The Challenge of Giving Evidence

Whether you are a newly qualified social worker, or a seasoned professional, having to go to court to give evidence, can leave you feeling somewhat anxious and apprehensive.

Just in case you do not realise it, this has very little to do with you, or the type of person that you are.

Giving evidence, being placed in the witness box, and subjected to cross-examination, is designed to ensure that you feel stress and discomfort. Because the court or legal system wants to observe how the evidence you give, stands up under the scrutiny of cross-examination.

So it's totally intentional, and this probably sounds and feels wicked, since going to court, if you are not familiar with courts, can feel alien enough, without the added pressure you feel in the witness box, attempting to do work that is already stressful enough.

In order to try to improve the situation for social workers and other witnesses I recently conducted a poll on LinkedIn asking participants to vote on what they considered was the biggest problem or challenge they faced when giving evidence.

They were asked to vote on four questions as follows:

a) feeling intimidated or exposed.

b) lacking confidence.

c) speaking when under pressure

d) other reason/s.

The poll duration was for 7 days and and 38 participants voted.

I had expected a larger amount of participants, but I am very grateful to those who responded.

The outcome of the poll is as follows:

19 people voted for a) and this represented 50% of the participants.

5 people voted for b) representing 13% of those who participated.

10 people voted for c) representing 26% of the participants and

4 people voted for d) which made up 11% of those who participated.

In hindsight, I think in connection with question a) I should have left it as 'feeling intimidated.

Although I think you are exposed when in the witness box, I suspect it may be the lesser, or less significant feeling, than feeling intimidated. I also now consider that feeling exposed may convey the incorrect impression i.e. that you have something to hide.

The clear winner of the poll was 'feeling intimidated,' and in second place was 'speaking when under pressure.' But it occurs to me that both feeling intimidated and experiencing difficulty speaking when under pressure, are both matters that are likely to be experienced as less challenging, the more confident you feel.

To some extent the more you give evidence the more familiar with the process and confident you may feel. But this likely depends on your experiences whilst in the witness box. Your poor or negative experiences may impact on your willingness to give evidence in future, or simply leave you with anxious feelings, that are never adequately addressed.

The importance of addressing any negative experiences you endured at court should not be ignored or underestimated, because this can leave you with unpleasant and sometimes traumatic feelings that you carry around with you, impacting your self esteem, health and feelings about court.

It occurs to me that what should be happening, before and after court, is that you should be provided with an opportunity to spend some time with your manager and/or legal representative, to discuss how you're feeling about giving evidence, and (as I got from someone who was good enough to share their feelings and experiences with me) whether there are any differences between your views and that of the managers or organisation.

Following giving evidence, also time should be made available to both offer you feedback, and for you to debrief, and offload any feelings you are left with, from your time in the witness box.

This time would be highly useful in helping workers to learn, improve their skills and address any shortcomings or areas they struggled with at court. The benefit of facilitating this feedback and debriefing session, would be that, instead of painful or unpleasant feelings being left to fester, that workers could both express their feelings and gain ideas about what they could learn to do differently next time.

Although, this feedback and debriefing session may not be considered helpful, if imposed on workers (particularly more experienced ones) it should be offered to all workers, such that a worker's time at court and their feelings about it, would not be seen as something that should or could be glossed over to make room for the next case, and the one after that.

I consider that this would provide workers an opportunity to talk about feelings, anxieties and concerns, get the required support and build the confidence and, resilience necessary to go from strength to strength at future court hearings.