Putting Children’s Memory and Suggestibility in their Place

Children bring their own unique abilities, backgrounds, and circumstances into legal settings. Thus, discussions of children’s memory and suggestibility require a nuanced approach to the many factors that can affect their eyewitness reports. The authors contend that children’s memory accuracy and inaccuracy in forensic contexts are affected by individual differences, the nature of the event, and the context in which the memory is elicited. In this chapter, the proposed framework is applied to extant research on children’s memory and suggestibility, focusing on children with histories of maltreatment. In doing so, the chapter considers suggestibility in relation to commission errors and omission errors, the latter concerning suggestibility to say that an event (such as child sexual abuse) did not occur when the crime actually did take place. It concludes that, just as a legal system cannot stand when the innocent are jailed, justice fails when victims feel they cannot come forward.