Childs Memory and Eyewitness Testimony

It may be useful to mention to the jury that Piaget (1932) interviewed one hundred children about lying and honesty. From his findings he argued that children younger than six years old cannot identify statements containing a lie and that children do not have an adult understanding of truth and lies until after the age of ten. Therefore, you could try to show the c

In conclusion, the above examples provide good evidence that there are major flaws in the investigations into child abuse cases, in particular the interviewing of the child, and the child’s testimony itself. Therefore, it may be helpful to refer to some of the guidelines and procedures examined by psychologists in order to weaken the effect of a child’s testimony.

In relation to this, interviewer bias can have a huge effect on the behaviour of children. For example, Ceci and Leichtman found that when an interviewer is given misinformation, 34% of three to four year olds corroborated one or more of the events the interviewer falsely believed had occurred. This is very relevant as children are often put in therapy when there are suspicions of child abuse. Therefore, if the therapist believes that the child has been abused, the child may give information about being abused as the therapy goes one. Ceci and Leichtman also found that as the interviewer persisted in asking questions based on his or her false hypothesis, a significant number of children abandoned their contradictions and endorsed the interviewer’s hypothesis. Similar findings have been reported by petit et al (1990) and Clarke-Stewart et al (1989). It would be useful if you could consider this for the interviewing used on the children in this case.

Another problem with the testimony of the child is their ability to remember particular occurrences of repeated events. There is evidence to suggest that children have difficulty remembering occurrences in sequence. For instanc

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