IJLCD - The impact of DLD on jury perceptions

Does knowing whether a defendant has a diagnosis of Developmental Language Disorder affect how mock jurors rate that defendant's levels of guilt, sentence length, credibility and blameworthiness?

In this podcast we chat with Dr Hannah Hobson, Samantha Gamblen and Claire Westwood about the research they did to answer this question and what it revealed.

The paper is:

The impact of developmental language disorder in a defendant's description on mock jurors’ perceptions and judgements

Hannah Madaleine Hobson,  Jemma Woodley,  Samantha Gamblen,  Joanna Brackely,  Fiona O'Neill,  Danielle Miles,  Claire Westwood 

First Published: 10 September 2022

Useful resources:

Access the paper here:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/14606984/2023/58/1 

Access the project dataset, vignette and codebook: https://osf.io/znve3/

RCSLT open access guide to DLD: https://www.rcslt.org/speech-and-language-therapy/clinical-information/developmental-language-disorder/


The Box elearning: Free learning to help with understanding what are speech, language and communication needs are and how to recognise them; plus strategies to support.
https://www.rcsltcpd.org.uk/courses/the-box-learning-journey/ 

Mind your words: Children and young people:
Free elearning to improve your understanding of children and young people with social, emotional and mental health needs and speech, language and communication needs.
https://www.rcsltcpd.org.uk/courses/mind-your-words-children-and-young-peoples-mental-health/

NOTES:
For RCSLT members, access this paper by navigating to the IJLCD website from our A-Z journals list here. Also, if you would like further information on the research terms used in the podcast, or many other aspects of research design, please navigate to the ‘Sage Research Methods’ collection from the Research Methods page of the RCSLT website’.

The interview is conducted by Jacques Strauss, freelance producer, on behalf of The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Transcript

Transcript Name: 

ijlcd-the-impact-of-dld-on-jury-perceptions

Transcript Date: 

2 May 2023 

Speaker Key (delete/anonymise if not required): 

HOST:                         JACQUES STRAUSS 

HANNAH:                   HANNAH HOBSON

SAMANTHA:               SAMANTHA GAMBLEN 

CLAIRE:                      CLAIRE WESTWOOD 

MUSIC PLAYS: 0:00:00-0:00:08 

HOST:                         0:00:08 Welcome to another RCSLT podcast. My name is Jacques Strauss. This is an IJLCD edition of the podcast, that is, the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders. In these podcasts we talk to authors about research that we think may be of interest to listeners. 

The paper discussed is entitled The impact of developmental language disorder in the defendants description on mock jurors perceptions and judgements. We were joined by three of the authors, and I started by asking them to introduce themselves. 

HANNAH:                   0:00:39 Hi, I’m Dr Hannah Hobson. I’m a psychology lecturer at the University of York. I’m not a speech language therapist, importantly; my background is in psychology, but my interests are in the relationship between language, communication, and social and emotional functioning. 

SAMANTHA:               0:00:53 Hi, I’m Samantha Gamblin. I’m a highly specialist speech and language therapist working in Surrey, and my interest is in working with children and young people with social, emotional, and mental health difficulties, and I work, at the moment, predominantly with children involved in the youth justice system.

CLAIRE:                      0:01:11 Hi, I’m Claire Westwood. I am a lecturer in speech and language therapy at Birmingham City University. My background is as a speech and language therapist, in youth justice services, social, emotional, mental health schools, violence reduction units, all kinds of parts of that field. 

HOST:                         0:01:26 I’ll start off with my usual basic question, which is: what clinical question were you trying to answer in this piece of research?

HANNAH:                   0:01:37 Essentially, we were interested in whether knowing a young person has developmental language disorder affects how that person is viewed when they’re accused of a crime. So, were people more likely to judge someone as guilty or endorse a longer sentence if they weren’t aware that somebody has developmental language disorder. That was what we were aiming to test in this experiment. 

There’d already been discussion in the literature about how young people with language needs might appear in the criminal justice system. Pamela Snow in Australia has written a bit about this, about how they might appear quite rude, their answers might be quite vague and incoherent, they might avoid eye contact – all of which might [inaudible 0:02:25] perceived as more guilty, or at least uncooperative. But we couldn’t find any experimental evidence that showed that these judgments were happening. That was primarily what we were aiming to look at.

HOST:                         0:02:39 I wonder, Samantha, could you just give us a very brief description of what DLD actually is. 

