What Accommodations Do Courts Provide for Abused Children with Communication Disabilities? A Legal Scoping Review

Abstract

Children with disabilities are at higher risk for becoming victims of violence and sexual abuse than peers without disabilities. Despite this, very few of these cases are heard in court due to a plethora of reasons. In the rare event that they do, the court appears to be unaware and unable to efficiently provide accommodations that would allow these children to testify and obtain justice. The aim of this legal scoping review was to identify the range of documented court accommodations to enable abused children with communication disabilities to testify in court. The legal scoping review methodology developed by White et al. (2021) was used to search the extant evidence related to court accommodations for children with communication disabilities across electronic social sciences databases (i.e., PubMed, CINAHL, The Cochrane Library and PscyInfo) and law databases (i.e., Hein Online, Lexis Nexis, Sabinet and Saflii). Results describe the available accommodations used across different countries and jurisdictions.