Children’s Eyewitness Testimony: Memory and the Law
This research aims to discover the different factors and difficulties forensics officers encounter when interviewing children for eyewitness testimonies. Children are vulnerable individuals and the eyewitness reports they provide are very important as even the slightest misidentification can lead to prosecution of an innocent individual. Thus, there is a great importance of acknowledging key factors that affect the accuracy of children’s eyewitness testimony, and establish efficient methods that can improve their accuracy.
There is compelling amount of evidence that suggests the importance of stress and trauma as a major factor that affects the accuracy of children’s eyewitness accounts.
Quesada et al stated that extremely stressful situations have an aversive effect on children’s recollection of events. An experimentation that was conducted assessed 8 – 11-year-old children’s memory by allocating them to either a stressful situation or a non-stressful situation. It was established that children in the stressful situation; their memory performance was much worse than of those children in non-stressful situation. Although this was conducted under lab settings, it can be applied to real life situations. According to Southwick et al, traumatic events like any other events are less likely to be accurate due to their accuracy of recall being affected by malleability and alteration.
Stress does not necessarily negatively affect the accuracy of children’s eyewitness testimony. Some researchers have demonstrated the relevance of stress and its affirmative outcomes on children’s witness statements. This was demonstrated by Ochsner et al who conducted a staged theft experiment under lab settings and found that children were able to accurately recall what they had witnessed. This study exhibits that, when children witness events highly traumatic in nature, they have the ability to attach a meaningful experience with a terrible event which enables encoding of specific details of that event due to ‘immense levels of cognitive activation’ as stated by Christianson; Hamann; Howe. Furthermore, when children are exposed to such traumatic events, they withhold the memory associated with the event for a longer period of time suggesting reiteration of the event can lead to better accuracy of their eyewitness accounts.
Stress that children experience during the time of the event may not be the only cause of inaccurate, altered or distorted memory that affects eyewitness statements. Stress and anxiety can be brought upon children due to interviews being conducted by authoritative figures such as the police. Authoritative figures interviewing children may prompt significant distress and high levels of intimidation which typically generate inaccurate answers provided by the children. The answers provided by the children may favour the interviewers even when children are unsure about their response, they may coincide with the interviewer to please them. In order to avoid stress and anxiety children should feel comfortable when being interviewed due to their vulnerability. The NICHD protocol suggested by Lamb et al, highlights ‘rapport – building phase’ allows children to build a sense of trust with the interviewer enabling them to be honest which will allow improvement of eyewitness testimony accounts.
Furthermore, extensive research conducted by Moston and Engleberg, have shown how the presence of another child that is of a similar age, or the presence of a peer beside the child will lead to reduced stress and anxiety. The company of another individual enabled the child to have a source of ‘emotional support’ as such situations can be alarming and the presence of another individual can be seen as a form of social support and thus lead to improvement of eyewitness accounts.
Autobiographical memory refers to memory that includes declarative memory which consists of both episodic and semantic memory. This includes personal experiences and facts. Children of a younger age do not have the accurate ability to recall an event as their narrative recollection of that specific event is sparse. Their memory has not fully developed and therefore only accommodates very few details about the incident or event that has occurred thus implies that there are only a limited amount of information and details about that specific event that is stored in episodic memory. This is usually until the child reaches eight years of age. This indicates that due to the lack of information in the child’s memory, they cannot give accurate recall of the incident that occurred and therefore affects eyewitness testimony accounts.
Biological and neurological evidence provide insight into the memory of a child and how this affects the accuracy of their eyewitness testimony accounts. During early childhood which is usually from around 18-24 months children have lost a lot of their memories. Their memory is not accessible to conscious recall, this is due to infantile amnesia.
