The challenge of assessing credibility when children with intellectual disabilities are alleged victims of abuse

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• intellectual disabilities
• child witnesses
• credibility assessments
• interdisciplinary knowledge

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Crime Victim Foundation of Sweden. The authors are grateful to the lawyers, prosecutors, and police officers who so generously gave their views on how they experience intellectually disabled children as eyewitnesses.