magazine issue 1 2015 / Issue 24

Children are poor witnesses. Or are they?

• written by Nathalie Brackmann, Henry Otgaar, Melanie Sauerland & Harald Merckelbach
• edited by Jay Wood

In a recent murder case, a 6-year-old girl claimed immediately upon arrival of the ambulance and police to have witnessed her father stabbing her mother (Brackmann, Otgaar, Sauerland, & Jelicic, 2014). Does such an account really reflect what happened and should it be used as evidence in court?

In criminal cases, it is important to decipher whether eyewitness statements are credible or not. Indeed, erroneous eyewitness statements can have severe consequences, such as wrongful imprisonment and waste of resources. The delineation of eyewitness accounts is relevant because such accounts often constitute the only piece of evidence in a police investigation or a trial (Ceci & Bruck, 1993). Technical evidence, such as DNA samples, is frequently absent. Hence, it is vital to know whether witnesses provide an accurate reflection of what happened or whether their statements have been infected by memory distortions, so-called false memories.

Comparing child witnesses to adult witnesses, the knee-jerk response among many legal professionals is that children’s testimonial accuracy is inferior to that of adults (e.g., Brainerd, Reyna, & Ceci, 2008). According to this view, children’s memory functions less optimally than that of adults, making them more prone to memory errors, such as false memories. This default assumption has far-reaching effects on jurisdiction. Specifically, when both an adult and a child provide a report of what purportedly occurred, more weight might be placed on the statement of the adult.

Intriguingly, however, recent evidence shows that under certain circumstances, this assumption is untenable. In recent years, there has been an upsurge in new research on the reliability of children’s testimony (e.g., Brainerd, 2013), revealing that adults, and not children, are sometimes the most susceptible to memory illusions. This developmental pattern has been dubbed developmental reversal. 

In the current paper, we address the relevance of these new findings to the legal domain. Importantly, we focus on eyewitness testimonies and the possibility that they are infected with faulty recollections. Of course, in the legal arena, other types of evidence might be relevant, such as identification performance. Research indeed shows that there are developmental differences between children’s and adults’ identification performance (Havard, 2013). Discussing these particularities is beyond the scope of this paper.

We therefore start with a short historical overview of early studies on children’s testimony and legal cases involving child witnesses. These early findings led to the conclusion that children’s eyewitness accounts can easily be infected with false memories. Subsequently, we discuss the formation of false memories by demonstrating that depending on certain factors, false memories may increase with age. We describe recent experimentation indicating that even forensically-relevant false memories follow an age-related increase. Finally, we consider the practical value of these new findings. 

The vulnerability of children’s testimony

Early research has pointed out weaknesses in children’s memory and its implications for the legal field (e.g., Loftus, 2005). The underlying question was whether and under which circumstances children are capable of giving an accurate report of what they have witnessed. Among the first researchers who systematically and experimentally analysed children’s memory in a way that has implications for the legal context were Binet (1900) and Varendonck (1911) at the beginning of the twentieth century (as cited in Ceci & Bruck, 1993). They found that the type of questioning has an influence on children’s answers. Specifically, invitations to freely recall what had happened led to the most accurate responses, whereas (mis)leading questions merely elicited conformal answers (Binet, 1900). In Varendonck’s field study, 17 of 22 children even reported details about an unknown suggested person. Subsequent studies adapted the methods used by these pioneers. A review of studies published between 1979 and 1992 comparing the suggestibility of young children vs. older children and adults found a decrease in the formation of false memories with age in 83% of the studies (Ceci & Bruck, 1993). Even though individual differences exist, young children were generally found to be more vulnerable to suggestive interviews and erroneous information than older children and adults (Bruck & Ceci, 1999).

The research reported above was, among others, stimulated by legal cases in which the authenticity of children’s testimony was doubted (e.g., Ceci & Bruck, 1993). Examples are the American day care child sexual abuse cases of Kelly Michaels and the McMartin Preschool that occurred in the late 1980s. These two cases had in common that the police interviews with the children were conducted in a highly suggestive manner merely suited to confirm the interrogators’ prevailing hypothesis of the factual occurrence of abuses, but not to obtain truthful and accurate testimony (Schreiber et al., 2006). Interviewers’ techniques included (1) the introduction of new information that had not previously been mentioned by the child witness, (2) positive reinforcement of answers that were in accordance with police's prior expectations and beliefs of what had happened, (3) showing scepticism towards answers that were not in accordance with those prior expectations and beliefs, (4) applying conformity pressure by referring to statements made by other children, and (5) invitations to speculate about the alleged events (Schreiber et al., 2006).