Child Witnesses Lecture Notes

Child Witnesses

Introduction

The lecture series will focus on child witnesses and address the question of whether children are reliable witnesses.
The instructor's research background includes master's and doctoral work on the relationship between children's temperament and their performance in police interviews.
Experience includes assisting police and courts in both the UK and the US on cases.
The lecture aims to provide an understanding of children's involvement in the criminal justice system.
Discussion of techniques police can use, some enhancing reliability and others potentially decreasing it.
Suggestibility will be discussed in the context of children.
Summary of children's general ability to recall and identify information.
Examination of the role of individual differences.
Consideration of how juries perceive children as witnesses.

Scenario

A six-year-old boy at a park with his mother and sister is approached by a stranger who attempts to lure him to a van with the promise of team jerseys.
The boy, having been taught not to go with strangers, resists the man's advances.
The man attempts to take him by force, but the boy escapes and returns to his mother.
The mother calls the police, who interview the boy about the incident and the man's appearance.
Police canvas the area for other witnesses and compare accounts.
They investigate potential suspects in the area, including those on the sex offender registry.
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If a suspect is identified, the boy may participate in a lineup and identify the suspect.
The case might proceed to trial with the boy's identification as the primary evidence.

Questions and Concerns

How accurately can a six-year-old recall detailed information under stress?
Can his identification be trusted enough to make an arrest and proceed to trial?
Would a jury convict based solely on a child's testimony?
Eyewitness testimony is responsible for about 75% of wrongful imprisonments.
Children remember less than adults, raising concerns about accuracy.
In child abuse cases, testimony is often the only evidence, which presents a challenge.
Cases of wrongful imprisonment based on child identification exist.

Case Examples

Ricardo Richel: Wrongfully accused of abduction and sexual abuse based on a child's identification influenced by neighborhood stories and his scar. Exonerated through the Innocence Project, which identified the real perpetrator, Andrew Halfburn, a serial rapist.
French Case: A teenage girl's allegations of sexual abuse by her father were initially dismissed until she provided video evidence.
Disclosures of sexual abuse are only taken seriously 26-30% of the time in the UK and the US.
Approximately 6% of children's sexual abuse allegations are thought to be fabricated or false.
The Hunt (Movie): Depicts a man wrongly accused of sexually assaulting a young girl at a daycare. The movie highlights how easily a narrative can be constructed and believed, and how suggestions by interviewers can cause false accusations.

History of Children in the Legal System

Children have been included as witnesses in legal systems since the 1500s in Europe.
In North America, Canada did not allow children to testify until 1893, and the US Supreme Court until 1895.
Concerns about children's testimony were influenced by events like the Salem witch trials.
Currently, in the US and the UK, there is no minimum age for giving testimony.
Judges determine if a child is competent to testify.
In the UK, the child needs to provide a coherent narrative (judge's discretion).
In the US, the child needs to understand the difference between fact and fiction and between a truth and a lie.
Judges may ask questions to assess the child's understanding of reality and truth.
Children as young as two years old can provide testimony.

Child Testimony in Abuse Cases

Sexual abuse is the crime children most often testify about.
In the US, an estimated one in ten children are sexually abused (the number may be higher due to underreporting).
Only 38% of those abused actually report it.
Children may also testify in cases of domestic violence or spousal homicide.
Over fifteen million children in the US witness domestic violence annually.
The exact number of children giving testimony each year is unknown but is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

Salem Witch Trials

Occurred near the end of the 1600s in Salem, Massachusetts.
Abigail Williams, 11 or 12 years old, lived with her uncle, Reverend Samuel Paris, after her parents died in an attack by Native Americans.
Abigail and her friends shared stories about magic and were nicknamed the “circle girls.”
After trying to predict their future using an egg in water, Abigail began behaving bizarrely, leading a doctor to claim she was possessed by witches.
Abigail accused the reverend's slave of bewitching her, leading to accusations against two other women.
17 women were arrested based on the children's accusations.
The town suffered crop shortages, leading to a shift in opinion against the witch trials.
The Salem witch trials were the last time women were killed for witchcraft in the US.
Reverend Paris lost public support and moved away.

