There is a certain difficulty in dealing with charges of sexual assault involving a child. Things to take into account when preparing a case for a trial would be the reliability of the witnesses, the conditions of the defendant as well as the victim, and the approach in attempting to defend against accusations of sexual abuse. As this specific case is dealing with sexual assault of a minor, who are easily persuaded for even the most insignificant rewards, there is a possibility that the minor have been prepared by the prosecution to lie in court. In addition, the minor might be provoked by their parental figure to accuse the defendant in order to get rid of the person, or even just to make money off the accused. When approaching such a case, the following measures should be taken: disprove the prosecutions statements, and make it seem like the witness is untrustworthy by breaking apart their testimony. As long as the course of tackling the case is taken cautiously, it becomes quite easy to receive an acquittal on the litigant.
There is an alarming increase in the rate of false allegations of child sexual abuse, which in turn increase the effortless preparation of the witnesses for the prosecution. The minor could be offered any primary or secondary reinforce in exchange for saying certain words in court, which conditions them to say things to please the prosecution in order to receive even more candy. Ultimately, such a method of reinforcement leads to a lying witness that does not recognize the detriment they are dealing to themselves if the lie is discovered; they have no conditioning to the aversive stimuli of their errors. A popular hypothesis for why the prosecution preps their witnesses to lie in court is because the...
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...ilities of the witness. The witness could be stating things for rewards such as candy or praise from the crown, but they could also have a valid recollection of the event. If the defense is able to shatter the recollection by contacting an expert psychologist and having them state the limit of the memory of a minor, the case becomes a lot easier to win; if a child can only remember so much, regardless of if the memory is emotional or not, how can anyone be sure what the minor says is true? The psychologist could discuss memory repression, amnesia, or distortion, and shift the favour of the jury to the defendant. Although the abuse might have truly happened, if the key testimony is faulty, the rest of the witness statements will become untrustworthy in the eyes of the jury, and that is how the defense can choose to approach a case of sexual abuse involving a minor.
...at because of the size of the children there would have been physical symptoms, no documented evidence of this sort was presented during the case. Out of 100 students no physical symptoms were ever recorded, and not one student said anything about abuse until four years later when the investigator was pursued (Silvergate, 2004) No parents ever filed complaints prior to police investigation. Because memories are malleable and children are even more vulnerable to authority, it is very probable that some children just complied to the leading questions due to fear, but is it possible that they all could? The influence of the investigators parallels to the influence of therapists in cases of sexually abused children's recovered memories.
According to London et al. (2005) “ a major problem with relying on children’s statements in forensic investigations is that many sexually abused children remain silent about abuse; they may deny that abuse ever occurred, or they may produce a series of disclosures of abuse followed by recantations of these disclosures” (p.195). Most of this happens because children blame themselves; attempt to make everything better in the family or mothers pressure them to change their
It’s not uncommon for a juvenile sexual assault victims to be concerned about the wellbeing of and potential consequences facing the offender, according to Warner, adding, “When a child faces trauma, sometimes their coping mechanism is to pretend it did not happen. … Unfortunately, this is a pattern we see often.”
When children are giving eyewitness testimony’s, the investigators techniques are a little different in terms of the repetition of questions. This is sometimes to get them to remember more information from when they asked it in the first instance. Whilst law enforcement are questioning ch...
Every day a child is called on to testify in a courtroom. Children who have to testify in open court are easily influenced by outside sources. This paper will show the reasons children should not be used as witnesses in a courtroom. I will show all the different influences that a child receives and prove them uncredible. The interview process can influence a child greatly. Ceci and Bruck (1995) found a study that shows that child witnesses may be questioned up to12 times during the course of an investigation. The questioning process can take up to a year and a half to be completed. Children are not capable of remembering exact details for that period. Their answers to questions will change each time he or she is asked. This is because they do not retain information in the same way as an adult. Most studies have shown that children start to lose their ability to recall an event accurately only 10 days after the original event has happened. Another factor in a child’s ability to recall an event is stress. A child can go into a shock stage and repress all memories of what has happened to them. These memories may not resurface for many years. This affects a child’s ability to identify the suspect in photo and live line-ups. The amount of stress a child goes through affects their ability to answer questions in an interview, if they cannot remember what has happened, how are they supposed to answer the myriad of questions the interviewer will ask them.
The current anxiety about the validity of children’s testimony in court stems mostly from heavily publicized cases of child molestation during the 1980’s (Meyer, 1997). As a result of society’s reaction to dramatic increases in reports of abuse and neglect, children increasingly are being admitted as witnesses in juvenile and criminal proceedings (Ceci & de Bruyn, 1993). Each year hundreds of thousands of children in North America become entangled in the legal system. Often these children testify about the alleged actions of a parent, teacher, baby-sitter, relative or neighbor. And when this happens, the case is often decided on the basis of the relative credibility of the child versus the defendant. Regardless of whether such testimony is made in forensic interviews, during preliminary hearings, or at trial, it may result in life altering decisions for all involved (Ceci & Bruck, 1995).
