Should Children Be Allowed To Testify In Court? Essay -- Children Cour

Should Children Be Allowed To Testify In Court? every last(predicate) over the past ten years, much research has been through involvingchildrens attestation than that of all the prior(prenominal) decades combined. Ceci & Bruck(93) have cited four reasons for this - The opinion of psychology experts is increasingly existence accepted by courts astestimony,- Social research is more ordinarily being applied to the issues of childrensrights,- More research into adult suggestibility in harmony with reason naturallyleads to more research into child suggestibility,- Children ar more comm precisely being used as witnesses in cases where they be nowadays involved (i.e. sexual abuses cases), requiring the development ofbetter ways for dealing with them as special cases. Some psychologists deem children to be Highly resistant to suggestion,as unlikely to lie, and as reliable as adult witnesses about acts perpetratedon their bodies (Ceci & Bruck 1993). However, children are also describ ed as Having difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy, as being susceptible tocoaching by powerful authority figures, and then as being potentially lessreliable than adults (Ceci & Bruck 1993). The suggestibility of child witnesses,the make of participation on childrens reports, and the effects of posteventinformation on a prior memory representation must be taken into account when itcomes to seeking answers to the reliability of their testimony, especiallybecause sexual abuse and sexual assault cases are a big part of childrenstestimony and they are often the alone witness.Those psychologists who feel that children tush be rated as Highlyresistant to suggestion.... etc. seem to have a good argument, whereas thosewho take the opposite expectation also seem to have just as valid an argument. Whichpsychologists are right? Maybe both. It seems that without outside influences, genial encounters, or other interferences, childrens testimony has thepotential to be quite valid. This is under ideal situations, however, whichunfortunately rarely occur.One of the major problems when assessing the validity of child witnessesis the suggestibility of the child. Ceci & Bruck (1993) define suggestibilityas The stratum to which childrens encoding, storage, retrieval, and reportingof events can be influenced by a range of mixer an... ...t that no children should be allowed to testifyon account of the malleability of their recollection. However, children canplay a vital role in the legal system, and hence there are many cases in whicha child is the only witness to a crime, but until the time that sufficientresearch has been done to achieve a system of questioning that will eliminatethe suggestibility and social aspects of a childs testimony, all suchtestimonies should be treated with caution.Works CitedBernstein, D. A., Roy, E. J., Srull, T. K., Wickens, C. D. (1994)Psychology, tertiary edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, MA.Ceci, S & Bruck, M. (1993). Suggestib ility of the Child Witness AHistorical Review and Synthesis, psychological Bulletin. 113, 403 - 439Lefrancois, G. R. (1992). Psychology, 2nd edition. Wadsworth PublishingCompany. California.Luus, C. A. E., Wells, G. L., & Turtle, J. W. (1995). Childeyewitnesses Seeing is believing. Journal of Applied Psychology, 80, 317 - 326Rovee-Collier, C. et al. (1993). Infants eyewitness Testimony Effectsof Postevent Information on a Prior retentiveness Representaion, Memory and Cognition,21, 267 - 279