Vaikų parodymus lemiantys psichologiniai veiksniai

Abstract

Children’s ability to remember and to describe accurately the events they have seen, is an important theoretical and practical problem. Even though children can testify in various cases, the especial attention should be paid to the children’s physical and sexual abuse data which needs a thorough investigation. The widely held belief that young children may fabricate allegations in particular of a sexual nature is frequently used to cast doubt on their testimony. However, various studies have revealed that children can be as trustworthy as adults, but it is necessary to focus on the possible sources of errors in children’s testimonies. In this article, the most significant early and new directions in the field are reviewed.
This article investigates the most important psychological factors that have influence on accuracy of children’s testimonies. Two main groups of these factors were defined: internal and external.
Memory, language and communicative abilities, fantasy, stress, motivation to lie, suggestibility were considered as internal factors. One reason for children’s incompleteness is the fact that not all the information perceived is encoded or stored for later retrieval. It is clear, however, that as time passes, information is forgotten by children as it is forgotten by adults. In general, children’s recollections of a personal experience are less complete and descriptive than those of adults but their accounts are quite accurate. Considering this the questions should be phrased in grammar and vocabulary children can easily comprehend and matched to children’s level of cognitive development. It should be noted that existing evidence does not support either the position that children are universally suggestible and unreliable as witnesses, or the contention that children lack the ability to lie or deceive. Moreover, the fantasy lives of children and adults are actually much more similar than was previously believed and children over six years of age appear similar to adults in their ability to discriminate between imagined and experienced events.
There are several external factors that can affect the accuracy of children’s reports. The most importance of this is interviewer bias. Interviewer bias characterizes those interviewers who hold a priori beliefs about the occurrence of certain events and mold the interview to maximize disclosures from the interviewee that are consistent with the interviewer’s prior beliefs. It is revealed through a number of different component features, that are highly suggestive, e.g., use of specific questions and subtle emotional tones, repeating questions within interviews etc. The problems of use of anatomically detailed dolls and visualization techniques (asking children to pretend or imagine) was disputed in this paper too.