SAMANTHA:               0:02:45 DLD affects around 7% of the general population, and is a specific form of a broader set of language difficulties. It is diagnosed in the absence of any other biomedical condition like Down’s syndrome or autism. Children and young people with DLD show problems with expressing themselves and understanding the language of others, and they might have poor vocabulary, word-finding difficulties, difficulties with grammar, and difficulties with a pragmatic skills, so understanding with social use of language. 

HOST:                         0:03:16 It seems like a obvious question, but can you explain why you thought this is something to be researched? Was there a perception out there that something like DLD, you thought there was a possibility that it would have an impact on the way, say, someone within the criminal justice system was perceived and treated? 

SAMANTHA:               0:03:38 Sure, because there is such a significant crossover with how speech, language and communication needs or DLD can impact on someone’s participation in justice procedures and whether they’re judged to be someone who either has committed the crime or not. It’s important that we understand the effect that that can have, and I think that’s why… initially, it was Hannah that came up with that initial question. 

For example, if you are a person who struggles to express yourself clearly and sufficiently, if you’re a person that struggles to understand questions, that can come across to people who perhaps don’t understand that you find that difficult as untrustworthy, or someone who is deliberately lying, perhaps in that scenario of giving evidence in a courtroom. So, it was important that we look into if jurors know that developmental language disorder is something that a person experiences, does that affect the outcome of their judgements?

HOST:                         0:04:39 I guess, then, we move on to the slight background question, and I’ll put this to you, Hannah: what does the literature currently say about this?

HANNAH:                   0:04:49 The literature already tells us that language problems are really over-represented in youth justice settings. So, we already know that there’s lots of young people in young offender institutes who have language problems. And there’s probably lots of reasons why that might be the case. It might be that language problems and criminality share risk factors, like school exclusion, socioeconomic status, mental health problems. It might be that having a language problem makes you maybe a bit more vulnerable towards being led to gang involvement or something. But what we were really looking at is, if someone’s deliberating whether they’re guilty or not, do they just look more guilty? 

I couldn’t find that much in terms of data to tell us whether people do judge young people with conditions like developmental language disorder as being… looking less honest, being less likeable, seeming less credible, looking more shifty. Although I suspect that your speech and language therapists listening to this would be like, we know… I know that! But we couldn’t find any data that have shown that laypeople were making these sorts of perhaps more negative judgements about youths with DLD. 

What we do know is that the study that we did was very closely modelled off a paper by [Maras 0:06:11], who’s based at Bath, who did this… pretty much our same study, but with the diagnosis of autism. So, they told people – mock jurors – a story about a young person who committed a crime, and some of those jurors got told he had autism and some didn’t. And actually, those who knew about his autism were less likely to give him a guilty verdict, gave him… recommended less long sentences, rated him as more likeable, more honest, less blameworthy. 

So, we know that for some neurodevelopmental conditions like autism, people do seem to use those conditions as a mitigating factor when they’re making their judgements. But I couldn’t find anything on developmental language disorder. 

HOST:                         0:06:55 Do you think that’s the case because autism may not be very well understood by the public, but it’s certainly something that’s known and it’s in the media a lot. And even though I think people’s understanding of autism is… the general public’s maybe not accurate, it’s all a bit too Rain Manny, if you will. But it is a known condition, whereas DLD is perhaps not something that’s really known about by the public. 

HANNAH:                   0:07:15 Yeah, I think you’re probably right. I think you hear that a person has autism and I think a lot of people automatically think of, as you say, like a Rain Man type figure, or someone who’s nonverbal, someone who’s rocking in a corner – all those very stereotypical versions of someone who has autism. 

You hear someone has DLD and then you suddenly find out that that means there’s something to do with speech and language therapists. I think people assume that they might have a lisp [inaudible 0:07:41] necessarily got that same association with the impact and the severity of a language impairment on everyday functioning. You can have a person with autism, as we know, who is able to function much more capably than a person with severe DLD. But you’ve got to be in the know to know that, I think, at this point.

HOST:                         0:08:01 I wonder if you could talk to me about the methodology and how you actually ran this experiment and what it involved. 

HANNAH:                   0:08:09 We took a lot of inspiration from [Katie Maras’ 0:08:08] autism mock jury paper. What we did is we created essentially a short story about a chap called Mr Rose, and we included a little bit about his background, so we mentioned that he’d had some trouble at school, that he’d actually had a run-in with the police when he was younger, but no charges. And then we have the event, and essentially the crime that he’s charged with. So, we had a description of what happened on the day. 

