Beacon Press Description: This 227 page book consists of six chapters dealing with what are claimed to be problems for children when giving testimony in an adult court. The basic assertion is that the American justice system does not acknowledge or understand modern concepts about children and children's rights. The assumption is that all that has gone on before in history is primitive, uninformed, stupid, and violates the rights of children. The authors are a judge and a nurse. The nurse was inspired to take up the cause of children's rights after writing a book on sexual harassment in the University. The authors attempt to draw analogies between harassment and child sexual abuse. The first chapter uncritically presents statistics. This is
followed by a short history of children in courts, which glosses over problems
of justice and fairness for all participants in the justice system. The next
chapter briefly and superficially discusses children's concepts of reality.
There then follows a single case history which is designed to convince us how
unfair adult courts are to those whose development is less than that of an
adult. The last two chapters call for court reform in the interests of children.
The book contains a listing of some resources and a short and select
bibliography. Discussion: This book offers nothing new in terms of problem-solving solutions and echoes previous discussions of court problems in children's testimony-giving. It depends upon individual war stories rather than on empirical studies to support its contention that our court system is unfair to children. Out of a total of 295 citations for the six chapters, a total of 23 (8%) are to research studies that may offer empirical data. Chapters 5 and 6 appear to be written by the judge and the references are almost entirely to legal articles, court rulings, and legal opinions. The authors seldom cite original sources but often use secondary sources and the references contained in them to cite articles or books they have not read nor studied themselves. The majority of the materials cited consists of newspaper articles or books that are polemical and biased toward a single viewpoint. When research studies are cited and described the authors fall into a trap common to persons who do not understand science, scientific data, nor how science proceeds. There is no awareness that a single study does not establish scientific credibility for its results. Science proceeds by cumulative impact of data that replicates claims or results. The current fuss among physicists and chemists over cold fusion demonstrates the crucial importance of replication and the scientific requirement that results be replicated before they are given currency. These authors cite single studies that have not been replicated as if their mere existence establishes their truthfulness and accuracy. There are frequent statements in the form of factual assertions for which there is no empirical support and no replication. An example is the claim "... denial is predictable in child sexual abuse cases and does not mean that assault did not occur. Once a child has disclosed an account of abuse, denials almost inevitable follow" (p.56). This stance puts the authors in the position of Marxism and Freudianism. Once inside the system, nothing can count against the belief. There is nothing that can falsify the dogma. No evidence can change the opinion that abuse is real. Sexual abuse accounts for the smallest percentage of child abuse in general and very few cases of child sexual abuse proceed to court. At the same time, the law and order approach seems to be superseding the rehabilitative ideal for families. But it is questionable whether prosecution is always in the family or the child's best interest. The authors contend that children do not fare well in the
courts, since rules of evidence are predicated on adults. If the book is to be
taken seriously, courts, judges, and lawyers may all be child abusers because
the system may compel the alleged victim to confront the alleged defendant.
The
implication is that all accusations are correct. Therefore, anytime the justice
system produces an acquittal or a finding of no abuse in family or juvenile
court it is an error and the justice system is therefore guilty of abusing
children by not finding that they were truly abused. This curious approach may
be the cause for the choice of the authors to begin each chapter with a
quotation from Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland
( However, the authors are actually bemoaning the lack of community resources for families, children, and the falsely accused. They are holding one small part of the whole system as responsible and this may be counterproductive. Communities may be unable to pay for more protective services and court personnel. State prosecutors may be so overworked and their departments so understaffed that "careful" (p.174) preparation of cases is a fantasy, giving rise to the battle of the experts, with some myth-spreading and intellectual perjury. Much of the book's naiveté involves lack of understanding of stress and how stress affects testimony. But stress is an adult concept. Justice is determined by adults' exercise of critical rational acumen, not by children's needs. The book highlights just how powerless the state is when privacy issues are invaded. Courts have historically intervened to protect the family against the state using adult concepts of evidence, fairness and rules, while trying not to violate the U.S. Constitution. The book is weak in its discussion of recommended changes and invokes the usual platitudes, such as more education for judges and lawyers and more sensitivity to developmental stages of children, as if we should change a system that has worked for 1000 years from the introduction of the Magna Carta just to address one kind of social problem. The book undermines the justice system in Western society in order to serve a single minority's needs. If the goal is to improve the situation for sexually abused children, the real answer is more community resources for our families, not ill-advised and ill-founded reforms of the justice system that can be assured to produce unintended and unanticipated consequences. Reviewed by LeRoy Schultz, School of Social Work, West Virginia University.
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