How Reliable Are Young Children As Eyewitnesses?
How Reliable Are Young Children As Eyewitnesses?
Use research on children’s episodic memory to support your answers.
The law has traditionally viewed children as unreliable witnesses, based on perceptions that they are prone to fantasy, that they are suggestible and that their evidence is otherwise inaccurate. General attitudes toward child witnesses have changed dramatically over the last decade, though some psychologists are still divided. Some deem children as reliable and quite capable of providing accurate and detailed testimony (due to their resistance to suggestion regarding events they took part in), whilst others describe them as having difficulties in distinguishing reality, for which further questioning must be initiated, and thus unreliable (Ceci & Bruck). But over all, it is logical to assume that children have similar failings to their adult counterparts, with the possible exception of being more easily confused by technical or complex questions.
When dealing with allegations that relate to the child’s personal experience we are generally dealing with episodic memory. Episodic memory relates to remembering events that have been personally experienced and making sense out of them. Procedures that are utilised by the mind in creating memory are threefold. First, information must be encoded. Some information is only encoded briefly. These short-term memories enter the working memory that holds the information for short time periods. Second, memories must be stored. Information that is not maintained in long-term memory cannot be recalled later. Third, memories must be retrieved. A process goes on in the brain where stored information is located and brought into awareness. Different components of a memory, for example the sensory or visual aspects, may be stored in different parts of the brain. The linking together of these various fragments becomes what a person experiences as a memory.
Given that children's recall and recognition are thought to be inferior to the recall and recognition of adults the question arises as to how much of this inferiority can be attributed to each of the different stages of memory. The answer to this has great significance in relation to the questioning of children as witnesses. If the inferiority of children's recall and recognition is entirely attributable to encoding, then the only matter that needs to be considered is the manner in which courts should receive children's evidence. If, on the other hand, some or all the relative deficiency of children's recall and recognition can be traced...