magazine issue 1 2015 / Issue 24

Children are poor witnesses. Or are they?

• written by Nathalie Brackmann, Henry Otgaar, Melanie Sauerland & Harald Merckelbach
• edited by Jay Wood

What are the consequences of these findings? Should child testimony be refused or favoured as evidence in court when the statement of an adult is available? Neither the idea that children always tell the truth nor the one that child testimony is generally afflicted by memory distortions seem to be adequate rules of thumb. On the one hand, children are capable of giving highly accurate testimony (Bidrose & Goodman, 2000), but on the other hand, they might give faulty accounts due to the formation of false memories. Even though faulty eyewitness accounts are possible in children, these findings do not imply that false memories are absent in adults. As pointed out, under conditions in which adults display greater knowledge of a standard scheme of occurrence than children, false memories are more likely to be present in the adult age group. A thorough analysis of each individual case is therefore imperative to assess the credibility of a child’s statement. It is necessary to establish how and under which circumstances allegations were first brought up and how they developed over time. In light of developmental reversals the widespread assumption of legal practitioners believing that an adult’s statement is nearly always more accurate and trustworthy than that of a child is untenable and needs to be corrected.

Paradoxically, children might be more reliable in situations that are very familiar to adults, but not to children. Especially when there is reference to a unique occurrence and the child makes a spontaneous utterance without previous pressure or influence, their statements should not be left aside. Consequently, in the aforementioned murder case, no external influences provide reason to doubt the 6-year-old girl’s identification of her father as the perpetrator.

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