Disorder in the courtroom? Child witnesses under cross-examination

U.S. Defense Attorneys' Implicit Questioning of Children in Child Sexual Assault Trials

The present study examined the frequency and content of implicit questions asked to 6- to 17-year-olds during cross-examinations (N = 122) of children in child sexual assault trials and analyzed how often they rebutted these questions. Through qualitative content analysis, we found that defense attorneys most commonly asked children implicit questions about: ulterior motives, coaching, being untruthful, missing disclosure opportunities, having poor memory, and other credibility issues. Implicit questions were posed in 63% of cases, with children rebutting only 11% of implied inquiries. We observed no significant correlations between the age of children testifying and the overall frequency of implicit questions or rebuttals. However, age differences were found based on the content of the questions; younger children (aged 6-12) were more frequently subjected to implicit inquiries about coaching, whereas teenaged adolescents (aged 13-17) faced more questions related to truthfulness and credibility issues. In conclusion, children were frequently asked implicit questions that implied credibility concerns, which may be difficult for children to understand. Furthermore, defense attorneys change the focus of the content of their implicit questions depending on the age of the child testifying.

Balancing the law with children's rights to participation and decision-making: Practice guidelines for mandatory reporting processes in child sexual abuse

In India, legal response to a sexual offence, namely, punishment of the perpetrator,relies nearly entirely on mandatory reporting provisions in child sexual abuse law.Mandatory reporting forms an important first step in the medico-legal processes of CSAwork, because it leads onto other legal interventions in CSA cases. However, social, stigma, perceived harassment, rampant gender stereotypes, the unwillingness of, family, disbelief of the victim, and threats by the perpetrator are a few of the many, barriers to mandatory reporting in the Indian context. One particularly insufficiently, addressed critical barrier in the global and Indian literature on CSA and law stems from the reluctance of children to allow child protection and mental health professionals to report to relevant authorities. There are few guidelines or practical strategies available,on how to engage children in mandatory reporting processes. This article uses a childcentric lens to propose the need to balance children's rights to participation and decision-making with the mandatory reporting law. It proposes a conceptual frameworkthat acknowledges the imperatives and challenges of the mandatory reporting law and its implementation, whilst also recognizing children's barriers to abuse disclosures andtheir rights to make decisions and provide consent on reporting issues. It culminates in a guideline for child mental health and protection service providers, offering step-bystep support on navigating the challenges and dilemmas of mandatory reporting through suggested scripts that engage children to enable more effective reporting ofCSA to child protection systems and relevant legal authorities.

"I do not remember… You are reminding me now!": Children's difficult experiences during forensic interviews about online sexual solicitation

BACKGROUND

Forensic interviews for children who have undergone online sexual solicitation (OSS) constitute a unique setting compared to other forms of child sexual abuse (CSA). In these cases, the interviewer holds concrete evidence of the abuse in the form of pictures or texts. During the interview, interviewers use these materials to advance the data collection regarding the abuse, a practice that may significantly influence the child's wellbeing.

OBJECTIVE

The current study aims to explore children's experiences during forensic interviews concerning OSS.

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING

The sample included 20 Jewish children in Israel who were referred to and participated in a forensic investigation.

METHODS

A thematic qualitative methodology was used to analyze the children's narratives.

RESULTS

The findings demonstrate the children's difficulties when confronted with materials related to the abuse. The children detailed the different ways the interview challenged their wellbeing, including visualizing and verbalizing the abuse, new insights, and being videotaped.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings in the current study emphasized the intrinsic challenges that children face in OSS forensic interviews resulting from the tension between the interviewer's need to collect details about the abuse and the child's desire to forget it. Practical ramifications pertaining to these threats to the child's wellbeing, future recommendations, and limitations of the study will be discussed.

Assessing Children's Credibility in Courtroom Investigations of Alleged Child Sexual Abuse: Suggestibility, Plausibility, and Consistency

As children's testimonies of child sexual abuse (CSA) often lack concrete evidence to corroborate a child's claims, attorneys devote a substantial amount of time to establishing a child as credible during the course of a trial. Examining 134 CSA victim testimonies for children aged 5-17 (M = 12.48, SD = 3.34; 90% female), we explored how attorneys assess child credibility through specifically targeting children's suggestibility/honesty, plausibility, and consistency. Results revealed that while prosecutors examine plausibility more often to establish credibility, defense attorneys focus their assessments on suggestibility/honesty and potential inconsistency. However, both attorneys asked many more questions about children's consistency than any other area of potential credibility. Furthermore, while prosecutors ask proportionally more credibility-challenging questions of older children, the defense do not. These results suggest that prosecutors may be missing an opportunity to establish children as honest and consistent and elucidate a need to train attorneys on the implications of children's inconsistencies, suggestibility, and plausible abuse dynamics.

