Attorneys’ Questions About Time in Criminal Cases of Alleged Child Sexual Abuse

Abstract

In cases of alleged child sexual abuse, information about the timing of events is often needed. However, published developmental laboratory research has demonstrated that children struggle to provide accurate and reliable testimony about time and there is currently a lack of field research examining how attorneys actually question child witnesses about time in court. The current study analyzed 130 trial transcripts from cases of alleged child sexual abuse containing a child witness between the ages of 5–17 years old to determine the frequency, style, and content of attorneys’ questions and child responses about time. We found that attorneys primarily ask closed-ended temporal location questions (i.e., asking when an event took place using a temporal construct such as day, month, and year) to child witnesses. Additionally, children, of all ages, rarely said “I don’t know” or expressed uncertainty in response to temporal questions. These findings are concerning as researchers find that children tend to struggle with temporally locating past events.