An Approach To The Credibility Of Children's Testimony And Its Protection System

In many cases, the child is the only witnesses or victims, there is a realistic demand to make the child to be witnesses in judicial proceedings indeed. However, many problems are related to the children's testimony, the credibility of the testimony and its protection is the core one.In base of the child four-stages developmental psychology, this paper makes a definition of the child is that between the age of 2 to 12 years old. The legislation in the world on child witness has gone through three stages: confused with the oath stage,limited off the oath stage, and separated from the oath stage. Now the child generally has been given the witness qualifications on national laws. Our legislation on child witnesses qualification are vague, and lack of operational criteria in judicial practice. The study on children's cognitive ability, attention and memory research, language, emotional and social competence, the ability to lie and deceive and moral development issues in child developmental psychology provides a basic theoretical support for child witness qualification. The credibility of the children s testimony may be affected by cognitive factors, memory factors, the way of suggestive questions being asked and the procedures in court etc. Although these factors are highly uncertain, but it also has an age universality and the personality, the two ways of !available statement impact assessment method " and!the reliability index" can be used to estimate the credibility of the children s testimony.Based on the factors which may affect the credibility of the childern s testimony, can establish the protection system by ways as following: Firstly, clear standards for child witnesses and improve the proceedings of investigating child witness qualification, this way may improve the credibility of the children s testimony; Secondly, give the right of identifying the child witness to both litigants. Thirdly, establish the litigation Assistant system to help the child witnesses to participate in the judicial proceedings; Fourthly,establish a intergrated protection system including collection of the children s testimony,appearing in the court and follow-on protection measure to protect the credibility of children s testimony.