Reliability and Credibility of Young Children’s Reports

                                                           Reading Reaction

After reading the paper Reliability and Credibility of Young Children’s Reports (Bruck & Hembrooke,1998), I wonder that whether the sexual abuse descriptions of children under 14 years old are able to become testimonies as reliable evidence? I’d like to express my own view from the perspective of developmental psychology.

Asking children to state their testimonies is mainly concerned with two elements of developmental psychology. One is “memory” and the other is “information processing”. In 1993, a related experiment was made by Ceci and Bruck who were famous psychologists. The experiment in detail can be found in the paper Suggestibility of the child witness: a historical review and synthesis (Ceci & Bruck, 1993). In the experiment, the researchers repeatedly asked a boy the question that he never experienced every week for 11 weeks consecutively. The question was that you went to the hospital because your fingers were caught by the mousetrap. Did the incident happened? Finally, the boy made up the whole story and gave a series of “memories” of the incident that had never happened under the researchers’ inducement. The experiment indicates that children's memory is fragile, susceptible and inaccurate. Young children can memorize the events quite wrongly and easily be convinced. In other words, Children's memory is easily influenced by adults’ interview bias.

This feature is more obvious for preschool children who are more likely to make false inferences about others’ behavior (including the perpetrators) after hinting questions (Thompson, Clarke-Stewart & Lepore, 1997). If you continue asking children a question in the way of inducement, the error rate of their memory will increase and the wrong memories of their own construction even lasting longer than the real memory. Moreover, when they grow up, they will still be convinced that the events they made up as children were really happened. (Ceci & Huffman, 1997)

After reading several papers related this issue, I find that three reasonable ways to obtain children's testimony. First, asking them what happened as soon as possible after the incident. Second, the accurate and clear responses are more easily got from more accurate questions compared with the general fuzzy questions. For example, one vague question that who went downstairs with you. And one clear question that did you go downstairs with Jack after playing the car models in his home. Obviously, the latter is better. The last but not least, it is so easy for children to have a sense of being threatened that affects their memories and statements in the circumstance of the court. So the interview in a relaxed environment may be better.