General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Should a 3-year-old child's testimony to his teacher (on child abuse) be admitted in court? [View all]Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)a teacher's job is different than a psychologist's, especially one trained to work with kids for the justice system. The teacher could, completely innocently, say something that 'led' the child to change how he/she discussed getting bruised. It's like when you have 'double blind' experiments - in those cases, during the experiment, even the researchers don't know which test subjects are the 'control' and which are the experimental group, because if they did, they might subconsciously do things to alter the outcomes. A teacher, like a health care worker, is a mandatory reporter of child abuse, and might be 'looking' for such abuse, and thus be more likely to find it, whether or not it's there. That's why you want a specially trained third party without a stake in the outcome to try and find out the truth.