Victim First Forensics: Focusing on the Victims of Crime

We often focus on the perpetrators of crime and how we can use modern technology to detect and examine the traces of evidence that will connect a criminal to their offence. But it is important to look at it with a different approach. We will be looking at crime with a victim-first approach; we will be putting the victim first and examining the effect that forensic investigations can have on the casualties of crime. More specifically, we will look at the ways CSIs, lab examiners, forensic nurses and other forensic professionals can utilise modern technology to put the well-being of the victim right at the centre of their investigation. The intention is to minimise any additional trauma or distress that may be caused to someone who’s already suffering as a victim of crime.

Foster + Freeman Forensic Examiner Searching For Evidence Using the Crime-Lite 82S.

Introduction

Sexual assault, a devastating crime that has unfortunately surged in recent years, remains a grave concern. Despite high reporting numbers, a startlingly low fraction of cases is reported due to reasons like fear, shame, and lack of faith in the justice system.

As forensic practitioners, the most disheartening reason, “a lack of faith in the police and justice system,” is the one we aim to combat. By enhancing the quality of evidence, we can positively influence the chances of justice prevailing.

Using an ALS is a non-invasive and non-destructive way to examine potential evidence on the skin. This is especially important when dealing with fragile or sensitive skin, as it minimizes the risk of causing further harm during the examination process. Furthermore, during this examination, the use of ALS can help speed up the examination process, allowing the victim to get this traumatic time and experience over sooner.

Identification of Bruises and Injuries

The utilization of a Crime-lite ALS significantly enhances the capacity of forensic examiners and nurses to identify and document injuries that may otherwise go unnoticed under standard lighting conditions. The application of UV or Violet illumination reveals subtle bruising and patterns of injuries that remain invisible to the naked eye, even after healing has occurred. This remarkable capability to penetrate through the layers of skin uncovers trauma long after its visible traces have seemingly vanished, providing a crucial advantage in piecing together the timeline of events in a crime.

Pattern Recognition

In cases involving physical abuse or assault, the Crime-lite proves invaluable in pattern recognition, shedding light on specific details that might be overlooked under normal circumstances. Forensic professionals can highlight patterns such as fingerprints, fabric impressions, or tool marks by employing different light wavelengths. This not only aids in identifying potential assailants but also offers insights into the type of weapons involved in the commission of the crime. The enhanced visibility provided by Crime-lites significantly contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamics surrounding the incident, potentially leading to more accurate investigative outcomes.

Detection of Body Fluids

Forensic nurses and dermatologists frequently encounter cases related to sexual assault or incidents involving bodily fluids. The Crime-lite ALS emerges as a critical tool in this context, enabling the detection of semen, saliva, urine, and other bodily fluids that may not be easily visible under normal lighting conditions. This capability facilitates the collection of pertinent evidence for further analysis, ensuring a thorough and comprehensive examination process. The use of ALS technology not only expedites the identification of relevant bodily fluids but also minimizes the risk of oversight, contributing to a more robust forensic investigation and bolstering the chances of justice prevailing in these sensitive cases.

What is a SARC centre and what do they do?

Last year, we spoke to Sam Charles, a forensic examiner at the Glades Sexual Assault Referral Centre, or SARC Centre in Worcester. We asked her about how a typical examination is conducted.

“So when they come into the examination suite, they would change in the bathroom into a gown so that I can examine them top to toe for any injuries, record those on a body map and then usually at that point they will have given me a urine specimen as well when they’re changing. So that would generally be my first sample and then I would usually take swabs in the order that the FFLM guidelines for forensic examinations suggest. So once we’ve completed all the samples and finished that physical part of the examination, the client would then get dressed, go into another room and I would seal and bag and seal the sample. So, finish, labelling, bagging and sealing the samples and the crisis work will look after the client while I’m doing that. It is very common to have bruises that the clients say are bite marks, especially on the neck and breast. On female victims. Other very common bruises are if the assault has been violent in nature, there are quite often bruises over bony prominences, so knees, shins, hips, and elbows. Quite often, we might find fingerprint-type bruising on upper arms and round wrists if it’s been an outdoor assault. Quite often, people have abrasions from falling on the ground outside, or they’ve had to put their hands out if they’ve been pushed or something like that. Non intimate injuries, I would measure and draw badly, probably on a body map, really, just that a copy does get submitted to the police and that may be presented in the body maps. So I would measure the injury, record it on the relevant body diagram and describe it on the body diagram. But we don’t actually take photographs of non-intimate injuries. GIf it’s something that’s non intimate and obvious and the client is aware of, they say, Look, I’ve got this terrible mark on my neck, he bit me. They would hopefully have taken a photo. But if I find anything else, any bruises anywhere else, or abrasions or lacerations or anything that are non-intimate that the police haven’t photographed as part of my handover back to the police, I would say, right, there are some injuries that need photographing.

