Coaching the witness

Children don’t lie

Letter to the editor;

A little child sits on the witness chair and answers the prosecutor.
Yes, her uncle took off her panties and handled her genitals.
Yes, he did this more than once.

The uncle is found guilty and sentenced to two hundred years in prison.
He claims he was taking care of the little girl and was merely cleaning her up
after an “accident” in her pants.

But since a child would not lie, off to prison with him.

The little girl did not lie. She told what she believed.
But after being in the custody of experts for days on end and being
interrogated (“brain-washed”), she came to believe the clumsy clean-up
was actually a sexual assault – and that it was repeated.

Groups of prisoners of war have been “brain-washed” by the rigors of imprisonment -- combined with multiple repetitions of reasonable-sounding explanations of the beatific
intentions of their captors.

How much more will a lone child kept in strange surroundings yield to the words of
expert child-psychologists? “Gloria, we are almost finished here. You can go home
to your Momma and your Poppa just as soon as you clear up a few details for us.”
(Translation: “You’re staying right here until you tell us what we want to hear.”)

After enough repetitions, the child starts to “remember” things in a way that does not correspond with reality – and to “remember” things that did not happen at all.

You can check this out for yourself: When you are talking with your brother or sister about something that happened ten or twenty years ago, suddenly you realize that one of you remembers it happened on a bus in Denver and the other says it was on a passenger train crossing Kansas.

Given time and pressure, a good prosecution psychologist might have you both “remembering” that it was actually on a New York subway – even though neither one of you ever went to New York as a child.

There is more to the science of memory than we know at this time. Meanwhile, untold thousands of men and women grind out their lives in prison based on false memories; deliberately implanted memories; casually-acquired untrue memories.

Glenn Jacobs / Eagar, Arizona