Essentially, he went to Curry’s PC World, picked up a laptop, and people felt he was acting quite suspiciously. And when he was challenged by security staff he ran and was then arrested. 

There’s then a brief excerpt of a police interview, giving… in a script style of police asking questions and Mr Rose’s responses, and then we also have an excerpt from court proceedings where, similarly, a lawyer is asking questions and Mr Rose is responding. 

All of our participants read this story. We had 142 people do this, and half of those people were told in the background section that Mr Rose had a diagnosis of developmental language disorder and we had a few sentences about what that meant. And then the other half had the exact same story, but just minus that detail that he had developmental language disorder. 

After everybody had read the stories, they were then asked a series of questions about whether they thought he was guilty. Did he do the crime? Yes, no. If they thought he was guilty, how long do they think he should go to prison for? And then they were asked how likeable he was, how honest he seemed, how cognitively able he seemed, and how blameworthy he was. 

And after each of those questions, we also asked people to tell us: why have you given that answer? So, if you’ve said out of one to seven, he’s six likeable, why is that? What is it about him? 

And then we were able to also look at the open text responses that people gave to see what details in the story that we’d written people were using to make their judgements. And one of the things I really liked about doing this paper was that when we were creating the story [inaudible 0:10:19] it was just me and my student at the time who’d written something, and I thought, I’m sure we could get some actual speech language therapists to help us really finesse this story and make it really [inaudible 0:10:29] valid and make it more like what a person would be like in real life. 

So, I just literally put it a call on Twitter, I think, and said, are there any forensic speech and language therapists who’d mind helping us with this project?! And I was really lucky to have a great response, including from Sam and Claire, who helped us to weave in details into the story, into Mr Rose’s background, and give us feedback on how he was responding to questions to make it more like a young person who had DLD going through the criminal justice system. 

It was all done online, so it was all anonymous and collected that way. And the other thing I should… I will just say is that before we collected the data, we did something called [pre-register the study 0:11:16]. It’s a little bit nerdy, but this is a new thing that researchers can do when they’ve got clear predictions for their data and they’ve worked out how they’re going to analyse the data and their methodology. You can basically timestamp that and say, this is how I’m going to analyse the data. 

It’s part of the open science and reproducible movement, which I’m pleased to see that the journal that we published in is very supportive of.  

HOST:                         0:11:40 When you say you the pre-reg [inaudible 0:11:41] did you then make a prediction about what you thought the data was going to tell you? 

HANNAH:                   Yeah, [inaudible 0:11:47]. 

HOST:                         0:11:49 Could you tell us, before we get into what the data actually did tell you, could you give us what your prediction was? 

HANNAH:                   0:11:54 Yeah, so we… basically, our hypothesis was that we would see an effect of giving the DLD diagnosis, so telling people that he had DLD. We were expecting that to impact people’s ratings of likability, honesty, blameworthiness, sentence length, and guilt. We were taking it from the autism paper that we thought it would become a mitigating factor, basically. So, people would let them off a little bit on their bad ratings if they knew he had DLD. 

We also said we were going to look at the open text responses. It was a different kind of analysis – a qualitative analysis – so we didn’t totally pin that down. So, in the paper you’ll see there’s stuff that is labelled as pre-registered, so that’s the stuff that we decided we were going to do before we collected the data, and then there’s a bit of the paper that says these are some unregistered analyses; this is stuff we thought of later. 

But it’s quite a nice clear way of showing where a team of researchers had already decided what they were going to do with this project and where they thought of things later. It’s just a way of combating bias in research where you might get really into the data and start convincing yourself that you have this hypothesis and this prediction from the start when you might not really! 

HOST:                         0:13:06 Samantha and Claire, I wonder if I can ask you guys, did you have a gut instinct that that potentially knowing about the DLD diagnosis would be a mitigating factor in the way that people were perceived? 

SAMANTHA:               0:13:18 In my experience working with these students, and I’d imagine Claire probably finds the same, that it doesn’t… I didn’t anticipate that it would have an impact on guilt, but I did anticipate that people would be possibly a little bit more favourable and wouldn’t be quite so harsh. Working with practitioners, so [inaudible 0:13:37] support workers, magistrates, solicitors, you tend to get the, okay, that makes sense, all right, well, I’ll use that. And that’s really helpful, but isn’t seen almost like an excuse – that’s the reason he did that; they aren’t giving that much credit to the diagnosis. 

