As early as the mid-seventeenth century in colonial America, adults accused of child abandonment, of excessive physical abuse, and of depriving their children of basic necessities faced criminal trials. In 1899 Cook County, Illinois, established the first juvenile court system, not so much to protect abused and neglected children but mainly to keep the abandoned children and runaways off the stree…
For the prosecutor's office, child abuse can present many problems. The foremost is that the victim is a child. This becomes an even greater problem when the victim is very young (from birth to age six), since the question of competency arises. More and more studies have examined children's reliability in recalling and retelling past events. Researchers have found that different sett…
What should parents do when their children claim to have been abused? It may come as an offhand remark, as if the child is testing to see what a parent's reaction will be. Perhaps the child is engaged in sexual behavior, a common symptom of sexual abuse. For example, the child may go through the motions of sexual intercourse and then say that this is what a parent, stepparent, relative, or …
Some experts believe children do not lie about abuse. They point out that children cannot describe events unfamiliar to them. For example, the average six-year-old has no concept of how forced penetration feels or how semen tastes. Experts also note that children lie to get themselves out of trouble, not into trouble, and reporting sexual abuse is definitely trouble. Children sometimes recant, or …
Traditionally, judges protected juries from incompetent witnesses, which in early America were considered to include women, slaves, and children. Children in particular were believed to live in a fantasy world, and their inability to understand such terms as "oath," "testify," and "solemnly swear" denied them the right to appear in court. In 1895 the U.S. …
Many legal professionals use dolls with sexual organs made to represent the human anatomy to help children explain what has happened to them in court. Advocates of the use of dolls report that they make it easier to get a child to talk about things that can be very difficult to discuss. Even when children know the words, they may be too embarrassed to say them out loud to strangers. The dolls allo…
Use of closed-circuit television testimony or videotape testimony has been challenged on the grounds that the defendant's Sixth Amendment constitutional right permits him or her to confront an accuser face to face. The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment states, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right … to be confronted with the witnesses again…
Together with the Sixth Amendment Confrontation Clause, the hearsay rule is intended to prevent the conviction of defendants by reports of evidence offered by someone other than the witness. With a few exceptions, hearsay is inadmissible as testimony because the actual witness cannot be cross-examined and his or her demeanor cannot be assessed for credibility of testimony. Whether or not to accept…
Videotaping and closed-circuit television permit juries to see and hear child witnesses, but it does not mean that the juries will understand or believe them. Prosecutors often request permission to bring in an expert witness to clarify an abused child's behavior, particularly to explain why a child might have waited so long to make an accusation or why the child might withdraw an accusatio…
The willingness of people to believe children's accusations of sexual abuse has varied greatly since the mid-twentieth century. At one time, people were simply unwilling to believe that sexual abuse of children was happening or happening with any frequency. Once society accepted the fact that child sexual abuse was occurring, responses to accusations of child sexual abuse went from disbelie…
At a national conference on sex offender registries in 1998, Director Jan M. Chaiken of the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Justice Department reported that nearly two-thirds of the 95,000 sex offenders in state prisons that year committed their violent sex crimes against children under age eighteen. The victims of the majority of the violent sex offenders were children younger than twelv…
Although the First Amendment protects pornography, it does not protect child pornography. Under the definition established in Miller v. California (413 U.S. 15 [1973]), pornography may be banned if it is deemed legally obscene. To be considered obscene, material "taken as a whole" must: Since 1982 child pornography has been banned by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling New York v. Ferber (…
In about forty states an "incest exception" is found in criminal codes and sentencing guidelines. This means that a person who commits incest (sexual abuse of a family member) gets off with a lighter sentence, if any at all, compared to a person who sexually abuses another's child. In some states, a family member who commits incest with a child is charged with a misdemeanor. I…
In November 1997 the South Carolina Supreme Court, in Whitner v. South Carolina (492 S.E.2d 777 [S.C. 1997]), held that pregnant women who use drugs can be criminally prosecuted for child maltreatment. The court found that a viable (potentially capable of surviving outside the womb) fetus is a person covered by the state's child abuse and neglect laws. The ruling was handed down in a case a…
Some local laws that have been passed impose penalties for domestic violence when children are present. For example, Salt Lake County, Utah, and Houston County, Georgia, enacted statutes creating a new crime of child maltreatment when domestic violence is witnessed by a child. Multnomah County, Oregon, passed legislation upgrading some assault offenses to felonies (serious crimes) when a child is …
A statute of limitations is a law that sets the time within which criminal charges or civil claims can be filed and after which one loses the right to sue or make a claim. Most states provide for extensions of the statute of limitations, either through state law or judicial tolling doctrines. A tolling doctrine is a rule that suspends the date from which a statutory period starts to run. An exampl…
In the 1980s and early 1990s alleged incidents of mass molestation of preschool children in the United States triggered hysteria not only among the parents of the children involved in the cases but also among the public. Some of these cases continued to be appealed into the early 2000s. Some had not been resolved. Many demonstrate the typical issues and problems that the legal system faces in deal…
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