Cross-examining suggestibility: memory, childhood, expertise - children’s testimony between psychological research and juridical practice

Although research into children’s eyewitness testimony has become more and more refined findings do not translate smoothly into practice. While competing scientific approaches produce complex results, practice is haunted by polarised debates that divert attention away from child witnesses or even undermine their position. In this paper I argue that an overall lack of concern for the reciprocal relationships between juridical, psychological and public discourses is responsible for this dynamic, which is furthermore fuelled by the fact that the concept of suggestibility has always remained an ill-defined entity. To address this problem I will introduce a multidisciplinary research perspective that is aimed to add transparency to the field by analysing the counterproductive dynamics between theory and application on an international level. Child witness research and practice in Britain and Germany are examined as comparative 'case examples' via in-depth interviews with academic, psychological and juridical professionals who work in the field

Matters of Suggestibility, Memory and Time: Child Witnesses in Court and what really happened

Abstract: As a result of an increasing awareness of child sexual abuse over the last few decades, children have been admitted as court witnesses more frequently, yet there has been persistent wariness about the reliability of their testimony. Examining the interaction of legal rationales and paradigms of developmental psychology, it would appear that children are still frequently positioned as deficient and passive witnesses. Three tropes can be distinguished: 1. Children are positioned as unreliable containers of facts. 2. Children have proved to be irritable dispensers of information. 3. Children are volatile interactants. In this paper I will examine how the English legal system employs various special measures that are designed to comfort children's assumed needs in order to enable them to give the most detailed evidence possible while guaranteeing the admissibility of the way in which the evidence is gathered and presented in court. Taking a closer look at the concrete practice I will argue that special measures such as video recorded evidence or closed circuit television links relate to, mediate and create different time zones of veridicality. Hence as such these well intended mediators of children's voice develop their own ambiguous dynamic when they operate and perform at the different stages of the legal procedure and thereby resonate with varying assumptions about how material presences and absences, temporal immediacy or mediatedness bolster or discredit the credibility of a piece of evidence. My analysis will unfold around the specific case of video recorded evidence. Using courtroom observations and data from interviews with legal professionals, I will follow the trajectory of the video from its planning and recording by the police to its presentation in court. Inspired by the work of ISABELLE STENGERS and BRUNO LATOUR, and drawing on discourse analytical tools, I will show that the collision of the different time zones of veridicality creates circumstances under which the video itself can become an ambiguous agent and ultimately a fanciful witness

Editorial: Research as practice: on critical methodologies

Isabelle Stengers, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps knowingly, echoes a theme of the work of American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1995, p. 136) when she invites in the first edition of the journal Subjectivity, her readers to join her in slowing down, in hesitating, pausing, taking a breath in the face of our own endeavours to ‘produce subjectivity’ (Stengers, 2008, p. 49). Cavell’s gesture of hesitation is similarly evocative and provocative. Where Stengers pushes for an approach which betrays or reveals rather than denounces, Cavell suggests that in the face of apparently constitutive philosophical oppositions, in stead of seeking to decide we should seek to dismantle. Betrayal rather than denunciation; revelation rather than condemnation; dismantling rather than deciding. Alluring and seductive ideas but the question is begged: where is the critical edge? This volume grapples with this question. It hesitates in the face of the complex relations between theory, research methods and practice, and the persons and places, or milieus, they are embedded in. It represents an attempt to revive the question as to what it means to do psychology critically, or for that matter, to practice critical theory

Cross-examining suggestibility: memory, childhood, expertise

Initially a central topic for psychology, suggestibility has been forgotten, rediscovered, evaded definition, sabotaged experimentation and persistently triggers epistemological short-circuits when interconnecting psychological questions of memory, childhood and scientificity, with concrete legal issues of child witnesses' credibility, the disclosure of sexual abuse and psychological expertise in courts of law. The aim of this study is to trace suggestibility through history, theory, research and practice, and to explore its efficacy at the intersection of psychology and law, by examining and comparing the. concrete case of child witness practice in England and Germany. Taking a transdisciplinary approach the study draws on two interrelated sources of 'data' combining historical, theoretical and research literature with the analysis of empirical data. A genealogy if theory and research is combined with the results of reflexive interviews, conducted in England and Germany with practitioners from all those professions involved in creating, applying or dealing with knowledge about child witnesses and suggestibility: judges, prosecutors, lawyers, police officers, psychologists (researchers, experts) and social workers. Drawing on the work of G. Deleuze and 1. Stengers this study shows how practical tensions around reliable witnesses, evidence and expertise merge pragmatically with theoretical movements employed to adjust the discipline, thereby causing frictions and voids. In this sense suggestibility provides a liminal resource: It transgresses disciplinary boundaries and pervades pragmatic and theoretical, global and personal, historical and actual considerations, creating voids that allow us to reconsider the pragmatics of change and to redefine the issue of critical impact, as well as to reformulate the problem of child witness practice and children's suggestibility. The study hopes to make a concrete contribution to facilitating the just prosecution of sexual abuse by adding transparency to the complex and at times unhelpfully polarised field of child witness practice. By exploring the 'pragmatics of change' the study furthermore hopes to give an unsettling and productive impetus to theoretical debates within critical approaches to psychology

Feminisms and activisms: reflections on the politics of writing and the editorial process

