Customer Reviews

Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children's Testimony

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2 star:		(1)
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An excellent guide to the state of current knowledge about memory, suggestibility, and unsuitable vs. suitable information-eliciting techniques, with regard to children's testimony. This book is distinguished from others on the same topic by the scientific reputations of the editors and chapter authors, as well as the cautious approach. Fits in very well with current Supreme Court strictures on the admissibility of expert/science based testimony---Daubert, Joiner, & Kumho decisions.

This is the most important non-legal book in my library. Anyone who needs to evaluate the credibility of a child's statement should read this book. Even-handed in its approach, it points out those factors most important to consider when assessing a child's accusations.

Incredible book. Must reading for any conscientious person who questions the merit of what many so-called professionals say about childrens' testimony in abuse...but especially alleged sexual abuse...cases. The book reviews a hundred years of research and presents a very balanced assessment of the strengths of childrens' testimony and the weaknesses, especially when children are submitted to the relentless prodding of adults with a preconceived notion of what they believe has happened to the children. The book calls for caution and balance when submitting children, especially the youngest children, to the forensic process. This book makes it clear that in reality much abuse is done to children by the very system and professionals we trust to protect them. The book is a clarion call to stop the unbridled "mining" in childrens' psyches to uncover abuses that have often not occurred but end up being manufactured by the investigators themselves because they refuse to believe childrens' repeated initial denials. This book suggests to me that often investigators and so-called professionals are really not operating on the childrens' behalf...to find the truth and protect the children...but are in fact operating on their own behalf to make their reputations and to titillate themselves and their own egos. The book suggests professionals need to be open to all the possibilities and not fix on one explanation for the allegations. Then, each possibility should be examined in light of the evidence that supports it and in light of the evidence that refutes it. As an afterthought, it amazes me that experts cannot figure out that if a child who was allegedly...as many of the allegations go...forced to eat feces; was peed upon; thrown in a pool of sharks; raped with knives and other dangerous instruments but came home every day to mom and dad with no mental/emotional distress; no fear; no stinky odor etc., in other words no symptoms of abuse, the conclusion should be the children were never perpetrated on. Any assertion to the contrary is a ridiculous premise of the experts- that children can have all sorts of horrendous, vile deeds perpetrated on them and yet be symptom free. To account for this notion, they have had to invent "repressed memory of childhood abuse"- that the horror of what allegedly "happened" to the children was banished from their memory as a self-protective device. This far out postulate is almost totally a construct of the experts own wild imaginations, with almost no scientific research or literature to support it, except what these experts manufacture themselves and then other experts quote back and forth as if it is fact. These experts are truly "legends in their own minds". These experts are monsters who have made innocent children and families their personal professional "playground". But, today being a professional means "never having to say you're wrong" and "never having to say you're sorry".

Child care center directors often shudder when the attempt to collect an overdue tuition bill angers the user of services. Money matters can turn into dangerous situations for a provider, if parents have shallow pockets, deep problems and reckless behaviors.This book should be read by lawyers, judges and people in the field of early childhood education.

I don't always give low ratings. However, this book is long overdue a 2nd edition, and as it stands, it should not be relied upon as a "state of the art" book on childrens' eyewitness testimony.

The progenitor of most of the scientific research on the subject, Elizabeth Loftus, has come under fire two years after the publication of this book, as the detractors (or uncritical believers) mounted a resurgent challenge to her work. A revision ought to include a critical reanalysis of these challenges, as well as another decade of subsequent psychological, experimental, and legal work in the area.

The book is therefore of historical interest, but cannot stand alone in any clinic library.