You find a similar thing with ADHD and ASD I find, that if a child has ASD it’s like, okay, well, we’ve got to be really careful around this then because obviously they’re going to have difficulties understanding things, and they’re going to have difficulties with social communication. And then you [inaudible 0:14:10] ADHD, and it’s like, well, they just fly off the handle quicker. And it’s all that very stereotypical language, or the stereotypical type of perception, I suppose. So, I would definitely say that I anticipated a lot of it being more favourable towards the vignette where the DLD was identified.

HOST:                         0:14:29 And Claire, in your experiencing… this is your area, did you have any thoughts when you saw the experiment design?

CLAIRE:                      0:14:36 I think it was very similar to Sam, in that I think it was more about a label rather than a specific label, And I thought it would very much mirror the Maras paper of autism because of that. In my experience, once professionals see a diagnostic label, not necessarily DLD, but including DLD, they, like Sam said, they go, okay, well, these young people, we’ll treat them slightly differently in a more favourable way because we know it’s perhaps more about support rather than punishment. And that could come across in sentencing options, thinking perhaps a community sentence versus a custodial sentence might be more appropriate. 

But because I also know that a young person could have that same profile without the diagnostic label, they wouldn’t get that treatment, it would be very much business as usual, down the punitive route. 

HOST:                         0:15:28 Do you think one needs to consider the difference between a person reading about, say, a defendant with some sort of language disorder, and sometimes more challenging behaviours that you might see in some sort of setting where people get frustrated and they can get quite angry and challenging? 

CLAIRE:                      0:15:49 Yeah, I think it often can become a disability issue, in that generally people associate disabled people with being quite placid, and I say that myself as disabled person. But seeing a disabled person who perhaps has challenging behaviours, and that coming across in a perhaps angry way, people don’t necessarily then think, okay, well, what other things could be going on that have made the situation come to light? And I think you’re right, in a courtroom, especially when it’s so pressured but also so antiquated, these nuances aren’t taken into account a lot of the time. 

HOST:                         0:16:23 So, Hannah, what did you find? 

HANNAH:                   0:16:25 We found that when we compared our groups who knew about his DLD versus the group that didn’t, we didn’t find any differences in terms of guilt ratings, so people who knew he had DLD weren’t less likely to say he did it, he’s guilty, and they weren’t less… they didn’t give him a reduced sentence either. But that’s a point of difference to the autism Maras paper, interestingly, where actually they did say that the autistic defendant was less guilty, and they did give him a shorter sentence. 

But what we did find was that the group who knew about his DLD rated him was more likeable, more honest, less cognitively able, and less blameworthy, so generally more favourably. Although I think, again, this is the having any condition attached to this person, it reduced their ratings of cognitive ability, interestingly. 

That’s was what we found with our scale questions where people were rating how likeable on one to seven and such. When we then looked at people’s justifications… so, we applied what’s called a ‘content analysis’ to people’s responses. It’s basically a way of going through the data and working out what are the things that keep coming up again and again and again across our participants. And we found that the people who knew he had DLD were often mentioning his cognitive function, so the fact that they thought, well, he’s got a condition or he’s got a learning disability, or he seems confused. That kind of thing happened more when people knew he had DLD. 

Those who didn’t know he had DLD, for some of the questions… for example, when rating his honesty they were more likely to describe him as being evasive and non-cooperative. They’d say, he’s being deliberately vague, or his answers are very short; he’s not being very forthcoming. So, it is interesting. They were picking up on… they were very short responses because that’s what a person with DLD would be like in those settings, but they were interpreting those as him not helping the police officers or him trying not to incriminate himself, essentially. 

One of the things that really struck me that I thought was really interesting is, at the end of the vignette, the end of the story, the last question the lawyer asks is: do you have any remorse for your actions? And Mr Rose responds, no. Now, this was actually something that happened in real life. It’s something we took from a Prison Trust report, where a young person with a learning disability had been asked by a judge if he was remorseful and he’d said no. And obviously, you don’t know that that made a big difference in what happened to that person, but you do feel like it’s not very fair; this person didn’t know what remorseful meant, so they said no. So, we included that in our story, and loads of our participants mentioned it in terms of, well, I didn’t really like him because he wasn’t… he’s not even sorry. 

