lo sviluppo morale come indicatore dell'affidabilità delle testimonianze dei bambini Background teorico, neurologico e risvolti pratici

Courts often require children to provide testimonies for various legal purposes. However, due to different developmental factors and neurological maturation that influences their reasoning, judgment, and memory, validating children's competency as court testifiers remains one of the biggest challenges. Understanding the current developmental profile of a child testifier could help interpret and validate their testimony. Although current forensic practice and present literature mainly consider children's cognitive and emotional skills to measure suggestibility, lying, and other factors of unreliability, little to no attention is being given to understanding the quality of their moral development as a factor of their testimonial reliability. Even though developmental psychology identifies the value of recognizing moral development's progress in children's conception of lying, intentional and unintentional deceptive stories, and behavior, little connection has been made to implement children's moral development in forensic purposes. The present exploratory literature review aims to test whether there is a value in drawing a parallel between the quality of children's moral development and testimonial fitness and validity for legal purposes and propose tools for its evaluation.