McMARTIN TRIAL: The Search for Credibility : Do Children Lie? Not About This : Jurors’ skepticism about victims’ testimony is rebutted by research. In sexual-abuse cases, even tots tend to tell the truth.

It comes down to this: The McMartin jury did not believe the children. The children were asked too many “leading questions,” some of the jurors said, and it was impossible to distinguish their fanciful stories from possible truths.

The McMartin case, like all sensational cases of sexual abuse, polarizes the public. Concerned citizens find themselves caught between two competing and increasingly disputatious camps.

One side argues that the sexual abuse of children is far more widespread than most people realize, and the perpetrators rarely come to trial. The other side argues that we are in an era of sexual McCarthyism, with false accusations and hysteria on the rise.

One side believes that when children are finally permitted to talk about the experience of abuse, they do not lie about the key events. The other side counters that children cannot distinguish real life from fantasy.

One side says that accounts of bizarre sexual or satanic rituals may seem wildly improbable, but that doesn’t mean they are false; some molesters even have learned that the more outrageous their behavior, the less likely they are to be convicted. The other side counters that the more bizarre a child’s story is, the more certain we can be that the child has invented it.

One side says that children are incapable of memorizing and repeating complicated sexual scenarios at the instigation of an adult. The other says that children accuse innocent adults all the time, sometimes to protect the real perpetrator, sometimes to placate one parent in a bitter custody case, sometimes to please an interrogator.

Our best hope in sorting out these conflicting views is to try to set aside our prejudices and assess the research evidence for each side. I recently reviewed much of this evidence, which I find remarkably persuasive. I do not know all the details in the McMartin case, and I do not wish to judge the defendants or second-guess the jury. But I am familiar with the issue of children’s credibility. Take the jurors’ reference to “leading questions.” Psychologists have found in controlled studies that without leading questions, very young children do not volunteer information that they feel is embarrassing or shameful. They also do not agree with leading questions that are wrong.

In a program of studies going back 10 years, psychologist Gail Goodman and her associates at the State University of New York, Buffalo, have questioned children as young as 3 after a variety of experiences. These included playing games with a stranger and undergoing stressful medical procedures ranging from tests for scoliosis to genital examinations. The children were questioned in leading ways about whether they had been hit, kissed, had their clothes removed, had their private parts touched, or had anything placed in their mouths--none of which had actually occurred (except among the children who’d had genital examinations): “How many times did he spank you?” “He took your clothes off, didn’t he?” Goodman found that children are surprisingly resistant to these questions. Some of the youngest, those between 3 and 3 1/2, were more likely to nod “yes” incorrectly when asked if anyone had touched their private parts. But when Goodman asked them what their private parts were, they didn’t know. The children’s problem was language, not lying. Goodman also found that when children are asked simply to tell “what happened,” there is a low risk of getting a false report of genital touching--and a high risk that children who have been touched will not reveal it.

Some psychologists discount Goodman’s research on the ground that laboratory studies of children, no matter how carefully designed, cannot reproduce the pressures and emotions of a real case. Yet they will cite other laboratory studies that serve their purpose. Confronted with this conflict, jurors often conclude that all studies are equal or can be manipulated to prove anything.

This reaction, while understandable, is unfortunate; a better one is to appraise each study in terms of its context and relevance. There are studies showing that in some circumstances, children, like adults, are suggestible. Current pressures or information can modify their memories of an event. The key is to ask what people are suggestible about and what kind of memories these experiments investigate. Children, like adults, may easily be persuaded to agree that a car was green rather than blue, or that it “crashed into” rather than “hit” another car. They are far less suggestible about important emotional experiences, like sexual abuse, that happened to them directly.

I think it is time we stopped asking simplistic yes/no questions. “Do children lie?” Of course they do, sometimes. A 3-year-old caught with crumbs all over his face will stoutly assure you he didn’t eat the cookies. But in cases of sexual abuse, children have far less reason to lie than does the molester. Unfortunately, what they have to say is often so shocking that many adults will prefer to dismiss it as a flight of imagination. But as Goodman and others have shown, the “imaginations” of abused children are very different from those of children who have not been abused.

The question is not whether children lie, but how we can develop techniques that will help children be as accurate and truthful as possible--techniques sensitive to a child’s age, language limitations and the emotional stress of the situation itself. The challenge is to be sure that our legitimate concerns about falsely accusing an innocent adult do not cause us to falsely disbelieve an innocent child.