Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Naomi Navarro-Poca, MD
Child Protection Specialist, WCPC, VSMMC
Child Protection Network Foundation, Inc.
OBJECTIVES OF THE LECTURE
1. Describe the different ways to ensure that
child witness at different stages of
development will be:
a) Given the opportunity to offer complete and
truthful testimony and
b) Protected from severe emotional distress
induced by the judicial process in order to
safeguard their mental, emotional and
physical well-being.
.
OBJECTIVES OF THE LECTURE
2. Discuss how children at different stages of
development understand concepts that are
routinely asked in court.
Retrieve memories even after long delays Well-developed memory function (short
& long term )
Need to develop:
memory strategies
to recall what is
stored.
Memory Strategies
REMEMBERING: Retrieving
information from memory
Types of Remembering:
1. Recognition
2. Reconstruction
3. Recall
Infancy (0-12 months)
Infants cannot talk
From birth to age 2 or
3 years, children store
information primarily
in non-verbal
memory.
Young children
express early trauma
through their
behavior.
Infancy (0-12 months)
Infants cannot talk
Sexual abuse rarely
documented except under
certain circumstances:
a confession by a
perpetrator
an eyewitness
presence of sperm or semen
presence of a sexually
transmitted disease
physical findings indicating
sexual abuse
New Cases Seen 2012
Breakdown of physical and sexual abuse cases by age
1147
Concrete
Still egocentric
Make mistakes about
causality, e.g.,
things that happen
together
Still with short
attention span
Example of concrete thinking
Saan binaril si
Jose Rizal?
Reply:
Sa likod!
Language of the Preschool Child
(3-5 years old)
Can speak in sentences and tell a story.
Have limited words to describe sexual acts
that may have been committed.
Focus differently from older children and
adults
Focus on the ordinary and routine
Does not know how to organize the story
may not start from the beginning
Factors that affect remembering:
Young children need more questions and
prompts from adults in order to recall
more information.
They need adults to provide a framework
or cues to provide the details:
Did you go to the comfort room?
Who was in the comfort room?
What was the man doing?
Why young children are inconsistent
Examples:
Will not volunteer the information that other
children were also present.
Sina Michael at
Raphael ay
mga?
Language of the Pre-school
Child (3-5 years)
They do not usually use
the correct terms for
various parts of the body
especially the genitalia.
Establish the childs
vocabulary for different
parts of the body and
should use the childs
terminology during the
questioning.
Language of the Preschool Child
(3-5 years)
There are many
words and grammar
rules that they do
not understand.
They do not
understand legal
terms e.g. witness
Concrete Understanding of child
Touch- Something to do with hands only.
If perpetrator used other parts of his body like
lips and penis, child will say she was not
touched. Does not include rubbing,
kissing, poking, etc.
House
Child may deny being in abusers house
because she was in his apartment.
Preschoolers have difficulty classifying
objects into high-order categories.
(pumatong)
in front and behind
in and on
(pinasok)
Preschoolers have problems
with pronouns.
They do not know who is referred to by
the pronoun.
Example:
Where did he bring you?
Instead:
Where did Mike bring you?
Preschoolers have difficulty
with negatives.
Sentences with negatives only produce
correct answers half of the time even if
the children know the facts.
Goodman et al 1996
Law Hum Beh 10: 317-332
The School-Aged Child (6-9 years)
Has learned to
classify and no longer
interpret words very
literally.
Example:
Understands that house can be an apartment
and that you can touch something with a part
of your body other than hand.
The School-Aged Child (6-9 years)
Example:
Child may still answer 5 times on one
occasion and 8 times on another. It
just means many times.
What the (6-9 years old)
school-aged child cannot do.
STATEMENT No No No Yes
PROSECUTION No No No No
LAWYER No No Yes Yes
OATH No No Yes Yes
Start to understand
hypothetical situations
Adolescence (10-15 years)