The primary goal of a Forensic Interview is to gather evidence and find the truthful facts about case. When interviewing children, having thorough knowledge of child development can help facilitate a better more forensically defensible interview because children do not yet have the ability to think, comprehend and express language and recall events in the same way that adults do. Having knowledge of a child’s developmental level can allow the interviewer to gather the information from the child by asking questions and using language that is developmentally appropriate and based on the child’s age and cognition level.
One example of how a child’s developmental level may impact our ability to gather reliable information would be the child’s ability to remember or recall the event. We have learned that children as young as 3 and 4 years old have the ability to recall events that had happened to them. Younger
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children have difficultly determining where the information they know comes from and are more likely than older children to rely on adults and other people for information rather than their own experiences.
During a forensic interview, children have to report verbally about the event that took place. Younger children have difficulty staying on topic and often need verbal redirection or topic focused prompts to stay on the event that is being discussed. Another example of how a child’s developmental level may impact our ability to gather reliable information from a child during a forensic interview is language and communication errors. Language and communication errors can occur due to a child’s perception and understanding of language being used during the interview and it may be different then adults. It is important for the interviewer to ask the child to define what they mean, if the child says things that are unclear or unrelated to the topic. Younger children also lack the ability to verbalize events in a chronological
narrative manner, and may disclose information in an inconsistent, disorganized way. A final example of how a child’s development level may impact our ability to gather reliable information would be suggestibility. Younger children have a tendency to make errors when they are presented with information that is false, are asked misleading questions, and are exposed to social pressures that encourage different answers. . Having knowledge of communication errors and using simple words, asking open ended questions, and providing the child with a clear understanding of the interview process and purpose may help facilitate a more successful interview. Homonym Errors are when children do not recognize that words can have two meanings. 10 examples of homonyms are : 1. Pair/pear 2. Ate/eight 3. See/Sea 4. Council/Counsel 5. Know/no 6. Meet/meat 7. One/won 8. Weak/Week. 9. Plain/plane 10. Sale/sail I have a funny example that I think is homonym error. A few years back my oldest daughter, who was then 10 years old walked into my room and asked me what I was watching on TV. I told her that I was watching “Sex In The City.” She looked at me and said “What a stupid name for a tv show, boy or girl in the city.” Auditory Discrimination Errors: When children confuse the meaning of words that sound the same and they use a different word that sounds the same and appropriate it and make it part of their understanding. Some examples of Auditory discrimination Error 1. Shiver/shimmer 2. pay/pave 3. oath/oat 4. came/cane 5. isolate/icicle
Once that a juvenile needs to be interviewed in regards to the investigation of a fire the interview should be done in a quiet area or room free of noise, distractions, and interruptions. One mindset of the juvenile fire setter is to demonstrate that authority figures have no impact on them and will demonstrate a “bad attitude”. The ability to annoy and frustrate an investigator is rewarding to them. One way to counteract this tactic is to ignore it as best as possible. The investigator needs to stay on track and keep the focus on the goal of getting the needed information. The investigator needs to be clear to the juvenile the purpose of the interview and expectations beforehand. The investigator needs to open with what will happen to the
Unfortunately, the therapist Shawn Connerly, and Kee MacFarlane didn’t do a great job with their interviewing the children involved in the McMartin case. Within, the case supposedly the young children experienced sexual abuse from their daycare providers. Placing children on the witness stand; to repeat what occurred in the daycare. With no customary protocol interviewing a minor involved in a sexual abuse case. The McMartin case didn’t report the kid’s cognitive factors for understanding and their abilities of memory. Shawn starting his interview off with “yucky secrets” is suggestibility a leading question for the victim to answer. Then Kee MacFarlane way of doing the interview with the children was also very leading, and rewarding the
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 ...
The forensic interview process happens when children have been abused or witnessed a violent act. “Every year more than 3 million reports of child abuse are made in the United States involving more than 6 million children (a report can include multiple children) (National Child Abuse Statistics).” In the United States there are about four to seven children that die every day due to child abuse and neglect (National Child Abuse Statistics). There are many different processes to conduct the interview and a number of steps are followed so children can tell their story accurately. People conducting the interview are supposed to make the child feel comfortable in their environment so they can find out what events happened.
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.
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).
The criminal justice system, in the United States, has been very slow in recognizing and competently employing the substantial volume of relevant research data that has been available, for the past century, on the subject of the significant differences in the psychological and neurological differences between children and adults. In Europe, there was substantial and illuminating research being carried out, at the turn of the 20th century. In the work of Alfred Binet (1900), on external forces of suggestibility, free recall, and the inherent pressures resulting from a child’s eagerness to please adults, and William Stern’s (1910) research, on the detrimental effects of repeated questioning and leading questions, which were found to literally alter future recall of the same event, there was an emergence of much valuable insight into the subject of child witness testimony (Bruck, 1993, p. 406). An explanation of why the U.S. was so slow to embrace these valuable findings lies in the differences in the judicial systems, of these countries.
