Psychological aspects of child development of importance for judicial proceedings

Children have the right to access the justice, to participate in the court proceedings, their views and testimonies to be heard and taken into account, and to be treated with utmost care during the court proceedings. However, over the past twenty years, researchers have pointed out that participation in the court proceedings may be traumatic for a child and a source of secondary victimization. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a specific approach to and different way of questioning children, which is adjusted to child’s developmental needs. Children and adolescents differ from adults in the way they function (cognitively, intellectually, emotionally). It is therefore crucial for professionals who deal with children (victims or witnesses) to be aware of and understand the specificities of each developmental stage. Otherwise, they will not be able to approach the child in the right way and ensure his/her understanding of newly born life circumstances, remove child’s worries and fears, and enable a child to answer questions, normalize his/her feelings, etc; consequently they will not get a quality testimony, significant for the court proceedings, which is also relevant for the child’s recovery process. The organ of the procedure should avoid acts that could harm the child’s psychological life and resort to techniques which are not harmful for the child’s development. One suggestive interview can create fake memories. Knowing the psychological life of a child in the context of his participation in the court proceedings is relevant for improving the quality of the child’s expression. This can help in making a child as spontaneous as possible, as well as more complete, coherent and safer. Child’s statements can be reliable and unreliable, just like the statements of adults. Thus, the quality, validity and accuracy of the taken statement depends largely on the knowledge and skills of the examiners. It is therefore of utmost importance that professionals who are interviewing/ questioning children are well trained and aware of the child’s development in general and of psychological aspects of child development in particular since they are important from the legal point of view: general understanding, memory, suggestiveness, language, social and emotional development, and morality (truths). Taking that as a starting point, this paper aims to present psychological aspects of child development relevant for the court proceedings, and to point out to the challenges in dealing with child victims and witnesses faced by professionals from the justice system and the social protection system, and the ways of overcoming them in order to protect the best interests of the child in the court proceedings