Authenticity Of A Child's Testimony Essay

Authenticity of a Child’s Testimony A child’s testimony is not very reliable, and is bound to be flawed. Due to their lack of age and experience in social intercourse, there are a lot of aspects of everyday scenarios that children just can’t grasp. For example, a child may not pick up on the subtle change in someone’s tone when they make a sarcastic remark; the child may take what that person said literally, and misinterpret the meaning behind what was said. Typically, children also have pretty active imaginations, which could lead to an anomaly in what they think they’ve experienced and what they’ve actually experienced. There are many things one should take into consideration when listening to a child. For one, they are like dogs in that a lot of the time they just want …show more content…
This desire for positive affection may cause the child’s story to stray from the facts or the actual events. The child will say what he thinks the adults want to hear, and in return be praised for his compliance. Another thing that should be taken into consideration is the fact that everyone, regardless of age, is capable of lying. If we can’t trust adults to tell the truth 100% of the time, how can we expect a child to do so? There’s also the fact that everyone has an opinion, and therefore a bias. A child could let his thoughts and opinions cloud his judgement; his testimony would no longer be objective, thus making it somewhat unreliable. Everything is open to interpretation, and everyone interprets things differently; how I see something is completely different than how my siblings see the same thing. A child’s interpretation of a course of events is likely to be different than the interpretation from an adult. It’s certain that there will be differences in the way other people recount the same events. I’m not saying that children can’t be trusted, or that they never tell the truth. In fact, a lot of children do tell the truth. However, their version of