Children S Eyewitness Testimonies Essay

While the free essays can give you inspiration for writing, they cannot be used 'as is' because they will not meet your assignment's requirements. If you are in a time crunch, then you need a custom written term paper on your subject (children s eyewitness testimonies)
Here you can hire an independent writer/researcher to custom write you an authentic essay to your specifications that will pass any plagiarism test (e.g. Turnitin). Waste no more time!

Children's Eyewitness Testimonies

M. Bruning 2

Using young children as witnesses in criminal and civil cases has come under the spotlight in recent years due to an increased awareness of child sexual abuse. Children are now allowed to provide testimony in cases dealing with sexual abuse, where there are only two accounts of reality, that of the child's and that of the alleged perpetrator. Herein lies the major problem with allowing young children to testify in a court of law. Numerous studies have shown that there are weaknesses in children's reporting and memory, thus causing great concern in the legal profession. Also, there are questions concerning the use of suggestibility techniques by interviewers that may sway a child's testimony and may even allow children to create events that may not have occurred at all. Obviously, this is a topic of great concern that has major impacts on the lives of numerous people across the globe and is an issue that we must resolve. There are many concerns to address when discussing this topic and this paper will address several of the issues in order to clarify a few misconceptions.

The main issue concerning child testimony and recollection is that of the interviewing process. A consistent finding concerning suggestibility is that young children are more vulnerable to suggestive techniques than older children. As seen in Goodwin's suggestibility survey (which compared three to four year olds versus seven year olds), younger children were found to be more suggestible than older children. This is of great concern because most sexual abuse occurs among preschoolers. A major problem during interviewers is that interviewers develop interviewers bias. Interviewers

M. Bruning 3

bias occurs when they hold preset ideas about events that may or may not have occurred. Professionals then seek confirmatory evidence instead of asking children open-ended questions. These interviewers do not ask questions that may disconfirm there preset beliefs, they simply ask very specific questions repeatedly in order to catch a defendant.

Stereotype inducement is another tool used when interviewing children. Interviewers who use this strategy usually associate unfavorable characteristics to a suspect while interviewing a child. Children may be told that the person is bad or that he/she does bad things in order to symbolically link the suspect to stereotypical negative behaviors. Some interviewers even threaten or bribe children in order to obtain desired information about a suspect or event. For example, some children have been told that if they disclose desired information that they will be able to see there parents or guardians sooner than if they do not answer correctly. In other instances, children have been given police badges and were told that they were helpers in an investigation and needed to tell the interviewer the information they were requesting.

Another type of interview bias that is seen in some interviews is the use of anatomically detailed dolls. These dolls are given to children and then they are asked to show the interviewer how they were fondled or touched. Often times, children are asked these specific questions before they even offer any evidence to suggest any abuse had taken place. This often urges children to describe events that never occurred at all simply

M. Bruning 4

because...

You should cite this paper as follows:

MLA Style
. EssayMania.com. Retrieved on 25 May, 2012 from
    <http://essaymania.com/12598/children-s-eyewitness-testimonies>

More College Papers

Children at Dinner Table essay
Where do children get a chance to simply sit down with their families and share what happened at school, hear a parent’s funny story from the office, or just share a joke? At the dinner table, of course. But between soccer practice, choir rehearsal, homework, evening meetings, household chores an

Children and TV violence (CON) essay
Children and TV Violence Violence on television is harmful and damaging to children’s minds. Most children watch 21-23 of television per week, and 3 to 5 violent acts per hour (“Media Violence (RE9526)” 1). The age in which television violence starts to affect children is when they are 3 years

Children and the Internet essay
Children and the Internet Although the U.S. created the Internet in the 1960s as a communications tool for the military, it was not until after the government opened it to the public in the late 1980s that the Internet became a unique communications phenomenon. Nobody could predict the speed b