Effects of Interviewer Support on Children's Memory and Suggestibility: Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses of Experimental Research

The accuracy of children's reports of abuse has been hotly debated in the press, academia, and the courtroom. Yet, children's accuracy depends, in part, on the context in which children are interviewed. Guidelines often recommend creating a supportive psychosocial context to promote open, honest responding; however, there is also concern that support promotes social desirability and acquiescence to suggestion, leading children to report more of what they perceive adults want to hear than the truth. The question remains as to whether there is a sufficient body of scientific research to determine whether interviewer supportiveness improves interview outcomes while minimizing children's stress or whether it increases suggestibility and impairs accuracy. Using a systematic search strategy and meta-analyses, this study identifies and reviews findings from experimental studies of the effects of interviewer supportiveness on the accuracy of children's reports. Although the number of studies in the evidence base is small ( n = 15), the studies are of relatively good quality. Results suggest noncontingent interviewer support bolsters children's accuracy. Children are more resistant and less acquiescent to suggestive questions when interviewers are supportive as compared to nonsupportive or neutral. Effects are in the moderate range. Interviewer support is also associated with fewer errors on nonsuggestive questions. Discussion focuses on implications for practice; directions for future research; identifying vulnerable subgroups; and underlying cognitive, social, and emotional mechanisms.

"I know it because it happened to me!" Confrontations of children within forensic investigations

Confrontations and cross-examination are considered to be a vital stage in forensic investigations; however, laboratory and field studies have systematically shown their adverse effects on children`s testimonies. The current field study aimed to assess the strategies utilized, and the frequency with which they are used, in confrontations within forensic investigations involving children following suspected abuse, and to assess their effects on the children's testimonies. The forensic investigations were conducted using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Protocol. The transcripts of 224 children aged 4-14, who were referred for forensic investigation following suspected physical or sexual abuse, were analyzed. All the cases included external evidence suggesting a high probability of abuse. The results indicated that confrontations of children were utilized in more than 60% of the forensic interviews, regardless of the child`s age. The vast majority of the interviewers' confrontation strategies involved references to the alleged suspects, with the number of confrontations ranging from 1 to 18 per interview. An examination of the children`s responses to the confrontations revealed that most of the children insisted on their initial reported testimonies; however, some of the children displayed confusion or fear, and one child recanted the allegation. The discussion addresses how confrontations and cross-examination, as a necessary stage of forensic investigation, can affect children`s testimonies, and the implications of these effects for the forensic context.

The "Good Old Days" of Courtroom Questioning: Changes in the Format of Child Cross-Examination Questions Over 60 Years

Recent decades have seen an explosion of research into children's eyewitness capabilities and resulted in legal reform to render the adversarial trial process more child friendly. Many, however, have been left with the feeling that the most intimidating legal process for child complainants-cross-examination-has not changed meaningfully despite its potential to distort children's evidence. To test this possibility, we compared the cross-examination questioning of Australian child sexual abuse complainants in the 1950s to that used in contemporary cases. We found that the format of cross-examination questions has remained largely consistent over time, with leading questions still making up the bulk of the questions asked. The changes that we did observe, however, are concerning. Cross-examination questions posed to contemporary child complainants were less likely to be open-ended and more likely to be complex, relative to those asked in the 1950s. Crucially, contemporary complainants were asked 3 times as many cross-examination questions as they were 60 years ago. These changes are likely to have detrimental effects on child complainants and their evidence and could reduce the ability of jurors to reach just outcomes in these cases.

A historical comparison of Australian lawyers' strategies for cross-examining child sexual abuse complainants

Many child sexual abuse complainants find the adversarial trial process so distressing that they say they would never report abuse again. Their concerns stem largely from cross-examination, in which the lawyer acting for the accused attempts to discredit their evidence. We examined whether-and if so, how-Australian defense lawyers' approaches to cross-examining child sexual abuse complainants have changed meaningfully over the past 60 years. To do this, we systematically evaluated cases that were prosecuted in the 1950s, comparing them to a matched set of cases from the turn of the twenty-first century. Despite the intervening law reforms designed to improve complainants' experience in court, we found that, relative to their historical counterparts, contemporary child complainants of sexual abuse are actually subjected to far lengthier cross-examinations involving a much broader range of strategies and associated tactics. These findings have important implications for future legal practice and reform, and for the way in which these are evaluated.

