Competence, credibility, and reliability of children’s forensic reports: Introduction to special issue on child witness research

Abstract

There is no greater challenge to child protection and law enforcement professionals than the investigation of child abuse cases where both false positives and false negatives may have devastating consequences, with innocent defendants losing their liberty or guilty pedophiles remaining free to victimize other children. In view of the enormity of these undesirable consequences, practitioners need to be mindful of both the sensitivity and specificity of their assessment procedures. Although this is true in all cases, it is particularly true of those involving allegations of child sexual abuse, in which a child’s allegation of abusive activities is countered by a defendant’s denial that such activities took place. These cases often are complicated by the young age of the child complainant and delays of months or years between the alleged events and their investigation (London, Bruck, Wright, & Ceci, 2008). In some cases, defendants argue that abuse allegations emerged due to erroneous beliefs or even malicious intentions of their estranged spouse during the course of a custody battle. Some cases involve suggestive interviewing practices in which the reliability of the allegations may be of concern. Other cases involve excellent best-practice forensic interview methods, but nevertheless raise concerns about the alleged earlier influence of parents, peers, or therapists on children’s reports. Against this high stakes and thorny backdrop, the field of forensic developmental psychology has emerged over the past two decades to address theoretical and applied issues related to competence, reliability, and credibility of children’s testimony. This special issue represents a broad review of the developmental literature regarding factors that promote and hinder children’s testimony. Each contributor to the special issue has published seminal work that has advanced knowledge about evidence-based forensic interview procedures with children. Each article in this special issue provides a historical backdrop on forensic practices in their domain of study, critically reviews the most upto-date developmental research and theory, and offers recommendations for future research as well as for forensic policy and practice. We anticipate these papers will become widely cited for their strong evidence-based and theory-driven conclusions. The first four articles in this special issue deal with factors that negatively affect children’s forensic reports, either in a formal interview context or in a naturally-occurring context. In the first of these Poole and Bruck review the scientific literature on two commonly used forensic interview props: