The Juxtaposition of the Child as a Witness and a Victim: An Analysis of Legal Policy Affecting Young Witnesses in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The role of a witness presents the complex responsibility to convince a court of the alleged criminally deviant actions committed against them.My research analyzes how this role is further complicated when a child is a sole witness, often in child sexual abuse cases.I explore how their agency and competency is addressed within the policies that facilitate their testimonies and how it manifests in practice.Pervasive discourses of developmental psychology theorized about a child's capability continuously captures the validation and implementation of protection-driven policies that reflect their differed capacity as witnesses compared to adults.Through a critical discourse and narrative analysis, this research challenges these dominant ideologies that invade interpretations of child's agency as victims and their ensuing capability as witnesses to testify.By drawing on newer sociologies of childhood and critical victimology, this thesis elucidates the confounds of protection-based policy and its hindrances on child witnesses' agency.Reforms, Reforms, Reforms: Do they Reconstitute or Reify the Norms?….…….………...128 Outcomes of a Victims' Testimony: Justice or Just Enough?…………………….……125Future Landscapes for the Courtroom: Balancing Participation and Protection ………...…… 131 CHAPTER FIVE Conclusion ……………………………………………………………….………………….…139References………………………………………………………………………………...……149 Appendices …………………………………………………………………………………… 163 Appendix A: Question Types & Formulations ………………………………….…….
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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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".