard that from somewhere, was acting out during the interview, showing me some things, talked about his family members being in gangs, and you could tell by the words that he was using that his family members were in gangs. And he was three really awful stuff coming out of his mouth.

Some children's exposure to trauma isn't going to be as obvious as a case like that, especially they've been subjected to sexual abuse for years.

Because it's, I mean, they've been raped daily by a family member for years and years and years, and they're flat and they don't have any emotion or inflection when they're talking to me. Does that mean it didn't happen? They are just… That's how they've coked. That's how they've processed.

Those cases take a lot more out of Kim as an interviewer because she has to push a little harder to understand what's been going on and for how long. Sometimes the child is unwilling to name their abuser because it's someone who's close to them, possibly even living under the same roof.

Every child's reaction is going to be very different. I think that there is a misconception on if a child is sexually abused, this is how they're going to act. That's not true at all. Because again, if it's their normal, if it's been happening for years, if it's happening by a mom or a dad, they love that mom and dad. It doesn't matter how awful the abuse was. That's their mom. That's their dad. They are still going to love them.

That's mind numbing. How can you love someone who hurts you so badly? I think it's an easy question we could all ask, especially those of us who haven't had to endure such horrific experiences. But I don't think that that question comes with an easy answer. I mean, we're talking about layers of trauma and serious psychological manipulation by abuse. A child who's been raised to believe that love incorporates uninvited sexual interactions cannot process what's happened to them like someone who hasn't experienced that. Kim says there's a tremendous amount of fear that children exhibit when they get to the point of disclosing. In her experience, she's found that a child's fear of repercussions is amplified when a relationship with a family member hangs in the balance.

One of the hardest things for me is when we have a caregiver, whether it be a parent or just a non-offending caregiver who isn't willing to hear what has happened to that child or is choosing the person who has hurt that child over the child. It is devastating to the children. I mean, it's heartbreaking to them. They're fractured. They are broken and what will make them feel comfortable to disclose again?

Kim told me about one case where this exact scenario unfolded right before her eyes.

We had a case where there were a couple of children who were being interviewed, and it was mom and I believe it was a boyfriend. And mom was believing the boyfriend over the children and the children were disclosing pretty significant sexual abuse. And after the interviews, the investigators will talk to the parents and say, hey, this was disclosed. You need to find a safe place for them. And the mom actually got up and walked out and left the children here, left them here, just left. She chose the boyfriend over the children, left them here. I think it was about five o'clock. So that instantly changed what was about to happen. Everybody had to start finding. We had to figure out where we're going to put the children. Where were they going to be safe? What were the investigators going to do with mom's decision? It was pretty heartbreaking for the kids.

A non-offending parent or caregiver who does not believe a child's disclosure is a scenario that Kim sees more than she'd like to admit. She's also seen a lot of parents or guardians who simply cannot care for the needs of a child who's been victimized.

We can offer services. We can offer therapy, but they have to be brought to the therapy. They need to… There's a large lack of parental support sometimes, which is very hard. You see the parents on drugs. You see the parents who have their own dysfunction, their own issues, their own cycles that they are surviving. And unfortunately, it's carrying over to the children and continuing. And you do, you see the cycle. You see a child who came here when they were younger, they've grown up some, maybe they didn't get the help that they needed, and so they've started perpetrating on younger children. So now you've got that cycle starting again.

If there's one thing she wants the public to know about how to understand and process an outcry, it's that you should never be too quick to cast judgment. You can't assume your child or another child is going to behave a certain way if they've been abused. Parents can't have preconceived ideas that could blind their ability to see abuse right in front of them.

All the emotions are going to be there, and you cannot look at a child and say, Oh, well, you're not acting this way, so you are not abused. You just don't know. They're all going to exhibit it very differently.

Also, parents and guardians shouldn't ignore an outcry simply because they don't want to believe it could be true.

