Law: Out of the Mouths of Babes

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How accurate is the testimony of children? Their visual powers and memories are every bit as good, or bad, as adults', contends Shirley Robinson, executive director of the Child Sexual Abuse Treatment and Training Center of Illinois. "Preschoolers can't remember their addresses," she notes, "but they can remember the print of the wallpaper in the room where they were molested." Experts disagree about whether children are unusually suggestible. As for possible youthful flights of imagination, Child Advocate Schrier says, "Kids don't fantasize about a sexual abuse incident."

Perhaps young witnesses' greatest handicap is their limited vocabularies. In sexual abuse cases, lawyers employ a new kind of visual aid: dolls with sex organs. Using a pair of dolls, a witness can play-act what happened. Jurors in Red Wing, Minn., found this tactic thoroughly convincing in the prosecution a year ago of James Cermak, 27, for sexually abusing ten children. After four of them used dolls to show what Cermak had done to them, he was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Cross-examining a child has its own set of pitfalls. A defense attorney who badgers a young witness risks alienating the jury, so the lawyer must probe inconsistent statements gingerly. Alternatively, the attorney can play on the still common belief that a child's word should be given less weight than a grownup's. As one juror from Laurel, Md., said after the acquittal of a woman charged with sexually assaulting a young boy, "It's very difficult to put someone in prison for something so serious, based only on a child's story."

For all the efforts to ease the child's natural problems in the witness chair, the experience can still be traumatic (as it often is for adults). In abuse cases, for example, youngsters must relive acutely painful incidents, and they frequently feel that they are the ones on trial. Those considerations recently cost Philadelphia Prosecutor William Heiman his sexual abuse case against the father of a four-year-old girl. She was the sole witness, and Heiman could not bring in her mother to relate what the youngster had told her because that would be inadmissible hearsay. The girl was not forced to testify, he says, because a "psychiatrist made it very clear that the child could be badly damaged."

That possibility is always a worry. "I don't like to see a child have to get up and testify," says Brenda Watson, a founder of the West Linn, Ore., firm that makes the anatomically correct dolls. "But what happened to him or her was worse. The only way to protect the children is to go through the judicial system." —By Bennett H. Beach. Reported by Magda Krance/Chicago and Laura Meyers/Los Angeles