The 1988 and 1991 Criminal Justice Acts transformed the position of the child witness within the criminal justice system. Rules of evidence which had discriminated against children's testimony were progressively abolished, and new procedures were introduced to accommodate children's needs within the trial process. This thesis offers a socio-legal critique of the reforms, analysing the way in which their development and implementation have been ideologically structured. Part Two provides an historical overview of the way in which the legal system has regarded children's testimony. Contrasts are drawn between the relative failure of the 1925 Inter-Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences against Young People to secure changes in the treatment of child witnesses, and the comparative success, some sixty years later, of the Pigot Committee. The links between child witness reform and dominant conceptions of child sexual abuse are investigated. Part Three turns to the implementation of the reforms and reports the findings of a qualitative and ethnographic study conducted for this thesis at one Crown Court Centre. Sixteen contested piosecutions, between them involving evidence from 53 child witnesses, were identified. The final hearing of each case was observed in full, and the attitudes towards the reforms of the barristers and child witnesses concerned were sought by way of interviews and questionnaires. Part Four notes the mixed effects of the reforms, and the categorical distinctions observable at the study Crown Court in the treatment of child complainants and child by-stander witnesses. It is suggested that the reconceptualisation of child sexual abuse as a criminal justice, rather than a welfare, problem, played a significant role in achieving child witness reform, but that the moral rhetoric involved silenced alternative perspectives and has led to the marginalisation of some child witnesses. What these conclusions suggest about the law reform process more generally is briefly discussed.

Children are often involved in the legal system as victims of maltreatment, and their disclosure of adult wrongdoing is necessary to initiate effective legal responses and protect them from continued abuse. However, external pressures and children's perceptions of the consequences of truth-telling (e.g., punishment, removal from the home) may result in the delay of disclosure or failure to disclose altogether. Research examining techniques for promoting children's truth-telling has almost exclusively relied on explicit requests to tell the truth (e.g., a promise, reassurance, assessments of conceptual knowledge and moral discussions), and the success of these techniques has varied. The present study examined the benefit of priming honesty (i.e., indirectly or non-consciously activating the goal of honesty) on children's disclosure of an adult's transgression. One-hundred fifteen 6- to 9-year-olds (M age = 7.47 years) participated in a first aid/safety event during which an adult (mother or stranger) engaged the child in play with a box of forbidden puppets, broke a puppet that was designed to break, and requested that the child keep it a secret. Before responding to questions about the puppets, children were either (1) primed for the goal of honesty (prime condition), (2) asked to promise to tell the truth (oath condition), or (3) not provided with any further instructions or information (control condition). Then, children were asked open-ended, direct, and suggestive questions about whether they or the adult touched, played with, or broke any puppets. Regression analyses revealed that children’s truthful disclosures to direct questions increased when children witnessed a stranger transgressing rather than their mother. However, children’s truthful disclosures across the question types did not differ by age or when a prime relative to a promise to tell the truth was used. Results advance our understanding of how children disclose negative events and the effectiveness of different techniques (including a novel technique) in encouraging children’s true disclosures of a parent or stranger’s transgression.

Initially a central topic for psychology, suggestibility has been forgotten, rediscovered, evaded definition, sabotaged experimentation and persistently triggers epistemological short-circuits when interconnecting psychological questions of memory, childhood and scientificity, with concrete legal issues of child witnesses' credibility, the disclosure of sexual abuse and psychological expertise in courts of law. The aim of this study is to trace suggestibility through history, theory, research and practice, and to explore its efficacy at the intersection of psychology and law, by examining and comparing the. concrete case of child witness practice in England and Germany. Taking a transdisciplinary approach the study draws on two interrelated sources of 'data' combining historical, theoretical and research literature with the analysis of empirical data. A genealogy if theory and research is combined with the results of reflexive interviews, conducted in England and Germany with practitioners from all those professions involved in creating, applying or dealing with knowledge about child witnesses and suggestibility: judges, prosecutors, lawyers, police officers, psychologists (researchers, experts) and social workers. Drawing on the work of G. Deleuze and 1. Stengers this study shows how practical tensions around reliable witnesses, evidence and expertise merge pragmatically with theoretical movements employed to adjust the discipline, thereby causing frictions and voids. In this sense suggestibility provides a liminal resource: It transgresses disciplinary boundaries and pervades pragmatic and theoretical, global and personal, historical and actual considerations, creating voids that allow us to reconsider the pragmatics of change and to redefine the issue of critical impact, as well as to reformulate the problem of child witness practice and children's suggestibility. The study hopes to make a concrete contribution to facilitating the just prosecution of sexual abuse by adding transparency to the complex and at times unhelpfully polarised field of child witness practice. By exploring the 'pragmatics of change' the study furthermore hopes to give an unsettling and productive impetus to theoretical debates within critical approaches to psychology.