It has crossed all races, all sexes, all sexual orientations, Christians, non-Christians. I mean, it is everywhere in the churches and the non-churches. I think a lot of people don't believe that. They think it might be the people who have less money or of a certain race, but it's not. I mean, we've seen the wealthy, we've seen the poorest of the poor, we've seen all skin colors. We've seen it all. And I wish people would recognize that it is happening. And I think there is a blinder that people like to put on because they don't... It's hard to talk about. I mean, who wants to talk about a child being raped? They don't. They don't want to believe that it happens. And I wish that that they would talk to their children. I wish the parents would teach them proper body language. I wish that the communication lines would be open and supervision would happen without it looking like I'm this super hypervigulent person just because I hear stuff, but no, it's out there. It's just out there.

Kim worked one case in North Carolina in recent years, where several adults chose not to address allegations of abuse happening in their community. Their lack of transparency eventually led to a larger victim pool and devastating consequences for multiple families.

I think people try to shelter themselves and think, Oh, it's not happening in the school. My kids go to. It's not happening. But we had a rather large case where a youth pastor was having full access to obviously a lot of younger children and was grooming them, preparing them for more, and had actually started touching some of the children, recording himself touching some of the children. And I believe a couple of the children finally started disclosing. And it blew up into a pretty large case because this was, again, lots of access to children. It was kept hush-hush within that church, which was really frustrating because these parents needed to know in case other victims were out there. We had a lot of people who we maybe knew personally calling and saying, hey, my child goes here, what's happening? Because nobody was talking about it. And that's one of the things I wish people would do is they would talk about it. It is happening. It's happening in youth groups. It's happening in churches. It's happening in classrooms. Talk about it. Let the kids know, hey, we see that this is happening. Is it happening to you?

Do we need to... Do you need to be saved? That was a big hit to the community because of the lack of communication and not talking about it.

Kim says another huge problem is that we, as a society, have stereotyped child abuseers. We've given them these identities and faces that are not always reflective of reality.

I think there is a misconception that is these old white, creepy men perping on little girls. But we have moms who perp on their sons, or we have teenagers who are perping on their younger siblings. You can't look at a picture online on Facebook and say, Oh, yeah, that person's a pedophile. Now, some people may look a little sketchy, but for the most part, it could be the most pleasant-looking person. The youth pastor was a young, pleasant-looking person. You would have looked at him and said, That's a pedophile. And he did some pretty horrific stuff. Kim says.

The gross lack of education and communication among adults about abusive situations is definitely disheartening. But the hardest pill to swallow in her line of work is when she believes what a child is telling her, but the criminal justice system does not. That is a battle she faces often, and losing it has devastating effects.

That's a really hard one because they had to go right back into that environment and got offended by the same person.

We all know how it goes. In a court of law, a person is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Period. It's a creed of our constitution and for good reason. In cases where children have disclosed that an adult has physically or sexually abused them, the criminal justice system has some protections for minors, but that creed? Yeah, it's still there to protect the defendant's rights, innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Everything a child has said to Kim craver in a recorded interview is scrutinized to ensure this right is upheld for the defendant.

Since the accuser has a right to face his accuser, since the perpetrator has a right to face his accuser, the kids still have to go to court. The interview is played, but the child still has to be there, unfortunately. The best case scenario is the abuser sees that video, sees that disclosure and decides I'm going to take a plea. And so then we don't have to go. But we do get called pretty frequently. It's not my favorite thing to testify because I know that defense attorneys have their jobs as well, and they do them very well. And their job is to get that person off and free. So even when they have their hurtful comments or try to tear apart my interviews, that's always not very fun. I just want to save the kids. I want to save everybody. I want to be a Wonder Woman. So when somebody's coming in and tearing apart and ripping apart when you're just trying to help, it just doesn't feel good inside. But I know, again, everybody's got a job to do, so I'll just continue to train and update and do my best.

For outcry cases that do make it to the inside of a courtroom, Kim says the experience can be almost as traumatizing for the child as the initial abuse. You don't know what's going to.

Happen next. You don't know what's going to happen in court. You don't know how long court is going to take. These cases, a child could have disclosed, and it's five years later that they're finally going to court. It's a different child at that point. We try not to focus too much on what that outcome is going to be, but what can we do just to help this child heal and move forward in his or her life? Because you don't know what's going to happen in that.