And that was actually true both for our people who did and didn’t know about his DLD. A lot of people picked up on this for he’s not even remorseful, he’s got no remorse, etc. So, I found that particularly interesting, and I think particularly because quite a large… a significant number of our DLD information group people – people who knew he had DLD – were still mentioning it. I think, again, this idea that we’ve told them he has a condition, but they don’t really know what that means – they’re not actually making the connection through to that’s probably a word he’s not going to know, and therefore, perhaps I should take that bit of a story with a pinch of salt. 

CLAIRE:                      0:19:49 And it’s actually really true to life what he was saying about the findings, because when we work with students in the youth justice system we tend to find that many of them will say that they don’t feel remorse, they don’t feel sorry for what they’ve done because they don’t actually understand who they’re supposed to feel sorry to, or they feel justified in their actions. 

I’ve got a number of students at the moment who have been involved… [or children, rather 0:20:09] who’ve been involved in  assault of an emergency worker, but the emergency worker was blocking them or was making them frustrated, because they didn’t understand what they were being asked, so they had it coming. And they don’t mean it like that, but they don’t feel that they’ve got any level of control, so they don’t feel remorse because they feel like they were justified in their actions, and that’s really difficult. 

And we also find that in terms of when they are interviewed by police, a lot of our children will say, no comment, because they don’t understand the question. And they feel like they that’s what they’re supposed to say – they see that on TV, they hear from their solicitor, say no comment, if you don’t want to answer you don’t have to. So, they say no comment. But then you speak to them in appropriate language in a calmer environment and they go, well, yeah, of course I did it; I know I did it. But as far as the police have said that it’s a non-admittance crime, and that’s where things are really, really challenging, and they are perceived as more negative as they’re not seen as compliance because they’re saying no comment, but purely because they haven’t got a clue what they’re meant to be saying. 

HOST:                         0:21:14 It’s both interesting but quite disappointing that disclosure of the DLD diagnosis didn’t seem to have an impact on the participants’ perception of culpability, guilt, or, indeed, sentencing. So, does this mean that even when people are told about DLD, though only briefly, the don’t register what impact it can have? 

SAMANTHA:               0:21:37 I think so, and as it’s a complete invisible disability it’s really hard for the general public to appreciate perhaps what it looks like in context in the courtroom or in the police station, and how that realistically impacts engagement in the process, even to the point of when the offence took place. How communication difficulties can cause certain reactions in a situation. For example, if things are escalating how to verbally deescalate, that would be a really tricky thing. So, I think that that does explain some way towards why perhaps people in this study thought more favourably around aspects of personality, but couldn’t translate that to the actual guilt and sentencing option. 

HOST:                         0:22:22 Other than training the whole of the public who may be in a jury in all sorts of language and communication disorders, what can we do? What does this tell us about how we can make things better?

HANNAH:                   0:22:37 Although we didn’t get the effects on guilty verdicts and sentencing lengths, we did get effects other aspects on which we asked our participants to judge the defendant. So, knowing that somebody has DLD does have an effect on how we perceive people. 

That really highlights, I think, how important it is, particularly in criminal justice systems, that if a person has a communication need that that is identified and that that’s considered. And that would involve the professionals that person’s working with, but also I think, ideally, in a jury situation, you would have maybe some kind of expert witness, somebody who could… more than what we did, which was four sentences about what DLD is – somebody who is able to give independent advice around realistically how this person’s communication problems is going to affect a) their behaviour on the day, as Claire’s mentioned, but also how they might appear to you the jury in this room. 

So, I think that’s really important. It really highlights the need to identify and do that awareness campaigning, I suppose, to ensure that the people who are involved in the criminal justice system – professionals, jury, everybody involved – has an understanding of what DLD looks like. 

I think it does also highlight that we need to keep doing DLD Awareness Day. We’ve got to keep up the energy in trying to get the general public to a level of awareness. It is a big task, but 30 years ago people didn’t know what autism was, and I suspect it was in quite a similar place to where DLD is now. So, I think there’s hope. It’s a lot of work, but I think we do have to keep that awareness going. 