This article addresses the questions and dilemmas that each of us has brought to the project. It traces their modulation, refinement and manifestation as they became part of a shared creative dynamic and thus subject to our personal experience and reflection thereon. The initial idea was to produce one text with multiple voices, yet considering our theoretical diversity, the geographical distance between us and the short time at hand we realized this, for the moment, was a too ambitious project. Hence as a tribute to the diversity of our perspectives and reflecting the actual dilemma of seeking to "speak in one powerful voice" while allowing heterogeneity, this article presents itself as a tentative pastiche of our four distinct yet overlapping and intersecting contributions

Kritische Psychologie: psychology from the standpoint of the subject

German (or German/Scandinavian) Kritische Psychologie emerged in the context of intellectual and political struggles at the Free University in former West Berlin during the 1960s and 1970s (see Osterkamp and Schraube 2013 for an overview; Maiers 1999; Mørck and Huniche 2006; Tolman 1994). While based on a number of topical contributions (including Dreier 1980; Haug 1987; Holzkamp 1973; Osterkamp 1976; Tolman and Maiers 1991; Schurig 1975), Klaus Holzkamp’s (1927–1995) work played a pivotal role for Kritische Psychologie. Its philosophical foundation is informed by historical dialectical materialism, and, specifically, builds on ideas developed in Marx’s social theory and theses on Feuerbach concerning human subjectivity and practice (coining practice research), as well as the cultural-historical activity theory of Vygotsky, and above all, Leontiev (a legacy which has been taken up in various other alternative psychologies as well, cf. Engeström 1987; Hedegaard and Chaiklin 2005; Wertch 1991). Whilst the term ‘Kritische Psychologie’ is used widely in this context, it is problematic. First, it is too generic, creating the impression this was a homogeneous approach (it was a heterogeneous and collective endeavour from the start), or indeed the only critical psychology in Germany; second, it implies that the approach as such is limited to German language context, which is not true; and third, and most importantly, the prefix ‘Kritische’ might suggest an anti-psychological vision which, is precisely not what Klaus Holzkamp et al. had in mind. This Kritische Psychologie is an attempt to rescue psychology from itself by redefining psychology as a historically developed theory about subjects as societal beings (based on the concept of the societal nature of human existence), and to reconstitute it as a psychology for and about these subjects. In this way it sought to overcome the problems caused by traditional psychology’s mapping of the abstract and external scientific ‘third-person’ perspective onto its object of study by establishing a ‘Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject’ (PSS). This is why in this chapter we will refer to PSS instead of ‘Kritische Psychologie’ (Tolman 1989) or ‘German Critical Psychology’ (Markard and Reimer 2013)

Reintegrating sense into subjectification

Subjectification displays the specific processes forming individual existence in the multiple interrelations between persons and their surroundings. In this sense subjectification corresponds to the idea of an individual as the intersection of the production of meaning and the efficacy of power. In this paper we want to assert that subjectification is more than the mere positioning of the individual between tangents of meaning and practice; it also entails the necessity of creating sense through the subjective reorganization of the conduct of self and of others. The driving force of this movement emerges from the political and social affinities realized by the participating subjects. In our paper we also wish to argue for the historical specificity of such a conception. That is, the notion of an individual both dialogical and self-reflective, although represented by alternative psychologies as the key presupposition for a critical stance in psychology, seems to reflect primarily the dominant postindustrial realities of North-Atlantic countries. Finally we offer an insight into some of the central aspects of current socioeconomic reasoning in psychological theories

Introduction to the Special Issue on Liminal Hotspots

This article introduces a special issue of Theory and Psychology on liminal hotspots. A liminal hotspot is an occasion during which people feel they are caught suspended in the circumstances of a transition that has become permanent. The liminal experiences of ambiguity and uncertainty that are typically at play in transitional circumstances acquire an enduring quality that can be described as a “hotspot”. Liminal hotspots are characterized by dynamics of paradox, paralysis, and polarization, but they also intensify the potential for pattern shift. The origins of the concept are described followed by an overview of the contributions to this special issue

Exploring the transdisciplinary trajectory of suggestibility

Traditionally considered a deficiency in will power and rationality, suggestibility has proven a troublesome concept for psychology. It was forgotten, rediscovered, denounced, undermined experimentation and recently became the ambiguous issue at the centre of concern about child witness' credibility in sexual abuse cases. This paper traces the history of suggestibility to show how it raises the 'paradox of the psychosocial'. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Stengers, and on interviews with legal practitioners, this paper demonstrates how suggestibility carries this paradox into theory, research and legal practice. It thereby opens up a transdisciplinary perspective, allowing for questions of power and knowledge to be asked as performative questions. In the spirit of a process-centred ontology for psychology, I argue that suggestibility constitutes a 'rhythm of problematization', a folding, giving a subversive insight into dynamics of subjectification and application, and offering new perspectives towards issues of children's credibility and protection

Speaking up against justice: credibility, suggestibility and children's memory on trial

In this chapter I suggest that the scientific and public debate on memories of sexual abuse could benefit from a detailed examination of how legal systems negotiate the tensions and ambiguities surrounding children's memory of sexual abuse, including legal attempts to make children's voices heard. This means examining memory in terms of the concrete practices through which its expression is negotiated, and to explore the dynamic and shifting conditions under which credibility is assessed and established. I will illustrate this approach by exploring child witness practices in England/Wales on the background of the history of sexual abuse and child witnessing. The chapter draws on interview data from a larger research project that has compared child witness practice in England/Wales and Germany against the backdrop of a genealogy of suggestibility research (Motzkau, 2006). I begin by positioning the issue of child witnessing and sexual abuse in a contemporary context