Child Sexual Abuse Report

posted by Edward Nichols, MSW, LCSW-R on Feb 16

There has been a flurry of recent research on children’s suggestibility.  Much of this research has focused on the special vulnerabilities of preschool children. The results of this research, coupled with basic empirical findings in developmental psychology, provide at least three reasons why young children are particularly susceptible to suggestion.

First, young children have special difficulty in producing narratives without relying on cues provided by an adult questioner.  Because cues are potentially misleading, the risk of inaccuracy increases.

Second, young children are especially deferential to adults’ perceptions and interpretations of prior events. If an adult communicates to a child that an event happened in a particular way, either explicitly or implicitly through the kinds of questions asked, the younger child is more inclined to believe it than an older child.

Third, young children have difficulty in identifying the sources of their beliefs.  They are more prone to confuse what they have been told with what they actually remember.

Additionally, preschool children are also particularly susceptible to accepting adults’ moral interpretation of others’ actions, making children vulnerable to suggestions that innocuous actions were immoral.

Another source of young children’s suggestibility is the difficulty in remembering the specific source of his or her beliefs — a task called source-monitoring.  Preschool children exhibit difficulties in recalling how they know a particular fact: because of something they saw, something they inferred, or something they were told.  Young children may therefore confuse what they have been told with what they actually perceived.

Children’s deference to adult interpretation can also be exploited by giving the child negative information regarding the person about whom questions are being asked.  Children’s source-monitoring difficulties can be heightened by telling them that the asked-about events have in fact occurred, giving them the means to visualize the nonevents.

My national practice is largely in the area of assisting defense attorneys in understanding the science that explicates the dynamics of the suggestibility of children and presenting that material to the court in a manner that protects the rights, and ultimately freedom, of the falsely accused.  To this end the Child Suggestibility Litigation Library has been created to document the appropriate science and legal methods used to establish child suggestibility in false child sexual abuse cases.