Sage Publications Description: The goal of this book is to review scientific research and legal considerations relating to children as witnesses in court. In seven chapters and 289 pages the authors do a creditable job of reaching that goal. The book is really organized around four basic issues and dilemmas. The issues are children's competence, children's credibility as witnesses, children's rights, and defendant's rights. The dilemmas are, in each case, to balance the interests in apprehending and convicting those who commit crimes against children with protecting the rights of those accused. Of necessity, then, this book is concerned with accuracy of the decision making process in various stages of that process. Chapter 1 covers the problems and issues generated by the
appearance of children in courtrooms. Chapter 2 presents data concerning
perceptions of children as witnesses and their impact on finders of fact. The
developmental process of children is detailed in Chapter 3. The capacities of
children's cognitions, memory, and communication skills are briefly reviewed in
Chapter 4. Chapter 5 turns to considerations of balancing the protection of
children's rights and defendant's rights and briefly deals with some procedures
intended to make it easier for children to testify in court. The authors offer
their suggestions for improvements in understanding what science and legal
scholarship have to offer in response to these questions in Chapter 6. The final
chapter, Chapter 7, returns to the basic question of the accuracy of the process
and includes the authors' suggestions on how to make it work better. The book
concludes with an adequate bibliography, including legal cases cited, and an
index. Discussion: This is one of the few efforts in books about child sexual abuse to deal openly with the issue of false allegations and errors the system may make. The authors deserve praise for making the effort to consider the needs of the society to have a justice system that is as accurate as possible. They have done well to define the many problems there are in terms of the four basic issues and dilemmas they address. This alone is helpful and worth the price of the book. Seeing these four broad concerns as organizing principles allows for making much more sense out of the confusing mass of concepts, studies, questions, and procedures followed and encountered in the system. However, the research evidence presented is rather elementary and the coverage of the various issues, while instructive, is most often superficial. The material is best seen as an introduction to various areas that may suggest to a professional what needs to be followed up on with further detailed study and analysis. The book therefore may be most helpful to social workers, psychiatrists, attorneys, and others involved in the system who are not familiar with science and the best way to be a consumer of science. It may also be useful to psychologists whose approach is that psychology is an art rather than a science and who may therefore benefit from a summary of the knowledge about children as witnesses the science of psychology has produced. Any professionals who are emotionally committed to concepts such as "children cannot lie about sexual abuse and cannot talk about things they have not experienced" would also benefit from a careful reading of this book. The suggestions for improvement do not contain any fresh ideas but are a summary of much of what has been offered in the past. The authors' suggestion that all participants in the process emphasize getting to the truth is dangerous. It opens the door to the subjective epistemological assumptions of each individual as to what truth is. When the best the philosophers can do is to produce only Tarski's Tautology, "Truth is truth," satisfying each individual's truth-seeking requirement can only produce error. Furthermore, no scientist can ever claim to have discovered truth but only probability. Popperian philosophy of science permits only falsification as the scientific pursuit, not truth. Science is not a way of knowing truth. The only institution in our society charged with determining disputes about facticity is the justice system. The proper role for psychologists and other mental health professionals is to offer information to the finder of fact, not conclusions concerning the ultimate issue. The authors fall into the trap of implicitly accepting the basic concept that most allegations are true when they give their suggestions for interviewers. They recommend that if the interviewer is not satisfied with the answers obtained, it is appropriate to move to leading questions and a more intrusive approach. Instead, they might do better to talk of base rates and antecedent probability and suggest that if the answers obtained in free recall do not support an allegation, the best outcomes will come from considering the alternative that there was no abuse and stopping right there. Also, nowhere does the book deal with the question of the consequences to children of adult error. In the effort to balance the various considerations, a major factor almost invariably overlooked is what happens to nonabused children who are treated by adults as if they have been abused. In the calculus of costs and benefits this, too, must be considered. Nevertheless, the book is valuable to those who may benefit from a careful, though brief review of the data and a considered effort to be fair. The basic reminder of the book that accuracy is crucial is well taken and needs to be more forcefully presented. The goal of increasing accuracy is served by this book and the more people who would read it with open minds, the better off the system and the people it affects would be. Reviewed by Ralph Underwager, Institute for Psychological Therapies, Northfield, Minnesota.
|
