Abstract
Child sexual abuse can be difficult to prosecute. Often the only available evidence in these cases is uncorroborated testimony from complainants who, for myriad reasons, frequently delay disclosure until adulthood. Fact-finders must adjudicate these historical cases based on memories for events occurring many years—and sometimes even decades—earlier. The deleterious effects of time on memory completeness have been well-documented, but some historical cases seem to fly in the face of this empirical evidence. Complainants making historical allegations often give a surprising level of detail about abusive experiences that happened when they were very young—rich accounts of verbatim conversations, temporal information, body positioning, and so on. To explore this paradox further, across three studies we compared adults’ and children’s recall of a negative childhood experience, examined the presence of speculation in adults’ repeated recall, and investigated how mock jurors view detail and speculation in allegations of historical versus contemporary abuse.
In Study 1, we asked 7- to 12-year-old children and adults to nominate and recall a physical injury from childhood. Using free and cued recall, we found that adults provided more details and answered more specific questions about their injury relative to children, despite the longer delays since their nominated event. But interestingly, adults’ accounts were much more likely than those of children to involve speculation.
In Study 2, we explored whether speculation might contribute to adults’ recall of specific details about a childhood injury. Adapting the procedure from Study 1, we asked a new group of adults to recall a childhood injury in two interviews, one week apart. We examined their use of speculative language, and whether this kind of language “dropped out” in the subsequent interview. As in Study 1, adults answered more self-oriented questions than temporal or contextual questions. Those who speculated in Interview 1 and gave a consistent response in Interview 2 also frequently lost their speculative language. It is possible, then, that highly detailed accounts of childhood experiences are simply a consequence of internal post-event influences on memory over time.
How, then, might jurors see these kinds of accounts when faced with them in the courtroom? In Study 3, we explored how laypeople evaluated allegations of abuse as a function of the age of the memories and the level of detail and speculation within them. Participants in this study viewed detailed, unspeculative allegations as significantly more reliable, credible, plausible, accurate, and believable than vague, speculative allegations— regardless of memory age. These findings suggest that the presence of specific details in testimony could increase laypeople’s decisions to convict—even when these details are out of step with how memory works and may well have been the result of post-event contamination.
Our findings have important implications for the investigation and evaluation of historical abuse allegations. They show how normal reconstructive processes—as well as beliefs and expectations about memory held by complainants, investigators, and jurors— could underpin at least some astonishing cases of remembering seen in accounts of events from long ago.