The structural linguistic complexity of lawyers' questions and children's responses in Scottish criminal courts

In the first study to systematically assess the structural linguistic complexity of lawyers' questions of children in Scotland, we examined 56 trial transcripts of 5- to 17-year-old children testifying as alleged victims of sexual abuse. Complexity was assessed using 8 quantitative measures of each utterance's components (number of questions, phrases, clauses, sentences, false starts, average word count, word length, and sentence length) and a composite measure was used in the analyses. Lawyers did not alter the complexity of questions when prompting children of different ages. Defense lawyers asked more structurally complex questions than prosecutors. Directive questions were the least structurally complex questions, followed by option-posing questions. Suggestive questions, followed by invitations, were the most structurally complex questions. Option-posing and suggestive questions were more complex when asked by defense lawyers than prosecutors. Of suggestive questions, confrontation and tagged questions were more complex than any other question type. Increased structural complexity led to more unresponsiveness, more expressions of uncertainty, and more self-contradictions regardless of which lawyer asked, the question type, or the children's ages. These findings highlight the additional risks associated with asking some types of questions in structurally complex ways and highlight the need for further innovations (e.g., the use of intermediaries) to facilitate the questioning of vulnerable witnesses in Scottish criminal courts.

The Culture of Silencing Child Victims of Sexual Abuse

This article describes the insidious impact of the cultural silencing of child victims of sexual abuse. Children exposed to sexual violence encounter a multitude of factors that force them to experience and respond to their victimization in silence. Those children able to break their silence in the form of disclosure are often thrust into a parallel process of silencing perpetuated in the United States by the current design of our criminal justice and court systems. Child witnesses within these systems are silenced in both subtle and overt ways throughout the judicial process and are expected to function under conditions of extremely high stress and anxiety. This intense and adversarial atmosphere overwhelms children’s resources and shuts down their ability to effectively communicate on the stand, leading to repeated experiences of silencing that can ultimately have devastating long-term consequences. In addition, secondary wounding is often inflicted because of the insensitivity of our institutional practices to both developmentally and trauma-sensitive treatment of these vulnerable children. This article describes an application of humanistic psychology to the court system in the United States as well as an attempt at building a coordinated community response to address the problem of silencing. Recommendations for addressing inequities in the child justice process and mobilizing professionals and agencies are offered in the humanistic tradition.

The Diagnostic Value of Children's Responses to Cross-Examination Questioning

In response to a widespread belief within the legal system that cross-examination is instrumental in uncovering the truth, we examined the effect of cross-examination questioning on the reports of children who had-and had not-been coached to lie. A group of children, aged 6-11 years (N = 65), played three computer games with one of their parents. For half of the pairs, the parents-who acted as confederates-coached their children to make lies of commission concerning the occurrence of two target activities. For the remaining pairs, these two target activities actually occurred, and there was no coaching. Immediately afterwards, children were interviewed about the two activities. Those who-correctly or incorrectly-reported that both activities occurred were retained for the final sample (n = 56); these children were then interviewed again with both neutral questions and cross-examination-style challenges. Neither style of questioning elicited responses that discriminated between liars and truth-tellers: although the accuracy of children who were lying increased in response to cross-examination questions, the accuracy of truth-telling children saw a corresponding decrease. When asked neutral questions, children's responses tended to be consistent with their earlier responses, whether or not those responses were lies. These findings raise important questions about the function that cross-examination might serve in trials involving child witnesses. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Where There's Smoke, There's Fire: the Effect of Truncated Testimony on Juror Decision-making

