Peter Ellis, pictured in 1992 Photo: Supplied
An American psychologist who gave evidence at the Supreme Court hearing into the Christchurch Civic Creche case has told a new RNZ podcast that a child's evidence can be just as reliable as an adult's, especially when reporting traumatic or stressful events.
Prof. Goodman, the Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Public Policy Research at the University of California, Davis, has been a pioneer in studying children's legal evidence since the 1970s and spoke exclusively to RNZ as part of Conviction: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case.
Listen to the podcast Conviction: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case
Prof. Goodman says the reliability of memory can change significantly from person to person and event to event, but age is not a critical determinant of reliable memory.
"You can have three-year-olds who are quite resistant to suggestive influence, and other three-year-olds who aren't."
The seriousness of the event being recalled is more significant.
Prof. Gail Goodman. Photo: Supplied
"We do find that if something has happened, that's traumatic or stressful to children, they often can be very accurate reporters of events. In real cases, where there are video recordings of the actual abuse, for instance, even two-year-olds have broken cases, so they can be accurate."
The question of just how reliable children's memories are was a critical point of contention in the trial, conviction and ultimate acquittal of Peter Ellis for abusing children at the creche between 1986 and 1992.
Ellis spent seven years in prison but a year ago this month the Supreme Court quashed his 16 convictions of abuse against seven children in his care. The case was a legal first as Ellis had died in 2019.
The case against Ellis at the high court in 1993 relied largely on the evidence of creche children, who were pre-schoolers when the offending took place and mostly primary school children when they gave evidence.
Experts have debated the children's evidence for decades, especially the more bizarre elements that included stories of cages, witches and the infamous 'circle incident' that involved children standing naked in a circle of adults who encouraged them to kick each other's genitals.
Emeritus psychology professor at the University of Auckland, the late Michael Corballis, who was interviewed for the podcast before his death in 2021, studied the Ellis files and said "children's testimony is unreliable. I mean, we feed kids fairy stories all the time and all sorts of magic. So it's pretty hard to get true statements about what happened out of them".
Dr Deirdre Brown, from Victoria University of Wellington, stressed the memories are fluid and are rebuilt each time we bring them to mind.
"And that happens for traumatic memories in exactly the same way that it happens for positive or neutral kinds of memories."
However, Goodman says that while research has shown a subset of children go off into wild fantasies, "children in our studies usually have been very accurate about traumatic events".
Her reading of the research is that traumatic memories are more reliable than others. She points to people on flights where they think the plane is going to crash, but then are able to land safely. She says memories of such events tend to be stronger and more reliable.
Research into why these memories are more reliable is still evolving, she adds.
"That is a topic of debate. But you know, some people feel that our amygdalas, our brains really, are adapted to have heightened memory for more traumatic negative events, so that you can avoid them in the future, for instance."
Her view is backed by Australian sexual abuse and trauma expert Dr Michael Salter of the University of New South Wales.
Research into communities of child sex offenders online have shown the extent and type of offending that goes on is not as unbelievable as many thought in the 1980s.
As for the children's more unlikely allegations, Dr Salter says it is "dangerous" to assume bizarre means the same thing as imagined. He quotes research of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children.
"In 1997, they published a study in which they took a series of substantiated child sexual abuse investigations. And they categorised them according to levels of bizarreness. And the outcome of the study was that children who made so-called bizarre disclosures or unbelievable disclosures, these were children that had been subjected to more severe child sexual abuse.
"And corroboration was more likely to be evidenced in cases with so-called bizarre disclosures than in other cases."
Drs Goodman, Salter, Brown and Corballis all feature in Episode 5 of Conviction. Follow and listen to Conviction: The Christchurch Civic Creche case on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you get your podcasts.