The other thing that I think would be really important is that a lot of SLTs might not get involved with a young person in the criminal justice system until after the sentencing has happened. And actually, by that point, it’s too late. So, trying to find routes in to support and identify those people earlier in the process. Obviously, the Royal College has got the box training for professionals in the criminal justice system, so trying to get colleagues to do that so they have got in the back of their minds when they’ve arrested someone, could this be someone with a communication need would be really important as well. 

CLAIRE:                      0:24:59 I think it’s important that the range of professionals who would come into contact with this young person, or adult, would have awareness of what speech, language and communication needs or DLD is, and some basic strategies for support. Whether that be the police in the first instance when they make that arrest, then moving on to solicitors. Appropriate adults, even, don’t get training in speech and language needs but they’re expected to be the person that mediates in the interview to ensure access in the process. And so I think it also highlights the need for people [inaudible 0:25:33] intermediaries exist and that can provide support and sufficient funding for intermediaries to be able to be involved with all the people who need it, because at the moment that’s very much not the case. 

And in terms of training, we’re not just talking the solicitors, we’re talking the barristers. I know training has happened with quite a few judges and magistrates, so that’s really positive. But increasing that amongst court staff, to me, I think is a really important outcome. 

HANNAH:                   0:26:02 Speech and language therapists and speech and language therapy students have a good understanding of DLD and language difficulties. A lot of SLTs don’t feel comfortable or confident working with students and children, adults, with the presenting SEMH needs that we are working with. 

I graduated over 10 years ago, but I had no lectures, no work on SEMH and the criminal justice system. Thankfully now we’ve got lovely Claire doing some lecturing as well, and there is a lot more exposure, I think, within the student community to that knowledge. [Inaudible 0:26:39] possible, I think we need to get our students and our qualified therapists a little bit more comfortable and confident working with these young people, because I think there is still a tendency to think, well, there’s behaviour there and it must be something else before me, or it’s all about anxiety and mental health. And yes, there is clearly mental health needs and anxiety needs, and potentially other diagnoses involved in a lot of the young people that we’re working with – that’s not to say that language difficulty isn’t there as well. 

I think we’ve got a role to play alongside other professionals to support young people, but I think don’t count ourselves out because of those other difficulties, I think, is a really, really important message for students and qualified SLTs to remember. 

HOST:                         0:27:26 What further research should we be doing in this area? 

HANNAH:                   0:27:29 So, as an academic, I’m always keen to check that the effect is going to replicate and see if it’s there. So, we’ve actually just finished data collection on our second jury perception experiment. Basically, we created a new vignette, but it’s the same design, so people either get told this person has DLD or they don’t. But this time it was with a female defendant and it was with a violent crime. So, rather than theft it was a scuffle outside a pub, essentially. 

And I was just interested by, do we still see these effects even if we change quite a lot, really, about what the people are reading? And interestingly, we still didn’t get effects on guilt or sentencing, so that seems to be holding, that knowing a person has developmental language disorder doesn’t seem to translate into reduced sentencing or guilt verdicts. 

The people that knew she had DLD thought she was more honest, less blameworthy, less cognitively able. The only thing that was different is it didn’t make any difference to her likability. So, people didn’t like her anymore, even if they knew she had DLD. Otherwise, the findings were the same. 

HOST:                         0:28:34 My other question is: the DLD description that you gave, was that exactly the same as it was previously? 

HANNAH:                   0:28:42 It was the same, and that, I think, leads into a really good future step which would be, rather than giving them a paragraph, if we had a condition where people were given perhaps a lot more training on DLD before then doing this study. The problem would be is by that point they’d probably have a really good idea of what it was we were trying to test them for! 

CLAIRE:                      0:29:00 I was just going to say on the gendered aspect of that kind of study, as we know, females are more likely, perhaps – especially adolescents – to be involved in exploitation scenarios, and whether knowing a person who has DLD who’s involved in that exploitation, whether it’s [county lines 0:29:19] or something like that, whether there’s a similar effect there. But also, again, females, often victims of crimes with much smaller numbers in terms of being perpetrators [inaudible 0:29:30] if a victim has DLD or not is there an impact on whether you believe their story there? There’s a lot of different factors to consider, I think. 

SAMANTHA:               0:29:38 Hannah, Claire, and I were talking before the podcast about whether a vignette where the individual was identified as having DLD would have any different perceptions placed upon them compared with if they had SLCN. Reason being, a lot of children who get… who come into the youth justice system don’t have diagnosis of DLD, and in order to get a diagnosis of DLD they would have to have a relatively large amount of speech and language therapy provision, or the speech and language therapist would have to do some digging into previous history and things like that. 

