Childhood memories can go back a long way
Of all the aspects of the criminal justice system, those that deal with childhood memory are perhaps the most prone to pitfalls.
Don’t believe a child, and a predator could go free. Ask the wrong questions, and an innocent person could go to jail.
Dr. Carole Peterson says the important thing to remember is that early memories are usually quite accurate, but children are also very vulnerable to suggestion.
“What happened in the past is it was all immediately dismissed,” Peterson said in a recent interview.
A psychology professor at Memorial University, Peterson pointed to the Mount Cashel Orphanage scandal as a prime example where police and higher authorities initially refused to believe young boys who came forward in the 1970s with stories of sexual and physical assault by Christian Brothers.
Peterson’s specific area of study deals with how children remember trauma or injury near the time of the event and in subsequent years.
Her research has burst the long-held view that children cannot form memories before the age of three, or later.
“They were encoding memories just fine, and remembering them just fine, and telling me things that had happened in the past just fine, so I knew that, obviously, this is just garbage.”
Using parental verification to reanalyze published and unpublished studies of about 1,000 interview subjects, she came to a startling conclusion: children as young as two can form perfectly accurate memories, but they later recall them as having happened at an older age.
TELESCOPING
In collaboration with Qi Wang of Cornell University, Peterson found most people placed their earliest memories as happening at three-and-a-half to four years old, whether they happened earlier or not.
“What people were doing is systematically making telescoping errors,” she said. “That is, any memory that is before the age of four, they moved the date of it to an older age. It’s like you’re looking through a telescope.”
Peterson admitted it’s possible some people may be influenced by the long-held belief that memories can’t be formed any earlier.
But that wouldn’t explain the consistency over longitudinal studies.
“We found (memories) were amazingly accurate and detailed. Kids who were three and four years of age, 10 years later still remembered it in amazing detail.”
The telescoping phenomenon has important implications for criminal justice, she said.
First and foremost, she said, children should be heard.
“If, in fact we can show that individuals can … retain memories from early on, then one is much more likely to take it seriously and do a serious investigation.”
But she points to a recent court case in which a person was convicted based on childhood memory, but appealed because the dating of the incidents was shown to be incorrect.
“The judge said because the individual was so wrong on the date, that casts everything that they said into doubt, and therefore the jury should have been warned about the probable unreliability of the individual’s testimony.”
Dating memory is a completely different process from content of memory, Peterson said.
“You cannot use errors in dating as an excuse for ignoring the forensic content of what a child remembers.”
IMPLANTED MEMORY
On the other side of the coin, children are impressionable, and open-ended questions are crucial, Peterson said.
A string of incidents in the 1990s saw reputations ruined after investigators used flawed interviewing techniques that encouraged kids to give the answers police wanted.
One of the most notorious was the Martensville daycare scandal of 1992, where an entire family and several police officers in Saskatchewan were dragged before the courts based on childhood imaginings of satanic rituals and sexual abuse.
It took 10 years for one officer, John Popowich, to finally receive an apology and payout from the government, but by then his life had already been turned upside down.
“I’m an innocent man and now the public knows I am an innocent man,” he told the CBC at the time.
“Children are more vulnerable to bad interviewing. But that’s on the adults, that’s not on the child,” Peterson explained. “That means it is our responsibility to make sure that those interviews are done correctly. That they’re non-suggestive, that they’re non-coercive, that they’re non-leading, and that you give an opportunity to the child to provide information in open-ended kinds of questioning.”
Peterson’s research, published last month, can be found online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080⁄09658211.2021.1918174