Developmental Challenges Underlying the Impeachment of Child Witnesses With Prior Inconsistent Statements

One way attorneys challenge witnesses’ credibility is through impeachment by prior inconsistent statements. We examined the testimony of 6- to 12-year-old child witnesses in 120 sexual abuse prosecutions and identified 96 cases in which attorneys challenged children with prior testimony that was allegedly inconsistent with the child’s current statements. In 11% of the cases, the statements were not in fact inconsistent. In 94% of the remaining cases, we identified one or more of 12 developmental difficulties with the question-types or topics potentially leading to the inconsistencies. This included suggestive tag questions in 45% of the cases, which always co-occurred with other question-type or topic difficulties. The most common problems (appearing in more than 20% of cases) included questions about time and number, questions requiring the child to distinguish among individual incidents, sexual terminology, and questions using negative polarity items such as “any” and “ever.”