Every day a child is called on to testify in a courtroom. Children who have to testify in open court are easily influenced by outside sources. This paper will show the reasons children should not be used as witnesses in a courtroom. I will show all the different influences that a child receives and prove them uncredible. The interview process can influence a child greatly. Ceci and Bruck (1995) found a study that shows that child witnesses may be questioned up to12 times during the course of an investigation. The questioning process can take up to a year and a half to be completed. Children are not capable of remembering exact details for that period. Their answers to questions will change each time he or she is asked. This is because they do not retain information in the same way as an adult. Most studies have shown that children start to lose their ability to recall an event accurately only 10 days after the original event has happened. Another factor in a child’s ability to recall an event is stress. A child can go into a shock stage and repress all memories of what has happened to them. These memories may not resurface for many years. This affects a child’s ability to identify the suspect in photo and live line-ups. The amount of stress a child goes through affects their ability to answer questions in an interview, if they cannot remember what has happened, how are they supposed to answer the myriad of questions the interviewer will ask them.
Overall, though, I believe that Stein is the closest scholar here-mentioned to have accounted for the explanation behind these controversies. The main mistake made by many modern scholars lies in the planning and the research – too much effort is spent on seeking to explain this opposition between the Proculians and the Sabinians in terms of two internally coherent law schools which differ entirely and have held controversies stemming from a specific occurrence. I have personally, as a student of the Roman law, found it difficult in reading the sources and differing theories from scholars to do just this – because, as Scarano Ussani stated, nowhere, in the mass of research that has been done, have any definitive results been reached. As afore-mentioned, I ruled out the political explanation for the purpose of answering this question, and the social explanation does not add a great deal to the debate for me. The theories supporting the social standpoint as addressed in this essay are among the worst for choosing to ignore many of the hard facts in order to make their theory fit better. This leaves only the philosophical and methodological explanations. The philosophical explanation is a reasonably sound one, although as explored above, I do believe that its significance has been largely exaggerated. There is no doubt over the fact that philosophy has played an influential role - even if you only look at Gaius’ ius gentium which contains a certain level of Stoic influence, but as mentioned above there are major differences which have been overlooked slightly in those arguments. The methodological explanation is another seemingly logical one, and the most reliable of all theorems explored in this essay, in my opinion, as it i...
For this study forensic evidence can be considered DNA evidence and/or trace evidence of any kind, included to but not limited to tire tracks, bullet casings, glass shards, fingerprints, and hair samples. Although this study proposes the idea that forensic evidence is more important it currently is not used frequently in the justice system. A study found that out of the cases they examined forensic evidence was collected in 37% of cases but only 18% of those cases were examined (Peterson, Hickman, Strom, Johnson, 2013). Another study found that 38% of participants said forensic evidence was hard to come by while 62% said they had spent time on victim credibility (Menaker, Campbell, Wells, 2016). This shows us that forensic evidence is not used frequently, and more time is spent on making a victim credible instead of finding evidence. It is the purpose of this study to determine if forensic evidence is more important than circumstantial evidence and eye witness testimony. If this can be determined than less time can be spent on things like victim credibility for testimonies, and more time can be spent on analyzing forensic
During the identification and prosecution of a suspect, eyewitnesses are of the utmost importance. They provide crucial information that determines the fate of the criminal, whether their memories are true to the event or slightly altered. Many eyewitnesses, being the victims of these crimes, have strong emotions related to the event. It has been found that emotions play a role in the accuracy and completeness of memories, especially in eyewitness testimony (Huston, Clifford, Phillips, & Memon, 2013). When emotions are negative in content, accuracy increases for memory of an event (Storbeck & Clore, 2005; Block, Greenberg, & Goodman, 2009). This finding holds true for all types of eyewitnesses, including children. There is no difference in memory between children and adults for aversive events, suggesting that the child eyewitness is just as capable as the adult eyewitness to give an accurate testimony (Cordon, Melinder, Goodman, & Edelstein, 2012). For my research paper, I will focus on the role of emotion in children’s eyewitness testimony.
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?
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.
The children have to give evidence in front of a strange person, the solicitor. However children are often unwillingly speak to yet another stranger. Though the solicitor adhering ethics to not contact with the witnesses, it needs to be flexible in relation to child witnesses. Many occasions children ignore the role of the solicitor or the types of questions asked in order to take judiciary decisions. Before the trial, children have no chance of meeting the prosecutor or establishing a connection with DP till prior to giving their evidence.