The Competency of Children to Testify: Psychological Research Informing Canadian Law Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The competency inquiry has traditionally been a critical initial challenge for child witnesses, most of who are called to testify about their own victimization or as witnesses of family violence. In most common law countries children can only testify if they can correctly answer questions about such abstract concepts as the “oath,” the “promise” and “truth.” These inquiries can be confusing to children, and may prevent children who are capable of giving important evidence from testifying. Recent psychological research establishes that the ability of children to answer questions about the meaning of such concepts as “truth” and “promise” is not related to whether they will actually tell the truth, but the act of “promising to tell the truth” increases the likelihood that children will tell the truth. Informed by this research, in 2006 Canada significantly reformed its laws governing the process for determining the competence of child witnesses. The last section of the paper briefly surveys laws that govern the competency of child witnesses in a number of other jurisdictions and offers proposals for reform.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.106 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".