issue. Countries also vary as to what the most important issue is surrounding testimony. In the United States (Kovera and Borgida), the primary focus is on the reliability of children's testimony, while in South Africa (Louw and Olivier), the primary focus is on the mitigation of potentially negative eects of testifying on the child.
In Israel (Sternberg, Lamb and Hershkowitz), the primary concern is the trade-o between not allowing children to testify directly in courts of law because of the perceived harm that the child could incur versus the necessity of testifying to provide corrobative evidence that the child was indeed abused. Because Israel desires to protect its children from irreparable harm that could occur during the process of testimony, the courts assign a youth investigator to each child. The youth investigator has the power to determine the entire nature and sequence of the abuse case. Consequently, a very small percentage of reported abuse cases are actually tried in Israeli courts, leaving perpetrators free and able to abuse again.
In other countries, however, such as the United States and Britain, children are allowed to testify. As a consequence, however, these countries focus more on issues of accuracy, suggestibility, and lying in the service of protecting or accusing parents and others of crimes that they may or may not have committed. It is a well-known fact that in some testimony cases, children have engaged in overt lying to support the testimony or intuition of a parent who thinks the child may have been sexually abused by another person. At the same time, children have been shown to be extremely accurate in their description of abuse, given the right operating conditions and the use of speci®c interview procedures. Thus, the particular focus of concern for each country carries with it a unique set of problems that must be dealt with to ensure protection for children. If children do not testify, they may be at greater risk for being harmed again by the same perpetrator. If a child does testify, the issue becomes one of accuracy and veridicality of the child's report, focusing on issues of well-being for the child and for the adult being accused.
In a concluding chapter, Myers focuses on the necessity of adopting a child witness code that is international in nature, despite cultural dierences in child abuse and testimony. He discusses the dierences in common law versus civil law, the two primary legal systems operating across the dierent countries. He describes how the tenets of each type of legal system in¯uence the course of reforms in regard to children's testimony. He reviews many of the reforms that have been implemented worldwide and stresses the necessity of adopting a legal code of ethics that would ensure support for, and fair treatment of, children who give testimony in any court of law.
Overall this book is an excellent resource for anyone seeking to gain a better understanding of the legal and societal concerns surrounding children's testimony around the world. Contributors provide a careful review of the special procedures that have been implemented to accommodate child witnesses, while never losing sight of the psychological underpinnings that have inspired these innovations. Whether a reader is approaching abuse from a legal or a psychological perspective, the book should be an invaluable resource for achieving a better understanding of the wide array of practices and concerns applicable to the realm of children's testimony around the world.