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father coming into her room. Images came to her of his hands reaching over the slats of
her crib, and she experienced body memories from infancy of being held facedown and
penetrated.
Accuracy of Childhood Memories
Just how reliable are memories? Can they be manufactured? How reliable, especially,
is the memory of a child? Do leading questions by parents, therapists, or investigators
—or the use of anatomically detailed dolls in the questioning of children who may have
been abused—create false accusations that lead to false convictions? These were the
sort of questions addressed by Gail S. Goodman, a psychologist at the State University
of New York, Buffalo, and her colleagues in studies designed to test not only the
accuracy of children's recall under stress and over time but also how children respond
to leading or strongly suggestive questions devised to bring about false accusations. "If
children are indeed as suggestible as some have claimed, then we should be able in
our studies to create false reports of abuse," Goodman writes in the chronicle of her
studies, published in 1990. Child-abuse charges, after all, have often been dismissed by
judges on this ground.
The scenes acted out in one of Goodman's studies were based on actual child-abuse
cases. Pairs of four- and seven-year-olds were taken into a dilapidated trailer where
they encountered a man who talked to them while using hand puppets. Then he put on
a mask. While one of the children observed, he played a game of Simon Says with the
other child, during which he and the child touched knees. He photographed the children
and played a game where one child tickled him while the other child watched. All of this
was video-taped through a one-way mirror so that researchers could have a precise
record.
Ten to 12 days later the children were asked the kinds of questions that might lead to a
charge of sexual abuse: "He took your clothes off, right?" The seven-year-olds
remembered more than the four-year-olds, but whatever both groups remembered they
remembered accurately and could not be led into sexualized answers. They became
embarrassed by the leading questions, looked surprised, covered their eyes, or—
according to Goodman—"asked in disbelief if we would repeat the question. "
Goodman and her colleagues used anatomically detailed dolls when questioning the
children to see if the dolls would encourage false reports. The study's conclusion on this
point: "Whether or not the children were interviewed with anatomically detailed dolls,
regular dolls, dolls in view, or no dolls did not influence their responses to the specific or
misleading abuse questions."
Because some people believe that a child under stress can't remember accurately and
may escalate what really happened in order to match the stress felt, Goodman also
studied children who had to go for shots at a medical clinic. "We know of no other
scientific studies in which the stress levels were as high as they were for our most
stressed children," she writes. The children had to sit in the clinic waiting room and
listen to other children scream as they got a needle, knowing they would get one, too.
"These children's reports were completely accurate," Goodman writes.
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" Not a single
error in free recall was made." The most stressed children remembered best and in the