ChildFirst Missouri 2024 – St. Louis
October 21 @ 8:00 am - October 25 @ 3:00 pm
$150Applications will open in the summer of 2024.
Missouri KidsFirst is the certified course provider in Missouri for ChildFirst®. The ChildFirst® Forensic Interviewing course is designed for investigative teams of law enforcement officers, social workers, prosecutors, and forensic interviewers. Students receive training on the ChildFirst® Forensic Interview Protocol, child development, memory and suggestibility, testifying in court, legal issues and preparing children for court. While the ChildFirst® Forensic Interviewing course is intended for those professionals who will be conducting forensic interviews of children, completing the ChildFirst® Forensic Interviewing course, alone, does not qualify an attendee to begin conducting forensic interviews.
COURSE INFORMATION: The ChildFirst® Missouri course provides essential information for all members of the Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT). An MDT may include a combination of the following: law enforcement, Children’s Division investigators, prosecutors, CAC staff, medical providers, and juvenile court professionals. This training is the national ChildFirst® Forensic Interviewing curriculum developed by the Zero Abuse Project and includes the ChildFirst® Forensic Interviewing protocol.
This course is an interactive, intensive training that combines lecture with hands on experience. From the pre-course materials on linguistics, child development, memory, suggestibility and other pertinent topics, to required-reading in the form of homework each day, students are expected to study a significant amount of literature relating to child sexual abuse.
All participants in the ChildFirst® Forensic Interviewing training are required to complete a practice interview with an actor playing the role of a child that is critiqued by an expert forensic interviewer. Participants are also required to take a pre-test and successfully pass a post-test to receive credit for the course. Participants who do not successfully complete the practice interview and achieve a passing score on the test will NOT receive a certificate of completion.
