In 2020, 49% of child sexual offences did not appear in court because several children felt unable to support the completion of the process (Office for National Statistics, 2020). We are empowering these forgotten children to complete this process through a board game.
Our board game, the Kids in Court Game (KiCGame), is a research-driven psychoeducational tool. The KiCGame is based on the Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy model (Cohen et al., 2017), on three educational programs on children’s court appearance (e.g., the Kids’ Court School (Nathanson & Saywitz, 2015) and governmental guidelines (CPS, 2017; 2019; Ministry of Justice, 2022). All these have been implemented into the KiCGame by following the ABC guidelines for test construction (Zigler, 2014) and guidelines on developing complex interventions (O’Cathain et al. 2019).
We are now testing the KiCGame with Children’s House in all regions within Cyprus. We are collecting qualitative and quantitative data on children’s attitudes regarding stress (Court-Related Stress Scale Questionnaire: Saywitz & Nathanson, 2006), wellbeing (The Children’s Happiness Scale: Morgan, 2014) and legal knowledge (Children’s Legal Knowledge Interview: Cooper et al. 2010). As well as feedback from professionals and children. Results so far show:
We are now testing the KiCGame with Children’s House in all regions within Cyprus. We are collecting qualitative and quantitative data on children’s attitudes regarding stress (Court-Related Stress Scale Questionnaire: Saywitz & Nathanson, 2006), wellbeing (The Children’s Happiness Scale: Morgan, 2014) and legal knowledge (Children’s Legal Knowledge Interview: Cooper et al. 2010). As well as feedback from professionals and children. Results so far show:
- Service Delivery Improvement e.g., practitioners stated the support for all children is now more organised and staff training is improved.
- Attitude Change e.g., children’s court-related stress is reduced after playing and children’s knowledge is increased after playing.
We now work with the Witness Service and Intermediaries for Justice to administer the KiCGame in all Magistrates and Crown Courts in Britain. We aspire to formalise children’s pre-trial preparations through our gaming system in Cyprus and UK. We aim to make this playful approach mandatory for all children’s pretrial preparations.
Recent studies in this area
Kyriakidou, M., Ellison, E., Powers, L., Sinclair, N., & Gray, K. (2022). Preparing children for court through playing! Sheffield Hallam University https://shura.shu.ac.uk/29963/
Game Workshop Recording. This is a workshop for the game delivered in January 2022. It explains how the game has been designed, how you can play it and our next steps. It is publicly available to be viewed here.
