How old is old enough? Old enough to understand the world around you, old enough to judge and make decisions and understand the implications of your choices, old enough to protect yourself and make decisions that will be best for you. When are people adept, when are people cognizant of the way they influence the world? When do they know what is appropriate, what is best, what is right? The line is a murky one, is it based on age? On understanding? Many methods have been developed in hopes to answer this question, this extremely important question. If a person is not competent to understand the implications of their actions, of what has happened to them, what is happening to them, someone must protect them. In such cases it is upon the shoulders of the court that their lives rest and the burden must be brunt with the full knowledge of their situation and standing. In any decision that the court makes concerning a child it is important to know how the child thinks and how much of the situation the child understands. It is also important to understand how a child feels, and what could be influencing the reasoning and thoughts of a child. Whatever the age the child may be they are currently that age, whatever a child may know is what you have to work with. You cannot make a person more mature, you cannot control how traumatized a person may be, you can only understand and accept and assess. When called as an expert witness, an advocate at the behest of the well being of a child all of these aspects of understanding are important to keep in mind. Your duty is to the child and to the truth. All details which may be relevant to proceedings should be mentioned. In some cases as a fact witness you may be called upon to relate scores on various tests, but it is also important to relate the meaning of the scores to the judges. You may be hired by either the state or by individual’s in several different positions. You may be a fact witness in a civil case dealing with child custody, or perhaps in a criminal case concerning PTSD, child molestation, or violence, or perhaps as a fact witness assessing the relevance and accuracy of a child’s testimony.
In depth knowledge of how children think and their developmental stage is important to be in anyway a representation of this knowledge. Before the age of 6 a child may not remember very much of their life. Their brain and self concept is still developing as they lay down many of the basic neural pathways. Young children lack many common motor skills, and their ability to process information may not be completely fine tuned. Many of the basic schema’s which adults rely upon are not created, or perhaps more accurately, they just aren’t fully developed and many times confusion may arise as to what something is. Children are apt to make false associations, they haven’t developed differentiation between what perhaps a cat is vs. what a dog is, a cat and a dog both have four legs and a tail, if their schema is that this is what a dog is they may reason that the two must be the same creature. Between birth and around three and a half years in age, a child has the highest synaptic density that it will perhaps ever reach, but this does not mean that the brain is fully developed. In the prefrontal cortex “the peak of overproduction takes place at about 1 year of age but it is not until middle to late adolescence that the adult density of synapses is achieved” (pg 172 Children 9th edition Santrock) Is it any surprise that during this period of pruning and synaptic growth a child may not remember important facts, it takes many repeated experience to allow something to be truly set in the brain, to be remembered and to allow the mind to know that this is something that is important as its working through tons of new neural connections. This paired with false associations which have to be repeatedly worked through and restructured allows for even more variability concerning what may be remembered. Children need time to assimilate and accommodate new experiences by working them into, or creating new, schema’s in order to encompass new concepts. Concepts which are abstract may be impossible for younger children to understand. Piaget’s stages of cognitive development set’s a good general timeline to understand where children are concerning how they can process information but his timeline isn’t perfect. Invariably it is on a person to person basis as to what will be remembered and how well it is going to be remembered. People develop differently and may be able to grasp certain concepts earlier then others. It is highly dependent on what the child is exposed to and how they are exposed to it, also how their mind has processed the information.
As children grow older they are more likely to remember details and less likely to have their opinions be influenced by suggestive wording. Children of 3 years of age are extremely suggestible while children of six are still more suggestible then adults yet show marked improvement in comparison to there three year old counterparts. (http://www.springerlink.com/content/w2mv66q621467388/) It is important to keep these fact in mind while dealing with a child witness, it is important to be extremely careful in wording while interviewing a child and it is important to not pressure the child in any way. Also it is likely for very young children to change their answers a week or so after initial questioning. A young child may not remember from one week to another, or even one moment to another, what has happened to them. If it was something traumatic they may not remember the event at all. In a custody hearing a child, if around one parent who is buying them ice cream and treats the previous day, then they may favor that parent even though said parent may not have treated them kindly in the past. People are more likely to remember pleasant things over unpleasant, and a young child may not remember the negative aspects as well. It’s much like when a young child is crying and you distract the child, the child may not remember what they were crying about. The negative aspects of life aren’t as set, while an older child may remember that parent wasn’t as kind to them before. If a child is traumatized they may not remember the event in favor of more positive memories, also they may create memories, or alter their existing memories to follow the line of questioning. As an expert witness it is also extremely important to be aware of PAS(parental alienation syndrome) which specifically deals with parents convincing their child to hate or believe negative things concerning the other parent. This may include believing that the child has abused them either sexually or physically. It is important to recognize the symptoms and to differentiate them from actual physical or sexual abuse.