Can you arrange that? We can only record what we see at that moment on that day in that room, and we don’t have light sources to look for evidence on people that we could then swab. But we don’t use stains or lights, unusual lights. I think it’s kind of making sure that you really know what the story of what happened is. And that really helps the police and the scientists who are examining the samples to focus on those swabs that are most likely to give some evidence. As I say, we could just swab people from head to foot and submit hundreds of samples, but that’s not cost-effective, and it doesn’t help you to focus in on the most likely samples to test.”

Hearing those insights from a SARC professional, we were immediately struck by two things. One is the reliance upon swabbing for evidence and obviously, the fact that some evidence or some swabs may not even be processed due to cost implications. But I was also surprised to learn that many forensic nurses just don’t have the training or the expertise or the equipment to photograph injuries on victims and instead refer them back to the SOCO or police scene of crime. Officer, there’s a huge knowledge gap here, as well as a lack of training and equipment that could be solved quite easily through the introduction of a forensic light source. In any case, where the human body itself is the crime scene, a high-power fluorescent light source can be used to better visualise bite marks, bruising and puncture wounds as well as other traces of body fluids that might relate to a physical or sexual crime.

Dr Scafide report

How can we find evidence of assault on the skin?

At foster+freeman, for many years, we have been advocating the use of forensic light sources for the use of identification of bruises on the skin. In 2022, Dr. Kathrine Scafide began developing a way to detect bruising on dark skin tones. When Dr Scafide was a forensic nurse examining a victim of an assault, Dr Scafide couldn’t find the bite mark her patient described; this was due to the patient having a darker skin tone, meaning that it was harder for a forensic examiner to spot any discolouration, bruising or bite marks. “Because pigment is closer to the surface of the skin than a bruise, in patients with darker skin tones, bruise detection with the naked eye can be difficult or impossible.”

This sparked inspiration with Dr Scafide, this made her pursue a PhD from John Hopkins University, while pursuing her PhD she conducted a year of research study and she came to a crucial discovery; Alternate light sources such as blue and purple light, which have shorter wavelengths, make bruises more visible on darker skin tones, allowing for victims of assault to document their injuries and seek justice more easily.

We have used ALS for many years at the crime scene to detect all manner of forensic evidence, such as blood splatter, body fluids, gunshot residue and latent fingermarks. But what Dr Scafide couldn’t believe is that not many people thought to research how you can use and alternate light source to look at injuries on a person.

When searching for blood evidence at a crime scene, we use specific wavelengths of light to search for blood as blood will absorb this wavelength, and the background will reflect it, creating a vast contrast. We have known this statement to be a fact for many years. Well, a bruise is not too dissimilar to blood splatter, as a bruise is a collection of blood under the skin after trauma. So, with this in mind, What Scafide and her team found was that violet and blue light “correspond pretty closely to haemoglobin and some of its breakdown products.” By shining that light on a bruise and wearing coloured goggles, they could better view that area of absorption. Scafide found that this method was more effective than white light at spotting bruises “across all skin types,” but especially for people with darker skin pigmentation.

What Dr Scafide found after several years of research was that you are five times more likely to detect bruising with alternate light sources such as blue or violet light when compared to white light Dr Scafide used the Crime-lite 82S to conduct this research and here at forster+freeman we have been banging on for years about the use of our industry-leading crime-lite 82S PRO for the use of identification of bruises on the skin and now it is very reassuring to have the empirical hard data to prove us right and we hope that the use of forensic ALS can help speed up and identify more victims of abuse and can help bring the perpetrators to justice.

Reducing the stress

We have focussed a lot on how the investigation works when looking for crimes of a distressing nature but not actually how this investigation process can affect the victim of these crimes and put the victim first. This period can be incredibly distressing for the victim, and the investigation can make this worse as it is making the victim re-live this experience.