Parallels to Modern Cases: Daycare Satanic Ritualistic Abuse

Widespread hysteria in the US in the 1970s about satanic ritualistic abuse in children's daycares.
Hundreds of people were arrested, despite no proven cases of such abuse.
This scare was driven by increased numbers of women in the workforce and the rise of daycares.
Mothers experienced anxiety about leaving their children with strangers.
Conferences educated mothers on warning signs of stranger danger and potential abuse.
Vague warning signs led to false reports and children were taken to therapists specializing in sexual abuse, appointed by district attorneys.
Therapists used leading questions and anatomical dolls.
Police used improper techniques, asking leading questions, using peer pressure, and rewarding children with plastic police badges for desired answers.
Researchers began studying children's eyewitness memory in response to concerns about abuse in daycares.
Interview formats to appropriately interview children were not available until the 1990s.

News Segment: Turning the Tide

A news segment shows the beginning of the realization in the 1990s that a terrible mistake had been made by imprisoning hundreds of people for child sexual abuse.
Children were coaxed into making accusations with suggestive questions.
Accusations were bizarre, involving underground tunnels, animal butchering, flying on broomsticks, and feeding babies to sharks.
Juries presumed guilt because they believed at least some of the accusations must be true.

"Jeopardy in the Courtroom" by Stephen Cece and Maggie Brooke

Published in the mid-1990s, it became an authority on children's testimony, summing up research to that point.
It was cited in courtroom arguments, helping in the release of wrongfully convicted individuals.
The McMartin case is still cited as the most expensive criminal trial in US history, resulting in acquittals.
The main takeaway is that false accusations occurred due to suggestive and improper questioning.

Suggestibility and False Memories

False memories can be implanted through suggestive questions, as discussed in the third module regarding adult witnesses.
The mouse trap study is an example of this happening in children.
Even in high-stress situations, memories can be manipulated.
Morgan and Loftus (2013) found that suggestive questions altered memories of military personnel undergoing interrogation simulation.
False accounts were created about the interrogator's facial hair, hair color, and objects in the room.
Children receiving vaccines who were more anxious remembered less about the nurse and objects and were more vulnerable to false memory accounts.
Attachment style mediated these effects.

Historical Studies on Child Witnesses in Continental Europe

Researchers in Continental Europe had studies on child witnesses as far back as the 1890s.
Many of these studies were not translated into English until the 1970s.
Early studies in the 1970s often repeated studies done half a century earlier.
Binet, one of the developers of the IQ test, distinguished between auto suggestion and false accounts due to suggestion in 1900.
In misleading question studies, participants agree with misleading questions that cause false reports, tainting future accounts.
In auto suggestion studies, children admit they might have been wrong when questioned later, while those influenced by misleading questions are confident in their answers.
Stern found that younger children were more vulnerable to misleading questions and that high stress negatively impacted memory.
In one study, children who watched an argument in which one child pulled out a gun remembered less of the dialogue due to weapon focus effect.

Vardanok Case

Likely the first criminal case to use psychological expert testimony of the reliability of children's testimony.
A nine-year-old girl, Cecil, was killed by a strange man after he lured her away.
The two friends that were with Cecil became the only witnesses.
Vardanok presented that children the same age as the witnesses were vulnerable to leading questions.
Showing results that revealed children will answer questions with information that was never presented to them, implying that their memory is to unreliable.
Bene and Stern did not believe that children should not be trusted.
They believed if open-ended questions are used, then their testimony is reliable.

Mousetrap Study

Three to six-year-old children were read events.
More than 50% had agreed to at least one of these false events by the end of the study.
The one that was most falsely reported was the mousetrap one.
It wasn't very suggestive, simply open ended, "Have you ever had your hands caught in a mousetrap?