Credibility assessment of testimonies provided by victims with intellectual disabilities

One of the main obstacles in the way of access to justice for the victims with intellectual disability comes from the stereotypes referred to their ability to produce a statement at police legal procedures, with the consequence that some consider their statements less reliable than the rest of the victims, and others considerate their statements more reliable given their inability to create complex lies. This article reviews three of the most recent studies done by the UCM group of Psychology of Testimony, with the objective of analyzing the role of experience and intuition in the evaluation of credibility in people with intellectual disability (ID), and also it aims to prove whether the credibility analysis procedures such as Reality Monitoring (RM) and Statement Validity Assessment (SVA) would be valid procedures to discriminate between real and false statements within these collectives. From the results of these studies, it can be deducted that experience may not seem to be enough in order to discriminate between real and simulated victims, but analyzing the characteristics of the statements as the only indicator doesn’t seem to be enough either. As an alternative, the general procedure HELPT is proposed for the evaluation of credibility of people with ID.