Children's Testimony, Evaluation by Juries

Perceptions of Bystander Witnesses

Gail Goodman and her colleagues conducted the first studies of jurors' perceptions of child witnesses. They evaluated jurors' reactions to bystander testimony given in the context of vehicular homicide and murder cases. Although all jurors read the same testimony, some were told that the key prosecution witness was an adult, while others were told that the witness was a child. Individual jurors perceived child witnesses to be less credible than adult witnesses, an effect that was not tempered by jury deliberation. This research provided the first evidence that jurors—and juries—are skeptical of children's ability to provide accurate testimony, presumably because jurors doubt young children's cognitive abilities to encode and retrieve details of events accurately. Even so, witness age did [Page 83]not directly affect jurors' ratings of the defendant's guilt. Instead, jurors based their verdicts primarily on witness testimony only when the witness was an adult. When the witness was a child, jurors gave greater consideration to other case evidence. Thus, although jurors often report that they consider corroborating evidence when making decisions, this is especially true when the primary source of evidence is child testimony. In fact, later research showed that jurors perceive individual child witnesses more positively when their testimony is corroborated by other credible child witnesses.

Perceptions of Alleged Victims of Child Maltreatment

After the first studies of jurors' perceptions of child bystander witnesses, research quickly turned to jurors' perceptions of child victim witnesses—specifically alleged child sexual abuse victims. This shift reflected the increased societal attention in the 1980s to child sexual abuse, as well as the fact that child sexual abuse is usually perpetrated in secret, with little corroborating evidence, making child victim testimony key to its prosecution. This research has revealed that jurors' decisions are influenced by many factors. For example, jurors generally find child sexual abuse victims who are younger than about 13 years more believable than older children. Why? Jurors' belief that younger children are less cognitively competent than older children (which hurts the perceived credibility of child bystander witnesses) actually works to the advantage of child sexual abuse victims. That is, compared with older children, younger children are perceived as sexually naive and therefore less cognitively capable of fabricating allegations of sexual abuse that did not actually occur. Younger children are also seen as more honest and therefore less likely to lie about such matters. In fact, for the same reasons, jurors perceive intellectually disabled (i.e., mentally retarded) teenaged sexual abuse victims to be more credible than children of average intelligence. In fact, intellectually disabled children are sexually victimized more often than nondisabled children, but prosecutors might hesitate to prosecute such cases, fearing that jurors will not believe disabled witnesses.

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