Eyewitnesses In Children

Eyewitnesses tend to have a tremendous impact when it comes to identifying and convicting a perpetrator. However, what happens when the only eyewitness is a child? Children are thought to be particularly unreliable, especially in the criminal justice system, and regardless of this, jurors still tend to place a lot of confidence in them (Lowenstein, Blank, & Sauer, 2010). Children's abilities to be reliable eyewitnesses has been a subject of interest over the past few years, and whether or not they are competent when it comes to their accuracy in what could potentially end in a false accusation. Sometimes an eyewitness can be the main form of evidence, so, it is important that if a child is identifying a suspect, that they can correctly identify
According to Brigham, Van Verst, and Bothwell (1986), age has a significant effect of about 20-25% difference in accuracy with a four year age difference when it comes to performance with a photo line-up. This, differs until children reach their mid-to-late teen years, suggesting that young children are less reliable eyewitnesses. This could be because younger children's brains have developed less, and as a result, they have difficulty with facial recognition and recall (Brigham, Van Verst, & Bothwell, 1986; Rush, Quas, Yim, Nikolaev, Clark, & Larson, 2014). This difference shows that accuracy improves with age, and that memory performance is strongly related to age. In a study by Rush et al. (2014), adolescent children had 55.3% of correct rejections in a line-up compared to children, who only had about 34.2% accuracy. This study also showed that if children have seen a face previously that they must identify, there is a substantial increase in correct identifications, regardless of age. These results strengthen the argument that age and development differences (like puberty) are a strong predictor of whether or not a child eyewitness identification may be
The last factor explored that may affect children's eyewitness identification accuracy is stress and anxiety. Lowenstein, Blank, and Sauer (2010), found that a presence of a uniform or authority figure is highly correlated with anxiety in children. With this, when children are faced with this anxiety, they take considerable more time in identifying the perpetrator. Another study showed that this state of anxiety and stress is reduced when someone the child has a close personal relationship with is with them or asking the questions (Ricci, Beal, & Dekle, 1996). This did showed that when children are more relaxed in a eyewitness identification situation, that their accuracy does not increase. If anything, it actually decreased. Considering this, Rush et al. (2014), found that high-stress environments can actually improve a child's performance when they are relaxed and are identifying a perpetrator. This research showed that high-stress environments, mixed with a supportive context, lead to an increase in accuracy by about 60%. It shows that stress can enhance the encoding process and in-turn, allows children to focus more on the interviewer's questions and give a more accurate response (Rush et al., 2014). Overall, when children are in a high-stress situation when making an eyewitness identification, they are less likely to make a false identification, unless they are