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Reliability and Credibility of Children as Witnesses
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All of the articles about child witnesses were interesting. Child witnesses are important to examine because they can be potential witnesses to crimes, just like adults can, so it is appropriate to examine their memory processes to see if they are different from adults. Since I am interested in jury research, I thought it was interesting that some of the articles touched on juror perceptions of child witnesses.
Thomson mentions at the end of his article that credibility assigned to child witnesses are different, depending on age. Six year olds were not as credible as compared to ten year olds, in terms of juror perceptions. This finding is consistent with research that I heard at AP-LS in one of the presentations on child witnesses. I believe that one of the researchers examined eight year olds in contrast to 11 year olds, and the 11 year olds were seen as more credible. The researchers also were discussing how there may be a “cut-off” point with jurors in terms of credibility of child witnesses, so that is an interesting research idea to explore further. At what exact age do child witnesses become credible in jurors’ eyes?
I also liked the Larsson et al. (2002) article. Delay and the cognitive interview are important issues to examine for all types of witnesses. The means clearly show the strength of the cognitive interview, as well as the deterioration of memory when there is a delay. However, the article by Memon et al. (1996) did not find significant effects for the cognitive interview with children, but they mention that methodological differences might be a factor in their findings. I would like to hear about further research on this topic to see if these methodological differences are causing the differences in the findings. Overall, these articles brought up a lot of interesting issues that involve child witnesses, including juror perceptions, the cognitive interview, and delay.
HC
This article explains the reliability and credibility of children as eyewitnesses. Thomson does an excellent job of discussing many different reasons why people think that children are less reliable then adults. I wasn’t surprised that many of the people that were questioned in the article believed that children were unreliable and incredible when they are compared to adults. I had the same prejudice before reading this article. Memory, retention, retrieval, and suggestibility are some of the factors he discusses in this article.
After Thomson studied all of these areas, he concluded that children are more susceptible to context, not that they cannot recognize people. Obviously, a child that is three years old will not be able to identify someone as well as a ten year old would. He brings up a good point in his article about how children might conceptualize the event differently than an adult would. Also children might have different ways they use their words and they might have a different meaning to a word then we would. This can cause irrelevant and inappropriate information.
One aspect of this article that I was surprised to read is when the judge gets to decide whether a child is able to become evidence in a hearing. I was very surprised that a judge was able to determine if a child is reliable enough in just that short amount of time. Do judges have trainings or a way of determining this? I think there are many adults that are used as evidence in eyewitness situations that should be reconsidered or re evaluated to see if they are reliable enough for the trial. This might be a difficult obligation of the courts, but I believe if they are going to turn down children from testifying, they should also be sure the adults are reliable enough to testify.
Obviously, this is a hard situation to discuss and more research needs to be done on this issue. I believe that children are more reliable then what other people think of them, researchers just need a way of asking them the questions and a way of retrieving the information the children have. KC
Thomson’s article titled Reliability and Credibility of Children as Witnesses brought up a point that caught my eye very early in the article. While giving an overview of the children eyewitness topic, they mention that exclusion of children’s evidence may mean that an offender will not be prosecuted, and if the child is the only witness, then the individual could not be prosecuted. Even worse was the idea that basically children could be the victims of criminal acts, but if there was no concrete evidence and only the child’s eyewitness evidence, and the child says they don’t understand the nature of the oath (say if they are under 6 years old), that there is no way to prosecute the offender. This situation makes the problems associated with the issue clear and easily applicable.
A major problem with child witnesses is their lack of understanding of what is significant, and possibly what is even going on during a given event. Any unfamiliar situation could be hard to understand (especially at a young age), and if a child doesn’t have the awareness to know what cues to focus on, it could make their testimony that much more difficult to wade through. If someone who had never watched football before sat down and watched, they may know that they should be paying attention to the ball, but may not know the difference between a running and passing play, or may be paying attention to the uniforms or other insignificant cues to the game situation. To me, this situation is comparable to the issue of using child witnesses. In the article, it makes note that children had a higher tendency to embellish the story, but were just as accurate at some details (such as identifying the colors of the buttons on the firefighters’ buttons). In the framework of the story, the color of the buttons were probably fairly insignificant, but the children very easily could have been locked in on things like that, not realizing that they were insignificant, while adults were probably taking in more of the event as a whole.
SB
It is easy for me to understand why the topic of children eyewitness should be researched. This is because there are many cases where the child is the only witnesses in a particular situation, such as in a sexual abuse case. There are other times when a child may be a key witness such as in a domestic violence situation. Therefore, the credibility of child eyewitnesses is important because if the child’s evidence is excluded, it could lead to the guilty offender not being prosecuted due to lack of evidence.
This article, regarding the reliability of evidence found two major conclusions from recall and recognition studies. The first is that child evidence is less reliable than evidence from adults. The second is that children’s evidence may be reliable when it comes to certain types of events/situations.
Previous research confirms that there is not a simple rule when it comes to age and witness credibility. It was said that credibility depends on the subject matter. Loftus and Davies (1984) said that there was no direct link between age and susceptibility to misleading information. They also believe there are other factors involved such as the type of information being processed and the length of retention interval. However, Thomson thought that the older the child had the more credible evidence (the 10 year old children were more credible than the 6 year old children)
When the article discussed the implication of research findings for judicial procedures, there were two different approaches. The first was exclusion of evidence (unless the judge thinks the child is a competent witness), and the second was allowing the child’s evidence in the court whereas the jury weighs the evidence appropriately. Later the article talked about recording the child witness so the evidence has less change of being tainted because it can minimize distortions, and reduce memory loss. It seems to be a good idea to me, it seems logical to record the evidence as soon as possible because subsequent interviews and repeated questions could give way to a slightly different story.
Especially with child witnesses, you have to be incredibly cautious with all the procedures involved in questionning, interviewing, and attempting to obtain information from the child's memory. Just as everything matters with adult witnesses, there are additional aspects of child witness testimonies that we need to be aware of. The article presents some of the issues related to child witnesses, but I think some other issues should perhaps have been mentioned as well. For example, memory does change with age. Specifically, the concept of M-space (Pascal-Leone, one of Piaget's academic offspring) is important because depending on the child's age, they will be able to hold a certain number of items/concepts in memory at a given time. So, if you are a bit older, you may have more items to hold about a criminal event than if you are younger, thus, age of the child witness is incredibly important for determining how much stock we can/should put into their testimony from their memory. Also, we know from fuzzy-trace theory that children are more likely to recall information verbatim rather than adults who get better at and eventually typically just recall the "gist" of information from a story or episode. Thus, when trying to recall all the information about an episode or event, if the information gets through and is successfully retreived, verbatim information may be a good thing. However, a lot can go wrong, even if the information was successfully encoded, from initial encoding to storage to retrieval. Also, if a child's memory is contaminated (which is easy enough to do) the child may, verbatim, describe events that never actually happened, but were stated by the child due to that information being brought into the story they actually remember or try to remember verbatim, but with inaccuracies (planted/false memories, etc).