What are the different techniques employed when using children as witness in the courtroom.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers may vary.Sometimes a child is the only witness to a crime-or its only victim. A number of questions arise in cases where children are witnesses. Can they remember the precise details of these incidents? Can suggestive interviewing techniques distort their reports? Do repeated interviews increase errors? Is it appropriate for children to testify in a courtroom? Society's desire to prosecute and punish offenders may require that children testify about their victimization, but defendants should not be convicted on the basis of inaccurate testimony. In this section, we focus on the accuracy of children as witnesses and on concerns about children testifying in court.Like adults, children are sometimes asked to identify strangers or to describe what they witnessed regarding crimes. In kidnappings and assaults, the child may be the only witness to a crime committed by a stranger. To test children's eyewitness capabilities, researchers create situations that closely match real-life events. In these studies, children typically interact with an unknown adult (the "target") for some period of time in a school classroom or a doctor's office. They are later questioned about what they experienced and what the target person looked like, and they may attempt to make identification from a lineup.Two general findings emerge from these studies. First, children ages five and older can make reasonably reliable identifications from lineups. Second, children are generally less accurate than adults when making identification from a lineup in which the suspect is absent. In these situations, children tend to select someone from the lineup, thereby making a false-positive error. Such mistakes are troubling to the police because they thwart the ongoing investigation.Psychologists have attempted to devise identification procedures for children that maintain identification accuracy when the suspect is in the lineup but reduce false-positive choices when the suspect is absent. Presenting lineup members in a face-off procedure that breaks the task into a series of binary decisions, rather than showing all lineup members together, decreased guessing and the incidence of false identifications from target-absent lineups.