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Do small children have the right to testify in court
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How much credibility should be given to a child testimony? Oftentimes, children are called to stand as witnesses of the crimes in which they were victimized. Child abuse is not a rare occurrence in our community. In the United States alone, six million or more children endure child abuse every year, and about four to seven of them pass away every day. Such malicious abuse includes not only physical abuse, but also emotional abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, and so forth. Victimized children suffer severe physical and mental damages that impose long-lasting stress and trauma (Childhelp, 2015). Consequently, there are many types of legal proceedings in which children engage and testify. Child testimony is very important in all types of legal proceedings because it is so indispensable to their security when they are abused. Children often testify in numerous criminal and civil trials. For instance, when a child is sexually molested by a parent, proceedings are usually held in the juvenile court. In other civil cases, such as divorce, child testimonies play a crucial role when one parent accuses another for child abuse while fighting over for child custody (Myers 2013). Thus, whether or not child testimony can be fully replied upon to resolve child abuse cases is a critical question that must be thoroughly addressed. On the other hand, studies reveal that questioning style and interview techniques can radically improve the accuracy of child testimonies regarding past events. In other words, they argue that even young children can be reliable witnesses (van Golde 2011). This paper will examine the complexity surrounding child testimony as it can not only entirely misguide cases, but greatly contribute to resolve them as
...at because of the size of the children there would have been physical symptoms, no documented evidence of this sort was presented during the case. Out of 100 students no physical symptoms were ever recorded, and not one student said anything about abuse until four years later when the investigator was pursued (Silvergate, 2004) No parents ever filed complaints prior to police investigation. Because memories are malleable and children are even more vulnerable to authority, it is very probable that some children just complied to the leading questions due to fear, but is it possible that they all could? The influence of the investigators parallels to the influence of therapists in cases of sexually abused children's recovered memories.
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 ...
Brott, A. (2010). A System Out of Control: The Epidemic of False Allegations of Child Abuse. Retrieved from http://www.fathersmanifesto.net/armin.htm
The reliability of children’s eyewitness testimony is a controversial issue. Opinions range from proponents believing that children are virtuous in every detail to those who are more skeptical. In actuality, child testimony falls somewhere in between the two divergent views. Though children may not intend to intentionally distort the truth, they do seem to be very vulnerable to suggestibility. Therefore, certain comments and the form of questions can influence testimonials.
The first phase of the interview process is planning details of what the interview will consist of. A witness assessment is what allows interviewers to find out information about the child and what happened to the child. The interviewer collects information about the child such as the name, age, gender, ethnicity, current living situation, physical/learning disability, medications taken, emotional state, any contact with public services, and relationship to the offender (Lamb, Michael E.; La Rooy, David J.; Malloy, Lindsay C.; Katz, Carmit (2011). It’s useful to find what hobbies may interest the child to build a connection with them. It also helps to find out any misunderstandings of the event that could lead to a false accusation (Forensic Interviewing Protocol). This helps distinguish any possible missing information and if the child is being accurate with their story.
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
Valentine, T., & Maras, K. (2011). The effect of cross-examination on the accuracy of adult eyewitness testimony. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25, 554-561. doi: 10.1002/acp.1768
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.
Truth be told, eyewitnesses always play a crucial role in the judgment process. In the present justice system, the testimony from eyewitnesses could possibly be one of the most reliable evidences and influence jurors on judging corresponding perpetrator. In psychology, researchers use eyewitness memory instead of any other expressions.
Loftus’s work and the studies that followed have demonstrated that an individual’s memory of an event can easily be distorted by post-event information, which is provided through questions that the researcher or police officer in case of a real life crime might ask the witness. But not only researchers’ questions have been found to distort memory. Several studies have indicated that when witnesses discuss an event together they can mistakenly incorporate elements of each other’s memories into their own memories (e.g., Gabbert, Memon, & Allan, 2003; Paterson & Kemp, 2006). ...
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.
The mistreatment of children is classified by four types of actions: physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, and neglect. Although, in recent years several steps have been taken to prevent the maltreatment of children it seems that child abuse is still prevalent in today's society. Countless children around the world suffer from some form of abuse and in many cases the same child experiences more than one. There is no exact number of victims because it difficult to measure the exact amount of children going through abuse. Child abuse almost always occurs in private, and because abuse is often hidden from view and its victims may be too young or too frightened to speak out, experts in child welfare suggest that its true prevalence
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?
Krahenbuhl & Blades did a study to investigate the influence of question repetition and question type on a child’s ability to accurately recall. In the study, a total of 136 children age five, seven and nine watched a live fifteen minute presentation. One week later, the children were asked twenty questions that were repeated an additional two times within the interview. The accuracy of the children’s responses to unanswerable questions declined with repetition. They found that children were more likely to change a response to an unanswerable question than to a question to which they know the answer. Generally, children upheld the same answers to only three quarters of the repeated questions. The most common pattern of change was for children to change their answer the second time a question was asked and then to uphold that answer when the question was repeated. This study shows that repetition can have a negative effect on a child’s eyewitness testimony, and therefore making the use of children’s eyewitness accounts of criminal activity ineffective.