The challenge of assessing credibility when children with intellectual disabilities are alleged victims of abuse
Assessing credibility is of importance when deciding the legal outcome of a case. Such an assessment can be especially challenging when the witness is a child with intellectual disabilities. If these children have difficulties making their voices heard in legal proceedings the principal of equal leg...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Stockholm University Press
2009-09-01
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| Series: | Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.sjdr.se/articles/367 |
| Summary: | Assessing credibility is of importance when deciding the legal outcome of a case. Such an assessment can be especially challenging when the witness is a child with intellectual disabilities. If these children have difficulties making their voices heard in legal proceedings the principal of equal legal rights may be called in question. We openly interviewed 32 lawyers, prosecutors, and police officers about how they assess credibility of these children. The findings indicate that individual perceptions of credibility are filtered through a legal norm of how to understand reliable reports irrespective of the eyewitnesses' ability to reach that standard. Legal representatives are aware that such a procedure may exclude intellectual disabled children from being fairly assessed but they do not deviate from the rules they perceive as required by their legal role. If knowledge about intellectual competence and functional level of an individual child witness was perceived as necessary when putting an adapted legal norm into praxis, this may increase the chance that assessments of credibility are based on knowledge rather then on a simplified general legal classification. Such an assessment procedure may increase the chance that children with intellectual disabilities are not excluded from fair legal trials of their cases. |
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| ISSN: | 1501-7419 1745-3011 |