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Achieving justice in cases of child sex assault is challenging. The knowledge and misconceptions of laypeople about children’s memory and responses to sexual abuse, and the impact of expert evidence on those misconceptions is tested in this project using simulated criminal trials. Increase in knowledge of juror misconceptions in Australia will permit the development of educative evidence-based tutorials and policy recommendations on the best mode of delivery of expert opinion about child development and behaviour, congruent with Australian evidence law and procedure.

Currently, the adversarial system does not adequately deal with issues surrounding children’s responses to sexual abuse. This study examines:
- the knowledge and misconceptions of laypeople about children’s memory, reliability, suggestibility and children’s responses to sexual abuse; and
- the impact on laypeople of specialised expert knowledge in mock jury child sexual assault trials
- The efficacy of judicial directions about children’s reliability and responses to sexual abuse

It is important for the law to integrate the decades of empirical research about children, their memories, their suggestibility and their responses to CSA. Traditional legal safeguards, such as cross-examination, the introduction of contrary evidence, standard judicial directions and jury deliberation have not been effective in countering juror misconceptions in these cases. To avoid problems when the jury relies on its commonsense or collective experience, specialised knowledge in the form of expert testimony or specific judicial directions about the behaviours of sexually abused children is necessary “to restore a complainant’s credibility from a debit balance because of jury misapprehension, back to a zero or neutral balance” (New Zealand Law Commission, 1999: 67), especially where the behaviour of the child complainant appears to a jury to be counterintuitive and inconsistent with sexual abuse.

People involved in this project:

Jane Goodman-Delahunty, University of New South Wales, Psychology

Anne Cossins, University of New South Wales, Law Link

Kate O'Brien

Melissa