Childhood sexual abuse, as defined by the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA, 1996), includes using persuasion, enticement, and other inducements to coerce a child to engage in sexually explicit conduct or simulation of sexual acts. Survivors of sexual abuse frequently have a legacy of both psychological and physical problem throughout life. There has been considerable literature published in the past 20 years focusing on the long-term consequences of childhood sexual abuse.
Regan, P.C. & Baker, S.J. (1998). The impact of child witness demeanor on perceived credibility and trial outcome in sexual abuse cases. Journal of Family Violence, 13(2), 187-195.
Krahenbuhl & Blades did a study to investigate the influence of question repetition and question type on a child’s ability to accurately recall. In the study, a total of 136 children age five, seven and nine watched a live fifteen minute presentation. One week later, the children were asked twenty questions that were repeated an additional two times within the interview. The accuracy of the children’s responses to unanswerable questions declined with repetition. They found that children were more likely to change a response to an unanswerable question than to a question to which they know the answer. Generally, children upheld the same answers to only three quarters of the repeated questions. The most common pattern of change was for children to change their answer the second time a question was asked and then to uphold that answer when the question was repeated. This study shows that repetition can have a negative effect on a child’s eyewitness testimony, and therefore making the use of children’s eyewitness accounts of criminal activity ineffective.
This paper outlines the consequences of child sexual abuse (CSA) based on the examination of results from multiple researches previously fulfilled concerning the psychological and physical impact of this crime, information of statistics, warning signs detected, victims’ performances, and emotional state. Sexual abuse causes severe trauma on child victims that will last for the course of their lives, therefore it is critical to identify and improve the therapeutic methods utilized to treat CSA survivors.
Child sexual abuse is defined as “the involvement of a child in sexual activity that he or she does not fully comprehend, is unable to give informed consent to, or for which the child is not developmentally prepared, or else that violates the laws or social taboos of society” (Ajduković, Sušac, and Rajter 470). In Bastard out of Carolina, Ruth Ann “Bone” Boatwright started experiencing sexual child abuse from her stepfather at the age of twelve, which changed aspects of her life forever. Coincidentally, it was proven through research that young girls between the ages of 13 and 16 suffered sexual abuse by adult men that they knew previously (Ajduković, Sušac, and Rajter 475). While it could be a family member, an acquaintance, or a friend, the feelings of betrayal remain the same.
The opposition believes that holding court cases where juveniles remain tried as adults undoubtedly violates the rights of the juvenile. Initially, the age of a person when the alleged crime occurred decides whether or not he or she will be tried as a juvenile. “Definitions of who is a juvenile vary for different purposes within individual states as well as among different states” (Rosenheim 36). Children, ages seven to seventeen, who are suspected of crime, must be treated as children in need of guidance and encouragement, and not as vicious criminals (Emerson 6). Also, the opposition feels that the juvenile cannot accept full responsibility for his or her actions. Some people insist that each minor who committed a crime was influenced in some way or another (Emerson 8). Not only does the opposition believe that the minor was influenced, but they also believe that the juvenile was not able to control his or herself (Emerson 8). In addition, juveniles have not yet reached the necessary maturity level to share a prison amongst other adults. Minors, isolated for punishment, do not deserve this radical treatment (Staff Report C13). Numerous lawsuits are filed annually to fight the improper incarceration of juveniles who were tried as adults (Staff Report C13). Most importantly, courts must not rely on prosecutors to prove that a child knew whether or not that the crime committed was right or wrong. “The court is exhorted to treat children brought before it with the same kind of care, custody, and discipline that they would receive ...
Sexual abuse cannot be clearly defined with ease. In fact, sexual abuse is an umbrella term for any sort of situation, whether or not it involves physical contact, in which a sexually immature child is exposed to anything sexual in nature. Because no child is psychologically mature enough for sexual stimulation, the complex feelings associated with it are mentally and emotionally disfiguring. Children who have been sexually abused experience an array of negative emotions such as shame, guilt and anger, and may display oddly withdrawn or distrustful behaviors. They cannot help but feel that they somehow brought the abuse unto themselves (Saisan, et al). One major contributing factor to these severe psychological consequences is the concept of trust. Sexual abuse is, in most cases, committed by a parent or other trusted adult figure. While children are naïve on such adult topics, they can still get an overwhelming feeling that the attention is wrong, yet they are unsure of how to cope with it. If the child has an emotional atta...
Children may also be easily swayed to give a certain answer because they were told to by the adults. This is obedience to authority. This affects the reliability of the children’s testimony majorly. The adult or suspect may be a murderer or rapist, and the child could be deceptive about what actually happened because that adult figure either threatened them if they didn’t give a good answer, or that the child thinks that it’s parents could never do wrong (Anderson, Truth in Children's Testimony, 1998). Children may remain loyal to authoritative figures during
I have a notoriously bad memory even now, and I have no recollection of it ever having been any better. Thinking back, I have reasonably clear and complete memories for only the past three years or so, becoming increasingly spotty and episodic the older they are. On the far end, I also am familiar with a set of stories about by infancy that my parents have told me. It is somewhere in this border between implanted stories and fuzzy memories that I look in trying to find my earliest memory.