When it comes to looking at children in the criminal justice system, they could very easily be considered vulnerable, particularly as witnesses. This is most apparent during the process of giving evidence. Lamb (1999) identified factors that can affect the quality and subsequent understanding of a child’s input.
One of the factors stated that children are most likely to be psychologically vulnerable in interviews. This is because interviewers are more prone to using language that a child would find difficult to discern because their speech and language skills aren’t as developed as an adults would be. This leaves the child vulnerable to misunderstanding of the questions and resultant misinformation provided for the professional conducting interview.
It was also identified that the interviewer’s personal characteristics and how they actually deal with the child in question could have an effect on how the child responds to the interviewers enquiries. Cleary, Mechanic and Weiss (1981) indicated in their research that variants in interviewers characteristics such as; attitudes towards the person in question, could have an effect on the responses they receive from them. Despite the fact this research isn’t specific to children in interviews, the underlying point it makes; that there is an effect on responses, does make it justifiably applicable to the subject of vulnerable witnesses in the criminal justice system.
Lamb (1999) also listed suggestibility as a factor, which is supported by Baxter’s research (1990). Baxter found that high suggestibility and a lack of direct questions leads to bias information provided by child witnesses. This has led to the notion that suggestive questioning during interviews with vulnerable witnesses i...
... middle of paper ...
...sful interviewing process in the criminal justice system.
Word Count – 778 Words
References
Bull, R, 2010, The Investigative Interviewing of Children and other Vulnerable witnesses: Psychological Research and Working/Professional Practice, Legal and Criminological Psychology, volume 15 (Pages 5-23)
Cleary P D, Mechanic D and Weiss N, 1981, The Effect of Interviewer Characteristics on Responses to a Mental Health Interview, Journal of Health and Social Behaviour, Volume 22 (pages 183-193)
Newburn, T, 2013, Criminology (Second Edition) Oxfordshire, UK, Page 888
Poole D, Lamb M E, 1998, Investigative Interviews of Children: A Guide for Helping Professionals, Washington US, American Psychological Association (pages 179-80)
Sternberg K J, Lamb M, Davies G, Westcott H, 2001, The Memorandum of Good Practice: Theory versus Application, Child Abuse & Neglect
While sitting at juvenile court, I never got a night’s sleep without waking to wonder if at least one decision I made that day had been the best for a child. It struck me that it might be possible to recruit and train volunteers to investigate a child’s case so they could provide a voice for the child in those proceedings, proceedings which could affect their whole lives.” -Judge David W. Soukup, Founder of CASA
McCoy, M. L., & Keen, S. M., (2009). Child abuse and neglect. New York: Psychology Press.
More than 200,000 children may be involved in the legal system in any given year, and 13,000 of these children are preschool age. Often with these cases involving young children, issues arise concerning credibility, vulnerability, and memory retrieval. Studies have shown that preschool age children are quite capable of providing accurate testimony, but they are also more vulnerable to distorting this memory and testimony. Public and professional opinion about the credibility of children as witnesses in court cases has been sharply divided. On one side, it is contended that when children disclose details of a circumstance, they must be believed, no matter what techniques were used to obtain this disclosure. For example, if a child is asked whether or not he/she was abused, and to describe this incident, we must believe that child because children cannot possibly generate a false report of their own sexual victimization. The other side depicts children as being helpless sponges ...
Hurley, Jennifer (1999). Child Abuse Opposing Views . San Diego : Greenhaven Press, Inc. print.
...actice in social work interviewing – keeping the child in mind”. Milton Keynes. The Open University.
