Children’s Allegations of Sexual Abuse in Criminal Trials: Assessing Defense Attacks on Credibility and Identifying Effective Prosecution Methods
Date
2020
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Publisher
Arizona State University
Abstract
Due to delays in reporting, lacking witnesses, and infrequent medical and physical
evidence, in criminal investigations of alleged child sexual abuse (CSA), children’s reports of
abuse become central to determining whether a crime occurred. While researchers acknowledge
that developmental vulnerabilities make children particularly susceptible to courtroom
questioning, potentially influencing the reliability and validity of their in-court reports, little
attention has been paid to how children are questioned in-court. Only one previous dataset,
collected on older cases, can speak to questioning practices in the United States. This was the
purpose of the present project: to examine how attorneys establish and attack children’s
credibility. In addition, we were interested in assessing how attorneys would phrase questions,
how children would respond, and whether questioning practices would exhibit developmental
sensitivity.
Collecting cases prosecuted between 2005 and 2015 in Maricopa County, Arizona, we
examined transcripts of 134 minors (5-17-year-olds) testifying about alleged child sexual abuse
in criminal trials. The majority of cases involved allegations against a familiar, if not familial,
adult. Children commonly alleged repeated abuse. All question and answer pairs were coded for
whether questions assessed three areas of credibility: suggestibility and honesty, plausibility, and
consistency. In addition, all question and answer pairs were systematically coded for the
linguistic form of each attorney question and each child’s subsequent response.
Consistency concerns seemed to be embedded in nearly all questions in some capacity,
representing 79% of prosecutor questions and 89% of defense questions. In addition, prosecutors
devoted more time to establishing plausibility than did the defense, at the expense of addressing
suggestibility and honesty, to which the defense gave proportionally more attention. Prosecutors
also asked the fewest credibility questions of the youngest children, while defense attorneys did
not differ in the proportion of credibility questions by the age of the child. Closed-ended
questions accounted for three-out-of-four attorney questions; while children provided elaborative
responses to open questions, they provided unleaborative responses to closed-ended questions.
We found that declarative questions, or statements posed as questions (e.g. “He hit you?”) were
common, representing 21% of overall questions, and indirect yes/no questions (e.g. “Do you
remember if he hit you?”) were common, describing 11% of all questions asked. Children
provided the most unelaborative and fewest elaborative responses to declarative questions, and
the most non-substantive responses to indirect yes/no questions, when compared to other closedended questions. While prosecutors were more likely to ask open-questions, and less likely to ask
suggestive questions, when compared to the defense, they had similar rates of closed-ended
questions (including declarative and indirect yes/no questions). There were few differences in
questioning practices, or response patterns, based on the age of the child.
Our data demonstrate that declarative and indirect yes/no questions produce problematic
response patterns. In addition, the issues of consistency, or inconsistency, dominate in courtroom
investigations of CSA, whereas issues of suggestive influence, honesty, and plausibility receive
significantly less attention. Furthermore, according to the kinds of credibility questions observed,
children may not be developmentally mature enough to answer the questions asked of them - a
tactic that may in itself be undermining credibility, particularly by the defense. Researchers
should work alongside prosecuting attorneys to develop effective training methods, as little is
known about how attorneys learn how to question children in these cases.
Description
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Article
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Keywords
child abuse, research, trial, child witness, credibility, prosecution
Citation
Stolzenberg,, S. N. (2020). Children’s Allegations of Sexual Abuse in Criminal Trials: Assessing Defense Attacks on Credibility and Identifying Effective Prosecution Methods. Arizona State University.