FINAL ESSAYS

Final Essays

Final Essays

Children as Witness

Over the past ten years, more research has been done involving children's testimony than that of all the prior decades combined. Some psychologists deem children to be "Highly resistant to suggestion, as unlikely to lie, and as reliable as adult witnesses about acts perpetrated on their bodies" (Ceci & Bruck 1993). However, children are also described as "Having difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy, as being susceptible to coaching by powerful authority figures, and therefore as being potentially less reliable than adults" (Ceci & Bruck 1993). The suggestibility of child witnesses, the effects of participation on children's reports, and the effects of postevent information on a prior memory representation must be taken into account when it comes to seeking answers to the reliability of their testimony, especially because sexual abuse and sexual assault cases are a big part of children's testimony and they are often the only witness.

One of the major problems when assessing the validity of child witnesses is the suggestibility of the child. Ceci & Bruck (1993) define suggestibility as "The degree to which children's encoding, storage, retrieval, and reporting of events can be influenced by a range of social and psychological factors." A child's perception of events may be manipulated by many factors with misleading questions being the most common way to assess a subjects suggestibility (Howard, 2002). A misleading question according to Smith et al, is one that "provides information that is inconsistent with the event witnessed, suggesting, for example, the existence of an object that was in fact not present." After being asked leading questions, a subject is much more likely than a person not asked leading questions to report the presented false information as correct.

This theory, therefore, leads us to believe that there is a source of unconscious postevent information after every even, even though assumption may only cause a very small amount of new information.

A further issue when deciding whether children should be allowed to testify in a courtroom is that of factors not directly related to the child. For example how do jurors react when a child is asked to testify. i.e. Do jurors believe children?

However, children can play a vital role in the legal system, and indeed there are many cases in which a child is the only witness to a crime, but until the time that sufficient research has been done to achieve a system of questioning that will eliminate the suggestibility and social aspects of a child's testimony, all such testimonies should be treated with caution.

Mentally ill offenders

Typically, the priority of governments' policies has been to focus on incarceration and punishment as society 'demands justice', but recently a shift towards rehabilitation and treatment programmes has emerged, as rising, unsustainable prison numbers appear to indicate that in fact 'prison doesn't work' (Rovee-Collier, 1993).

Preventing crime is a debate open to much discussion. In essence, rehabilitation focuses on the need to treat rather than punish, with its aim being to retrain and re-socialise the offender back into ...