Cases involving charges of child abuse are often decided solely on accusations made by children. Absent physical evidence, an adult witness, or a confession, the only evidence of abuse may be the claims of the child complainant. In these cases, it is important to understand how the accusations of abuse became known. Sometimes a child spontaneously reports abuse. Other times, accusations of abuse do not arise until a child is questioned, for one reason or another, by an adult. When accusations are not freely or spontaneously disclosed by a child, it is crucial to know the methods by which they were produced. This is because, as the scientific research shows, certain methods of questioning have the power to compromise the accuracy of children’s reports and even cause children to report having experienced events that never occurred. For more than a decade, social scientists have generated an ever-growing body of scientific research literature documenting that certain types of suggestive questioning methods may cause children to make inaccurate reports. The research has also revealed that inaccurate reports resulting from those suggestive methods are often indistinguishable from accurate reports. That is, there is no way to determine a true report from one created by interviewer suggestion. Thus, absent indicia that the post-suggestion statements are reli- able, there is no way to support a claim that they are what they purport to be: a reflection of the child’s experience rather than the interviewer’s influence.
An excerpt from “Suggestability, Reliability, and the Legal Process”, by Robert Rosenthal, J.D.
See Rosenthal Article under the pages heading for the full discussion
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