The Child Witness
The children of Salem and Mora, and the suggestibility of memory.
In the Texts
The witch trials made an exception to every rule of evidence for children: the Salem accusers were girls, the Mora trials in Sweden (1669) rested on three hundred children’s accounts of the sabbath at Blåkulla, and the Würzburg burnings took children on their own confessions. The manuals accept the testimony of minors in the crime of witchcraft alone, as an exceptional crime, and the examiners questioned them with the manual open.
What Medicine Makes of It
Ceci and Bruck (1993, 1995) reviewed the experiments: a young child questioned repeatedly by an authoritative adult with leading questions will report in detail events that did not happen, believe them, and hold to them; Loftus implanted false memories in adults by suggestion. The daycare ritual-abuse trials of the 1980s convicted on such interviews and were mostly overturned, and Garven (1998) reproduced the McMartin techniques and got false allegations from 58 per cent of children in minutes. The Salem interrogations are the same technique.
The Evidence
- The Salem accusers of 1692 were girls of nine to twenty; the Mora trials in Sweden (1669) rested on the testimony of some three hundred children, who said they had been carried to Blåkulla, and the Würzburg trials (1626–31) burned children on children’s evidence; the manuals of Canale’s time accepted the testimony of minors in witchcraft alone.
- Ceci and Bruck (1993, 1995) reviewed the experimental literature on suggestibility: preschool children, asked repeated leading questions by an authoritative adult, come to report in detail events that did not happen, believe them, and resist correction; older children and adults are less but not immune.
- Loftus and Pickrell (1995) implanted a false childhood memory of being lost in a shopping mall in a quarter of adult subjects by suggestion from a relative; the techniques of the interrogation, repetition, imagination, and social pressure, are those of the witch-examiner.
- The daycare abuse trials of the 1980s (McMartin, Kern County, Wenatchee) convicted on children’s accounts of ritual abuse produced by such interviews; most were overturned, and Lanning’s FBI report (1992) found no corroborated case of organised satanic ritual abuse.
- Garven et al. (1998) reproduced the McMartin interviewing techniques with children and produced false allegations in 58 per cent after a few minutes; the Salem girls were interviewed by magistrates who had read the manuals.
Where They Part
The manuals took the child’s detail as proof of the sabbath; the psychology takes it as proof of the interview. Both agree the children were not lying, which is the finding that matters.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Ceci, S. J., and Bruck, M. (1995). Jeopardy in the Courtroom: A Scientific Analysis of Children’s Testimony. American Psychological Association.
- Loftus, E. F., and Pickrell, J. E. (1995). “The formation of false memories.” Psychiatric Annals 25.
- Garven, S., et al. (1998). “More than suggestion: the effect of interviewing techniques from the McMartin Preschool case.” Journal of Applied Psychology 83.
- Lanning, K. V. (1992). Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of “Ritual” Child Abuse. FBI.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.