So, by putting the victim first and thinking of how we can reduce this stress but by gathering the most evidence at the same time, we need to think of ways we can increase the speed of examination effectively. We have already discussed how forensic light sources can reveal more evidence on the skin and bite marks and bruises, so employing the use of these can increase the speed of examination. However, we can further increase the speed and effectiveness of investigations by using an all-in-one alternate light source. The Crime-lite X5 is a multispectral light source that has been made with five wavelengths of light integrated into one unit. So, within the Crime-lite X5, we actually have two LEDs per wavelength of the wavelengths that we often associate with serology investigations, hence our pet name, the Crime-lite X serology unit. These wavelengths, from UV through to blue-green, as well as cool white light, are often associated with the search for body fluids. However, they do have a range of other uses, including searching for contamination as well as bruising and injuries. These wavelengths can be really effective in searching for injuries and potentially giving visualisation to injuries that aren’t visible to the naked eye. Often what might happen with an injury is that as it fades, particularly bruising, it’s no longer visible or only faintly visible on the top layers of skin. So to what we see visibly, we may not see much. However, the bruising will persist in the deeper levels of the dermis and using a light source, particularly violet light or maybe UV light, which are both within the Crime-lite X5, can be really helpful in giving some visibility to a bruise that no longer visible to us with the naked eye. And that can help to corroborate a victim’s account of what has happened.

Another option for increasing the speed and reducing the stress of a SARC examination is the Crime-lite AUTO. The versatility of the Crime-lite AUTO lends itself perfectly to a victim-first approach as you might employ in a SARC examination. Providing a full range of illumination. Combined with automatic filters and a UV vis/ir camera, the Crime-lite AUTO simplifies the task of examinations. It reduces the need for specialist training and it enables the examiner to fully document the entire examination. Investigators no longer need to carry a box full of light sources, a camera, filters, and multiple pairs of goggles, because the Crime-lite AUTO offers all this functionality in a single package.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a victim-first approach to forensic investigations is essential in addressing the aftermath of crimes, particularly distressing cases like sexual assault. The focus should not only be on the identification of perpetrators but also on minimizing the trauma experienced by the victims. Modern technology, specifically forensic light sources, has emerged as a crucial tool in achieving this delicate balance.

The insights from professionals at Sexual Assault Referral Centres (SARC) shed light on the challenges faced in evidence collection, including a reliance on swabbing, a lack of training for photographing injuries, and the potential non-processing of certain evidence due to cost considerations. The integration of forensic light sources, such as the Crime-lite ALS and Crime-lite X5, addresses these gaps by enhancing the visualization of injuries, bruises, and body fluids on various skin tones, ensuring a more comprehensive and efficient examination process.

Dr. Kathrine Scafide’s groundbreaking research further emphasizes the importance of alternate light sources, specifically blue and violet light, in detecting bruises on darker skin tones. The Crime-lite 82S PRO, utilized in her study, has proven to be five times more effective than traditional white light in identifying bruises. This empirical data supports the use of forensic ALS in expediting the identification of victims and facilitating justice.

Moreover, the emphasis on reducing the stress on victims during examinations is paramount. The Crime-lite X5 and Crime-lite AUTO offer multispectral light sources that not only enhance the speed of examination but also provide a victim-first approach by simplifying the process, reducing the need for multiple tools, and enabling thorough documentation.

In conclusion, the integration of modern forensic technology, especially forensic light sources, not only enhances the efficacy of investigations but also prioritizes the well-being of victims. By adopting a victim-first approach, forensic professionals can minimize trauma, expedite examinations, and contribute significantly to the pursuit of justice in the aftermath of distressing crimes.

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Crime-lite® X

Handheld, Multi-Spectral LED Light Source with Advanced Functionality: The biggest leap forward in Forensic Light Source technology for over 20 years.

A complete ALS kit in a single light source, the Crime-lite X enables the examiner to seamlessly switch between White, UV, Violet, Blue, Blue/Green, Green, Orange, Red, and Infrared LEDs, to perform a comprehensive multi-spectral examination of a crime scene.

Operated via a simple 3-button interface, the Crime-lite X provides new functionality never seen before in a forensic light source that will ensure that crime scene and laboratory examiners reveal the maximum amount of evidence in every examination.

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Crime-lite^® AUTO

Forensic imaging technology meets powerful multi-spectral illumination in this complete solution to the search, detection, and capture of evidence.

Investigators no longer need to carry a box full of light sources, a camera, filters, and multiple pairs of goggles, because the Crime-lite AUTO offers all this functionality in a single package.

Providing complete portability and ease of use for the operator, the Crime-lite AUTO is an essential tool for criminal investigators and first responders and includes all of the technology required to reveal evidence including body fluids (semen, saliva, urine, etc.); blood on dark fabrics; fingerprints; gunshot residues; and traces of physical evidence (glass, fibres, hairs, etc.).

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