A witness who has been harmed once and a witness who has been harmed fifty times do not hold the same kind of memory, and only one of those memory types fits the story courts expect to hear. That mismatch is the subject of Helen Paterson’s work, and it is why the University of Sydney forensic psychologist was awarded a Eureka prize on Thursday night.
Paterson’s finding, in her own summary: “compared to a single-event witness, a repeated-event witness tends to report more gist-like details, the overall details of what typically would happen, and the things that remain constant between the episodes.” The recollections are not fabricated and they are not vague in the way a disbeliever means the word — they are organised around a pattern rather than a timestamp. “Sometimes they confuse one episode with another.”
That distinction collapses the moment it enters a courtroom. If a victim-survivor of domestic and family violence gives slightly different details across interviews, the standard defence move is to treat the discrepancy as proof that everything she says is invented. “It’s defence 101 to say … they’ve made this inconsistency, therefore their whole memory is unreliable,” Paterson told the Guardian. Her research points the other way: “we do know what they do report tends to be highly accurate in that it did happen to them. It’s just they might mix up the episode in which it happened.”
The penalty is in the listener, not the memory
Paterson’s work has also tested how repeated-event witnesses are received, and the result is uncomfortable. They are judged “less honest, less cognitively competent, and less overall credible than the single-event witnesses.” The consequence, as she puts it, is that “the more repeatedly you are victimised, the less credible you appear to others” — a penalty applied not for contradicting the facts but for remembering in the shape that repeated experience produces.
The practical upshot is interview design rather than doctrine. If repetition blurs episode boundaries, then interviews that treat a survivor’s account as a single discrete event will manufacture the inconsistencies later used to discredit her; procedures built to separate episodes and prompt the recurring, constant details should recover more and punish less. Paterson’s hope for the award is modest and specific: that it helps elevate the voices of victim-survivors, who — in her words — are often not given “the support and encouragement” they need, and are not believed or “seen as credible as we should.”
None of this is an argument that every survivor account is accurate, or that memory under trauma is immune to error. It is a narrower and more defensible claim: inconsistency across episodes is a normal output of remembering repeated harm, so reading it as evidence of fabrication is a category error. Courts already know how to reason about imperfect memory in other contexts. The gap is in recognising which kind of imperfect memory they are looking at.
The Eureka prizes, run by the Australian Museum since 1990, recognise Australian scientists and science communicators across 19 categories. Other winners this year included Associate Professor Jane Tiller of Monash University, whose work drove the national ban on life insurers discriminating against people on the basis of genetic test results, and Professor Georgina Long for melanoma research.