I came across this article about testing the reliability of child witnesses. The article acknowledges the well-known fact that young children are very suggestible, and that this causes a dilemma when children have to questioned by an adult who is trying to find out evidence in a case where the child is the only witness. A professor at Cornell has proposed that there should be a way of testing the suggestibility of a child witness and assigning a suggestibility rating.
This article relates to what happened in the “Witch Hunt” film where the parents were victims of a witch hunt and their children recanted their stories way after the intensity died down. Wouldn’t a test have been helpful in that situation?
Although this test addresses a problem in justice system, I still wonder about its feasibility and reception. The test was conducted over a four-week period. This may be viewed as too long to establish a baseline and may be seen as just as contaminating. Asking questions about an unrelated scenario that’s being played out may bring in elements to confuse or weakens a child’s memory. But then, it may also serve as a test to how susceptible the child in question is. On another note, if a traumatic event really occurred, how closely should the scenario be allowed to mimic it without compromising it? But then again, coming that close to the actual event might help to show how much fidelity a child would show to events of that nature, even after being traumatized.
If the tests are actually conducted on children who have experienced traumatic events then I believe the researchers will be savvy enough (and responsible enough) to not use events that mimic the traumatic event that child has been through. I do not believe that the event has to closely mirror the event that the child went through. Rather, the events in the video that will be used in the test should just measure the ability of the child to recount events and to do so in an accurate fashion. The test actually does seem good in my opinion, that is, if the test is conducted properly. But after reading the article I find it very interesting that a part of the trial-and-error process of this study was to conduct the tests on children who suffer from genital infections. VERY VERY strange. Maybe the researchers felt that children who suffer from sexual discomfort can closely relate to other children who have been through sexual abuse? I’m not sure, I can however understand how they could believe this but I do not think that that it is a proper approach. Furthermore, children who are going through sexual infections may not even have the same psychological issues as children who have been through sexual abuse (i.e. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, lack of concentration, nightmares about the ordeal). Say that the researchers do conduct studies on children with sexual infections and the children are deemed reliable, will that really reveal the reliability of children suffering from the affects of sexual abuse? I think not.