In cases of children who have actually been molested it is important to realize that “people construct new knowledge and understandings based on what they already know and believe” (pg. 10
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=B2h3iaDkUo8C&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&ots=qlzI9eVLcW&sig=eK8qXVhM5pFrscozTKmhXveHNqw#PPA10,M1) This is an extremely important concept for many reasons, this concepts provides for pathways of learning. A child wouldn’t be able to remember something they have no concept of, or schema for. The basis of knowledge must rest on something. This means that a child in order to recognize sexual acts has to be in some way exposed to the commitment of sexual acts. This means that a child might have seen the act or experienced the act in order to recreate the act. If a child has only heard of the act then if the child is left in a room with dolls they may verbally comment on the act, perhaps might say that the dolls are making babies, yet they wouldn’t know how the dolls are making babies. It is also important to note that children may have different names for acts, this may be that they were taught a different name to call the act so that when referring to such acts it wouldn’t be automatically linked to being a sexual act. If a child walks in on their parental figures having sex, the parent might say they were summoning the stork. Thus if they had two dolls and started moving them in a suggestive manner they might call it summoning the stork. If a child was molested they may not know what it was that was done to them, they might know the sensations that it produced or the movements but it may be unlikely that they have a proper name for the act. In order to protect themselves from the memories at very young ages they may say that they had a dream of something being done to them. These dreams can be disturbing in there nature. Many times when people here children say things along those lines it is a definite red flag, the child is trying to process this new stimulus and one of the major ways children process information is through sleeping. This is part of the reason why children need to sleep more then most adults. Understanding a child’s physical well being, sleep cycles and eating cycles can play an important role in understanding what is going on in the child’s mind.
Even adults when faced with certain adverse situations may have trouble remembering details and facts. Under stressful conditions many times adults will forget important details and it may be because of the stress that people can't remember details. When the mind is in a heightened state people process alot more information, or percieve alot more information then they normally might. Things which are traumatic or provide emotional duress may be surpressed because they cause a sort of harm to the persons psyche. Much of of the information people process may be wrong as people are highly suspectible to the power of suggestion and the brain can only process 15 items at any given moment. What we do process are actually bits and peices of information which we match to the closest existing schema. In a heightened state a person either may exhibite flash bulb memory where everything is much like a picture or perhaps they may not remember much at all. The circumstances and the persons emotional and mental state weigh heavily on how information will be processed. Stress provides alot of strain on a persons system making it more difficult to process certain informaiton while we loose other information. Having in depth understanding of the affects of stress and memory is important in considering how a child may be affected, or how a child may interprete, specific events.
A child’s emotions though are extremely relevant. It is said that it is best to treat children as you would any person. They may have a long way to go in order to fully understand ideas and concepts because they haven’t been presented with as many concepts. It’s very important to present them with information in a way that they can understand and to not jump to the conclusion that they are not capable of understanding a situation. Much of the time children may understand things quite clearly because they might not be as biased, the same mutability of mental concepts also means they can be suggestible. It’s important to remain neutral and to not be suggestive but also to allow the child to express their thoughts and ideas an d present them with a way of structuring their own concepts. Concerning child custody a child attachment to their parents and desires concerning which parent to be with is an important factor as to whom the child should go with. Telling a child that the child should be with one parent, or trying to collaborate a childs testimony or trying to refute it using leading questions can highly influence what a the child may say. A protective supportive non-judgemental environment is extremely important to getting an accurate answer from a young child.
In order to assess the answers gained various tools are used. To judge which parent may be more effective a psychologist may use the ASPECT procedure. The ASPECT procedure is based on a self report cross referenced by an interview with the psychologist. In order to understand weather a child was molested a psychologist may use Statement Validity Testing, this consists of an interview, secondly CBCA (Criterion Based Content Analysis) technique which helps discern between truthfulness in children and fabrications, and this would be followed by a Statement Validity Checklist which compares their answers to their psychological history. The Bricklin Perceptual Scales (BPS) “assesses the child’s perception of his or her parents in four major areas: Competence, Follow-up Consistency, Supportiveness, and Possession of Admirable Personality Traits.”( http://www.tjta.com/products/TST_005.htm) and can be extremely useful in identifying children’s opinions concerning their parents and may be useful in identifying truthfulness in testimonies and determining which parent may be more effective as a parent. In order to confirm whether a child may have been molested the use of anatomically correct dolls may be practiced. This may be done in several ways, one way is to ask a child where they may have been touched, another way is to use naturalistic observation in order to observe the actions of the child and see how they play with the dolls. If assessment and testing is done improperly it can have horrid ramifications which can permanently alter the lives of all parties involved. The emotions of the parent and the emotions of the child are highly entwined with the results and decisions which are influenced by testing. If, perhaps, suggestive questioning, or perhaps misinterpretation came into play concerning the results or creation of the results, then the affects will permanently alter a person’s life, and not necessarily positively. There are many journals devoted to understanding these subjects and the welfare of the child. Many of the journals focus on various aspects of knowledge and it may take several different sources to create a comprehensive model which will help with all aspects necessary to be an accurate witness in court.
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