For both Cognitive and Forensic interviewing, it has been found to be more effective with older children than with younger for a variety of reasons. These reasons include the natural linguistic and cognitive development of children. Older children are more likely to remember the more information about the situation they experienced through a Cognitive interview than younger children, which suggests that may be most beneficial for them. Forensic interviewing should work better with younger children than Cognitive interviewing in that it allows freedom to give unique answers and considers the child’s age and developmental level more than a Cognitive interview does. In many interviews, children with intellectual disabilities need more prompting
Thousands of kid criminals in the United States have been tried as adults and sent to prison (Equal Justice Initiative). The debate whether these kids should be tried as adults is a huge controversy. The decision to try them or to not try them as an adult can change their whole life. “Fourteen states have no minimum age for trying children as adults” (Equal Justice Initiative). Some people feel that children are too immature to fully understand the severity of their actions. People who are for kids to be tried as adults feel that if they are old enough to commit the crime, then they are old enough to understand what they are doing. There are people who feel that children should only be tried as adults depending on the crime.
When children are giving eyewitness testimony’s, the investigators techniques are a little different in terms of the repetition of questions. This is sometimes to get them to remember more information from when they asked it in the first instance. Whilst law enforcement are questioning ch...
Every state allows children under sixteen to be tried as adults, but new research indicates that many cannot understand their situations well enough to aid their defense. A study by the private MacArthur Foundation says that many children under sixteen have as much difficulty grasping the legal proceedings as adults who had been ruled incompetent to go to court. The study, by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice, looked at more than 1,400 people between the ages of 11 and 24 in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Northern and Eastern Virginia, and Northern Florida. They were given an intelligence test and asked to respond to several hypothetical legal situations, such as whether to confess to a police officer. The results found that one-third of those 11 to 13 and one-fifth of those 14 or 15 could not understand the proceedings or help lawyers defend them. The study recommends that states reconsider the minimum age for juveniles to be tried as adults or to develop a system for evaluating young defendants' competence (Salant 2003).
Even though I am aware that there have been great strides forward, especially within the past decade, in the implementation of safer and more constructive methods, in regards to child interviewing practices, I am appalled at the gross negligence of our justice system, in their failure to protect children from the brutal onslaught of such damaging interrogation. Not only does it fail to safeguard a child’s health and well-fare, but it also proves counterproductive in the gathering of reliable testimony, and so therefore does not ultimately serve the constructs of justice, either.
Many people think that children do not lie. It is not that they lie, they just cannot remember what happened a year or two ago when they were much younger, perhaps only a year or two old. The truth is children do lie. “One study shows that twenty three percent of abuse allegations are false and there was insufficient information to determine the truth in another twenty four percent” (Slicker W.D., 1999, Child testimony ¶ 16). Fear is also a factor in children lying or not providing adequate information. Lepore (1991) says that studies show in most abuse cases the suspect will usually bribe the child or threaten them into secrecy. This causes the child to become afraid to tell the truth, and they will begin to deny what has happened or even worse not report the abuse at all. The way an interviewer phrases a question will influence a child.
Evidence provided in many courtroom cases can range from DNA samples, eyewitness testimony and video-recordings, to name a few. What happens when one of the main sources of information in a case comes from a child? Even worse, what if the child is the victim in the case? The topic of children participating and providing testimony in courtroom settings is an image that, presumably, most would not associate as a “usual” place for children. Yet in cases such as sexual abuse or violence towards a child or within the child’s family, it is not impossible to have cases where children are the predominant source of information provided for judges and jurors. Ref It is then important to consider the reliability of children’s testimonial accounts much like how adult testimonies are examined. The question of focus is then, to what extent can we rely on child eyewitnesses? Specifically, what factors influence the veracity of their testimonies?
However, these studies may not be accurate in proving how these factors affect children’s eyewitness accounts because they lack ecological validity. They were all done in a very lab-like environment, and therefore eliminating the nature of a child’s recall. The children knew that they were participating in a study and therefore they may have
Child witnesses have provided a basis for controversy over the years in criminal justice. There are two main things that people worry about when it comes to having a child witness, one is the anxiety that is put on the child with regard to the traumatic experience and the other is dependability of the testimony. Child testimony has long been considered an important part of the case but what is to be done when there are questions regarding legal, ethical, and professional ways to interact with the children.
Lyon, T. D., Scurich, N., Choi, K., Handmaker, S., & Blank, R. (2012). "how did you feel?": Increasing child sexual abuse witnesses' production of evaluative information. Law and Human Behavior, 36(5), 448-457.