And a lot of us, in terms of how much speech and language therapy is offered to students and children and young people within the criminal justice system, there’s really not that much. So, in order to give diagnosis of DLD to every student who… or every child, sorry, who has DLD, we just don’t have the staffing to do it. So, it’d be curious to find out whether or not a diagnosis of DLD would have any different effect to an identified speech, language and communication need.

HOST:                         0:30:43 Another really interesting point that came up in the discussion is the tension between this move away from pathologising speech and language differences, and yet, still ensuring that we have equitable and fair outcomes in the criminal justice system. 

CLAIRE:                      0:31:00 Us therapists working in youth justice, myself included, are often reluctant to pathologise the communication presentation of a young person and describe it in terms of their communication inaccessibility, rather than perhaps disordered communication on the behalf of the young person. But how that could be presented to a mock juror is a very complex idea, and I think it’s just something to consider as our profession continues in this space, that pathologising of the communication inaccessibility situation. 

HOST:                         0:31:37 Hannah, what were the limitations to the study? 

HANNAH:                   0:31:40 Many and various! One is that obviously this is not really how juries actually operate – you don’t read a story, you’re there; you get to see the person who’s accused of the crime and so on. So, people might perceive young people DLD very differently if they’re in the same room as them, if they’re actually interacting with them or watching them be interviewed as opposed to reading about what happened. So, there’s that – there’s the modality aspect of the of the study. 

There’s also, as has been mentioned, DLD is not that often diagnosed and actually, there might be other terms that might be more akin to what somebody coming through the criminal justice system might actually have. So, looking into the role of, for example, a label of speech, language and communication needs would be really important. 

What we also didn’t have was a comparison to what happens if you actually take the same story and just say, this person’s autistic. What it looks like is that the DLD label is offering… it’s changing some people’s perceptions, but I don’t think they have enough of an understanding what DLD is for it to make an impact on guilt ratings. So, now what I’d like to do is the direct comparison [inaudible 0:32:54] same stories, but if the person has a diagnosis of autism in their background, can we then say, they definitely shouldn’t go to prison because of this. Because that, I think, would provide a lot more direct evidence for the fact that some diagnostic information is having an effect on people’s guilt verdicts, and some conditions aren’t. 

So yeah, we don’t have that direct comparison in this study, but I’m hoping to address that soon. 

HOST:                         0:33:18 What is it that the SLTs as a profession do you think should be doing? 

SAMANTHA:               0:33:23 I think speech and language therapists need to, where possible, if they are referred a child with SEMH needs, or they are aware of a child of SEMH needs to not just see the SEMH needs and then assume that the language is fine, or assume that the SEMH needs to take priority. 

We do have an awful lot of young people who do have very significant social, emotional, mental health difficulties that may well be because of language difficulties, or may well be contributing to language difficulties, and they may well exist without language difficulties. 

But completing that assessment in a dynamic way, in a safe environment is really valuable, and it can really have a huge impact on the success of those children. We’ve got so many children coming into the justice system at the moment who have never seen a speech and language therapist. They’ve never had anything identified on EHCPs or SEND support plans about any speech and language difficulties, yet they’ve presented with these SEMH needs for 10, 15 years and no one’s considered that it might be a speech and language difficulty. 

CLAIRE:                      0:34:32 I think it’s being confident that we have a role in not just the assessment, but also providing communication accessibility in scenarios like this, to be confident in making links with community members, whether that’s the police, whether it’s the person solicited to share your information about diagnoses, needs, recommendations. And also to know that intermediaries exist as a role now where you can signpost people to access intermediaries because I think they can make the difference for young people and adults in the criminal justice system in supporting that accessibility of communication. 

Often information about DLD or SLCN [inaudible 0:35:17] SEND route in school, and we need to make sure it goes across to the pastoral teams who are perhaps doing the exclusions, for example. And also, when you’re in a school, asking if you’ve got people who are frequent fliers in the behaviour units, in isolation, who are up for suspension, exclusion, do they need to be referred to speech language therapy? Because sometimes in schools those two teams don’t equate speech and language needs as needing to be known to both sides, pastoral and special educational needs.

HOST:                         0:35:52 A very big thank you to Sam, Claire, and Hannah for their time. As always, helpful links are in the show notes. Until next time, keep well. 

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