Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 16Child Abuse and Related TraumaChild Abuse and TraumaSexual Assault and Victimization Studies

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 19 of the 20 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Child sexual abuse—Medical statement conclusions in criminal legal process

Joki-Erkkilä, Minna, Niemi, Jenni, Ellonen, Noora·2014·Forensic Science International
DOI 10.1016/j.forsciint.2014.03.006
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Objectives To evaluate medical statement conclusions in the criminal-legal process in suspected cases of child sexual abuse (CSA). Study design An observational study of a random sample of 130 medically examined, police reported CSA suspected cases during 2001-2009. Medical statements were evaluated and their conclusions were analyzed with an end-point in the legal process. The data consists of official investigation documents from the University Hospital records, the Police, crime laboratories, the State Prosecutor, and the Courts of Law. Results The median age of the children was 5.3 years (range 11 months-17.3 years) at the time of the suspected sexual abuse. In most cases (76.2%, 99/130) medical statement conclusions neither supported nor excluded the suspicion of CSA. Twenty-one (16.2%) medical statements supported and in 10 cases (7.7%) the conclusion did not support the suspected CSA. Of the suspected CSA cases a hundred (76.9%) proceeded to the Prosecutor. The charge filing rate was 41.5% (54/130). The final conviction rate was 30.8% (40/130) and 74% in the charged cases. Medical statements were mentioned as evidence in the Prosecutor's decision to file charges in 18 (33.3%) of suspected CSA cases and in 15 (36%) of verdicts. A child's clear disclosure of CSA (p<0.001) and medical statements (p=0.037) had a significant role in decision making on convictions. Conclusion In medical statement conclusions, physical findings with proper documentation and interpretation are needed to avoid misunderstandings in the legal process. The present study supports a routine medical statement peer review to minimize the risk of neglect caused by lack of knowledge among authorities working with sexually abused children.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.forsciint.2014.03.006

Cites

19 of 19 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Show all 20 references

Cited by

See all 16

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Joki-Erkkilä, M., Niemi, J., & Ellonen, N.
Affiliations
Police University College (FI)
ORCID
Ellonen, Noora
Venue
Forensic Science International
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2014-06
Volume
239
Pages
31-36
ISSN
0379-0738 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/j.forsciint.2014.03.006
OpenAlex
W2046704302
Cited by
15
References
20
Citations by year
2025: 2 · 2024: 2 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 2 · 2018: 2 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 1
FWCI
0.94
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
Locations
  • Forensic Science International (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health › Child Abuse and Related Trauma
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child Abuse and Trauma
  • Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Sexual Assault and Victimization Studies
Keywords
child sexual abuse, forensic medical examination, conviction rates, child disclosure, medical peer review, child protection, police investigation
MeSH terms
Adolescent, Child, Child Abuse, Sexual, Child, Preschool, DNA, Documentation, Female, Finland, Forensic Medicine, Humans, Infant, Male, Physical Examination, Retrospective Studies, Semen, DNA Fingerprinting

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Child sexual abuse—Medical statement conclusions in criminal legal process. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.forsciint.2014.03.006
The paper
Joki-Erkkilä, M., Niemi, J., & Ellonen, N. (2014). Child sexual abuse—Medical statement conclusions in criminal legal process. Forensic Science International. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2014.03.006

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.