In countries that allow child complainants of abuse to present their direct evidence via pre-recorded videotape, the recording is sometimes truncated for relevance or admissibility purposes before it is presented to the jury. In two experiments, we investigated how this practice affects mock jurors' judgments of child credibility and defendant culpability when truncation omitted the child's less plausible allegations. Mock jurors read a transcript of a 6-year-old girl making an abuse allegation against the janitor at her school. Some jurors read this allegation only (truncated version), while others also read either one or two additional - but less plausible - allegations by the same child. Contrary to what we predicted, the presence of these additional allegations did not decrease jurors' belief in the core allegation, nor did it influence their judgments about the child complainant's honesty or cognitive competence. In fact, under at least one condition, reading additional, less plausible allegations made jurors more likely to pronounce the defendant guilty of the core allegation - even when jurors did not believe the additional allegations. This finding stands in stark contrast to prior research on jurors' evaluation of adults' testimony that includes implausible details. Future research in this area will help to elucidate the conditions under which the presentation of truncated testimony may or may not influence juror decision-making. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Preserving the Past: An Early Interview Improves Delayed Event Memory in Children With Intellectual Disabilities

The influence of an early interview on children's (N = 194) later recall of an experienced event was examined in children with mild and moderate intellectual disabilities (CWID; 7–12 years) and typically developing (TD) children matched for chronological (7–12 years) or mental (4–9 years) age. Children previously interviewed were more informative, more accurate, and less suggestible. CWID (mild) recalled as much information as TD mental age matches, and were as accurate as TD chronological age matches. CWID (moderate) recalled less than TD mental age matches but were as accurate. Interviewers should elicit CWID's recall as early as possible and consider developmental level and severity of impairments when evaluating eyewitness testimony.

Attorneys' Questions and Children's Productivity in Child Sexual Abuse Criminal Trials

We investigated the links between questions child witnesses are asked in court, children's answers, and case outcome. Samples of acquittals and convictions were matched on child age, victim-defendant relationship, and allegation count and severity. Transcripts were coded for question types, including a previously under-examined type of potentially suggestive question, declarative questions. Children's productivity was conceptualized in a novel way by separating new from repeated content and by adjusting the definition based on the linguistic demands of the questions. Attorneys frequently used declarative questions, and disconcertingly, attorneys who used these and other suggestive questions more frequently were more likely to win their case. Open-ended and closed-ended questions elicited similar levels of productivity from children, and both elicited more productivity compared with suggestive questions. Results highlight how conceptualization of questions and answers can influence conclusions, and demonstrate the important real-world implications of attorney questioning strategies on legal cases with child witnesses.

Witness recall across repeated interviews in a case of repeated abuse

In this illustrative case study we examine the three forensic interviews of a girl who experienced repeated sexual abuse from ages 7 to 11. She disclosed the abuse after watching a serialized television show that contained a storyline similar to her own experience. This triggered an investigation that ended in successful prosecution of the offender. Because this case involved abuse that was repeated on a weekly basis for 4 years we thus investigated the degree to which the child's narrative reflected specific episodes or generic accounts, and both the interviewer's and child's attempts to elicit and provide, respectively, specific details across the 3 interviews collected in a 1 month period. Across the 3 interviews, the child's account was largely generic, yet on a number of occasions she provided details specific to individual incidents (episodic leads) that could have been probed further. As predicted: earlier interviews were characterized more by episodic than generic prompts and the reverse was true for the third interview; the child often responded using the same style of language (episodic or generic) as the interviewer; and open questions yielded narrative information. We discuss the importance of adopting children's words to specify occurrences, and the potential benefits of permitting generic recall in investigative interviews on children's ability to provide episodic leads. Despite the fact that the testimony was characterized by generic information about what usually happened, rather than specific episodic details about individual occurrences, this case resulted in successful prosecution.

The role of culture and language in avoiding misinformation: pilot findings

In two pilot studies, we investigate the possibility that patterns in our linguistic environment affect the likelihood of accepting misinformation. Turkish, which marks its verbs for the source of a speaker's evidence (first-hand perception vs. hearsay), was contrasted with English which does not mark its verbs but which, to signal strength of evidence, must employ optional lexical marking. In the first pilot study, Turkish adults were shown to be affected by that language's obligatory evidential markings: their free recall for details of the events changed as a function of the type of the tense-aspect marker in use, and strong evidential markers led to increased levels of suggestibility when employed with misleading questions. In the second pilot study, Turkish- and English-speaking children were shown to be differentially suggestible depending on combinations of evidential markers in the story presented and the evidential marker employed in the misinformation subsequently provided. Together, these two pilot studies show promise in this area of research, which has been ignored by the forensic community and yet would seem to be relevant when interviewing, taking statements, and giving testimony in cross-linguistic settings.