The Child Witness

Abstract

Abstract: Recent years have seen a growth in interest and concern for the child witness. The law has long acknowledged the special status of children's testimony and has implicitly assumed it to be less reliable than that of adults. However, recent psychological research casts doubt on the view that children are uniformly less accurate or competent than their adult peers in eyewitness tasks. Nor is there any clear experimental evidence that the memory of young people is necessarily more suggestible or malleable than that of adults. Given stimulus support, appropriate circumstances and sympathetic questioning, children may be able to provide valuable and reliable evidence in courts of law. However, if such testimony is to become commonplace, efforts must be made to adjust traditional courtroom procedure to the special needs of the child.

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