The hard part of Kim's job is knowing what she knows after conducting interviews and then seeing the criminal justice system be unable to take a case forward. Most often, that's due to lack of evidence to corroborate a child's claim.

We see repeats. We'll see repeats with children who have had the same offender because nothing happened. And those can be a little frustrating sometimes because when we are talking about these cases, and I'm sharing what happened again in the interview, and the detectives are like, well, we're not taking out any charges. And you're sitting there thinking, but I really believe that child. And they may also really believe that child, but there may be just enough of an inconsistency or just enough of something that wasn't able to be found or proven. Those get to be very frustrating because you just... I mean, there are sometimes I will interview a kid and just the body language I feel from that child. But a lot of that can't be used in court. I can't get on the stand and say, yes, this child is telling me the truth, and no, this child is not. I can basically provide what the child said. But there have definitely been cases where I can sit in here and I can just feel maybe it's mom's intuition, maybe it's just doing this for so long. You just know. Those are really hard.

You feel like you want to do more. You feel like you're failing that child. And that can be really discouraging, puts you in a negative space for a little while.

I feel like you are trapped in this limbo.

It feels like that sometimes. There are a lot of times I feel like I'm helping. And there are some times where I feel like why does it matter if they're not going to do anything in this case anyway? But I can't think that because even if it doesn't go to court, even if it doesn't, that child did come and talk. So that's the beginning of something. Maybe they'll talk again one day. Maybe they'll get some therapy because of it. Court isn't the end of end all. They still have all the feelings and emotions. So getting them therapy, getting them help, we can do those things, too. So I can't just think that maybe my job is pointless because I know it's not. I know it's really important.

It is really important because the impact of the work forensic interviewers like Kim and advocacy centers like the Dragon Fly House are doing reaches far beyond just the individual making a disclosure. It is almost a guarantee that if a.

Child comes through here, we are going to be recommending therapy and counseling. We have support groups for the parents, for the non-offending caregivers, for grandparents who sometimes are raising their grandbabies. We do support groups for that. We're in the schools, we're trying to educate. We have community outreach, which is amazing. We're just trying to let people know, Hey, we have resources as well, and it's all free. We will never charge anybody a dime.

Kim usually doesn't know what happens to a child after her interview with them. She may see the case go to court, she may not. It's uncommon for her to have interactions with a child beyond that first conversation in the cozy, soundproof room. But on the rare occasion, she does get an update from one of them. It's a reminder that all of the darkness she walked through with them was worth it because they didn't forget those few hours she spent with them just listening.

It is really nice when you… We've gotten a couple of letters every now and then, people who have done really well, and they'll just write back and be like, Thanks, and that's pretty awesome. I mean, you don't do it for that. It's pretty rare to get that, but when you get it, you're like, Oh, we saved one. So it feels really good.

When I left the center to head back out into the rain, I wondered where the organization got its name from, the Dragonfly House. It seemed random. Turns out it's not. When I asked the director what the story was behind the name, she told me this. In most parts of the world, the Dragonfly is a symbol of change, transformation, and new beginnings. So in other words, an image of hope and newness. An unknown author penned a story about the Dragonfly that the center has and adopted. The story speaks of a small water beetle who lived in the depths of a muddy pond, and it yearned to fly upward towards the sunlight. One day, the little beetle climbed the stem of a lily pad and napped in the sunshine for a few hours. When it awoke, it had transformed into a beautiful blue-tailed dragonfly with wings and flew away from the muck it had always known. It buzzed around free but burdened by the fact that it could not return to the bottom of the pond and tell its friends about how freedom was just one decision away. Eventually, it realized those that had left behind would eventually find the courage to climb the lily pad into the sunlight too.

With that, it flew off and enjoyed its new life out of darkness and into the light. This episode of Dark Areas was written and produced by Delia D'Ambra, with writing assistants from executive producer, Ashley Flowers. You can find pictures and source material for this episode on our website, darkarenas. Com. Dark Areas is an audio Chuck original show. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?