Law Commons^™

Little is known about how the dynamics of sexual abuse and disclosure are discussed in criminal court. We examined how attorneys ask child witnesses in sexual abuse cases (N #1; 72, 6–16 years of age) about their prior conversations, both with suspects and with disclosure recipients. Prosecutors’ questions were more open-ended than defense attorneys, but most questions asked by either attorney were yes/no questions, and children tended to provide unelaborated responses. Prosecutors were more inclined to ask about children’s prior conversations with suspects than defense attorneys, but focused on the immediate abuse rather than on grooming behavior or attempts to …

This study examined the effects of rapport (emotional, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD]) and prompt type (what-next, cued-action, cued-emotion, what-think) on one hundred forty-two 4-9-year-old maltreated children's spontaneous and prompted emotional language.  Children in the emotional-rapport condition narrated the last time they felt good and the last time they felt bad on the playground. Children in the NICHD-rapport condition narrated their last birthday party and what happened yesterday. Following rapport, all children were presented a series of story stems about positive and negative situations. Emotional-rapport minimally affected children’s use of emotional language. Cued-emotion prompts were most …

Two studies, with 102 nonmaltreated 3- to 6-year-old children and 96 maltreated 4- to 7-year-old children, examined children’s understanding of the relative strengths of “I promise,” “I will,” “I might,” and “I won’t,” to determine the most age-appropriate means of eliciting a promise to tell the truth from child witnesses. Children played a game in which they chose which of 2 boxes would contain a toy after hearing story characters make conflicting statements about their intent to place a toy in each box (e.g., one character said “I will put a toy in my box” and the other character said …