EVIDENCE GIVEN by video-link can make the victim seem remote and depersonalised, and a lot of non-verbal information and cues are lost in the ether, according to a senior Scottish prosecutor.
David Ogg QC was addressing the conference on the voice of the child in the criminal justice system at the weekend.
Mr Ogg prosecuted a number of high-profile child abuse cases in Scotland and was the leading counsel for the director of social work in the Orkney enquiry into the handling of allegations of child sex abuse, which had led to children being removed from their homes.
Some weeks later, they were returned and prosecutions against their families thrown out.
A surprising number of child witnesses go through screen-protected evidence in court with no side effects at all, Mr Ogg said.
If evidence by CCTV reduces the effective impact of a child’s evidence it reduces the chances of a successful prosecution, which could be more damaging to the child than giving evidence, he claimed.
Mr Ogg said that prosecutors had discovered the value of psychologists in giving evidence, but stressed that their evidence must be used critically.
“My experience of the Orkney Child Abuse Enquiry taught me that sometimes there are theories diagnostic of sexual abuse which bear little forensic or critical scrutiny,” he said.
He pointed out that the Victorian pseudo-science of phrenology, which claimed to predict criminal behaviour from the shape a person’s skull, gained wide and respected currency.
He also warned against uncritical acceptance of “child abuse syndrome” without hard and fast, thorough and peer-reviewed research.
Referring to the use of “intermediaries” in court to assist child witnesses or those suffering from a learning or mental disability, Dr Ogg said the fact that this was even being discussed was the result of the failure of the legal profession to “skill-up” to the degree necessary to examine children with the sensitivity and productivity essential to them telling their stories.
Mr Ogg suggested that all the professions involved in questioning children should be trained and certified as competent.
“We have to show that we are the best people to do it: that we understand how children process grammar and ideas at different ages; how they form memories; how they use tenses; how to interpret their body language; how they articulate embarrassment, shame guilt; what techniques are never justifiable because they are positively harmful,” he said.
He also suggested that there might be some cases in which it was not justifiable to subject severely damaged children to the criminal justice system at all, even if this meant that the perpetrator of the abuse was not prosecuted as a result.
Dr Teresa Burke of the school of psychology in UCD said the reality of false memories can also include false memories of abuse.
She stressed the importance of psychologists avoiding the contamination of evidence through their methods of inquiry and the need to apply the rules of science and scientific method in offering an informed opinion.
Dr Burke stressed that the idea of “recovered memory” of child sexual abuse was the subject of debate.
She warned that such recovered memories of traumatic childhood events could be the product of the therapeutic process itself, or be caused by the reconstructive nature of memory combined with leading and suggestive therapeutic techniques.