Judging the credibility of historic child sexual abuse complainants: How judges describe their decisions.

Abstract

Criminal prosecutions of child sexual abuse alleged to have occurred in the distant past raise myriad challenges. One significant challenge involves assessing the credibility of complainants. In the present study, 51 bench trials involving 87 complainants were coded into categories related to complainants' memory for the offense, as well as credibility of the complainant, reliability of the evidence, and judicial inferences. A total of 4,827 judicial comments were identified and categorized. Judges were more likely to describe the allegations specifically than generally; however, they were sensitive to the predictably impoverished nature of memory after such a long delay. Consistent with psychological evidence, there were more judicial comments about inconsistencies in acquit cases than in convict cases and more comments about corroboration in convict than in acquit cases, although neither inconsistencies nor corroboration were strongly associated with verdict. Of some concern was the apparent and considerable judicial interest in complainants' behavior and emotions around the time of the alleged abuse and around the time of disclosure.

“How did you feel?”: Increasing child sexual abuse witnesses' production of evaluative information.

“…Evaluative reactions are an important component of well-formed narratives (Labov & Waletsky, 1967; Stein & Glenn, 1979), and well-formed narratives are likely to be more convincing (O’Barr, 1982; Pennington & Hastie, 1992). Although we are not aware of any research specifically examining the effects of child witnesses’ production of evaluative reactions on jurors, Connolly and colleagues (2009, 2010) found that judges frequently mentioned alleged victims’ conduct at the time of abuse in justifying their decisions (and conduct included emotional reactions).…”

“…Children who fail to describe strong negative reactions may be disbelieved, despite the fact that children often state that they were initially confused by the perpetrator’s actions or did not recognize that the actions were wrong (Berliner & Conte, 1990; Sas & Cunningham, 1995). Because children’s reactions to abuse are varied, some have even argued that questions about children’s reactions to alleged abuse should be presumptively inadmissible at trial (Connolly, Price, & Gordon, 2009). These are important questions for future research.…”

Beyond Gender: Proximity to Interpersonal Trauma in Examining Differences in Believing Child Abuse Disclosures

“…Research has consistently found that delayed or retrospective disclosure of child sexual abuse (CSA) is viewed as being less believable than immediate disclosure (e.g., Connolly, Price, & Gordon, 2009;Cromer & Freyd, 2007). However, it is not uncommon for CSA survivors to delay disclosure, if they ever tell anyone at all.…”

Factors Associated with Delays of Days to Decades to Criminal Prosecutions of Child Sexual Abuse

“…Until the latter part of the 20th century, if a CSA complaint was delayed, a different legal doctrine, the recent complaint doctrine, compelled a judicial warning that the complaint was probably false (Connolly, Price, & Gordon, ). The recent complaint doctrine stated that a victim of sexual assault (the doctrine only applied to sexual assaults) was expected to report the crime at the first available opportunity; failure to do so meant that the trier of fact was required to assume, in the absence of convincing contrary evidence, either that a sexual assault had not occurred or that sex was consensual (Lewis, ).…”