Cameron McKenna N, Merriwether Ella P, Katzman Jacqueline, Stolzenberg Stacia N, Evans Angela D, McWilliams Kelly
CUNY, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY, USA.
CUNY, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA.
Child Maltreat. 2025 May;30(2):266-277. doi: 10.1177/10775595241271426. Epub 2024 Aug 7.
In cases of alleged child sexual abuse, information about the timing of events is often needed. However, published developmental laboratory research has demonstrated that children struggle to provide accurate and reliable testimony about time and there is currently a lack of field research examining how attorneys actually question child witnesses about time in court. The current study analyzed 130 trial transcripts from cases of alleged child sexual abuse containing a child witness between the ages of 5-17 years old to determine the frequency, style, and content of attorneys' questions and child responses about time. We found that attorneys primarily ask closed-ended temporal location questions (i.e., asking when an event took place using a temporal construct such as day, month, and year) to child witnesses. Additionally, children, of all ages, rarely said "I don't know" or expressed uncertainty in response to temporal questions. These findings are concerning as researchers find that children tend to struggle with temporally locating past events.
在涉嫌儿童性虐待的案件中，通常需要有关事件发生时间的信息。然而，已发表的发展实验室研究表明，儿童难以提供关于时间的准确可靠证词，目前缺乏实地研究来考察律师在法庭上实际如何询问儿童证人关于时间的问题。本研究分析了130份涉嫌儿童性虐待案件的庭审记录，这些案件包含一名5至17岁的儿童证人，以确定律师关于时间的提问频率、方式和内容以及儿童的回答。我们发现，律师主要向儿童证人提出封闭式的时间地点问题（即使用日、月、年等时间结构询问事件发生的时间）。此外，所有年龄段的儿童在回答时间问题时很少说“我不知道”或表达不确定性。这些发现令人担忧，因为研究人员发现儿童往往难以确定过去事件的时间。
