There is a theoretical need, and that's why, in the paper I submitted, there was a line about this.
Yes, I believe there is a need to look into this, but in practice, it is very rare that law enforcement or prosecutors will want to rely on a child witness, for all kinds of reasons, including, basically, sympathy for the child, not wanting to put the child through that process. There might be exceptional situations where a decision is made that in terms of the risk to others or the nature of the case—for instance, if we were talking about a serious terrorist case—you might have to compel a child to be a witness or to have a child as a witness.
Part of the problem is that we haven't really worked out a whole lot of procedures when it comes to what you do with the rest of the family—issues of consent, all those other legal issues that deal with children.
As to the second part of your question, yes, most countries in Europe have provisions for witnesses who are children, but most of them actually do not rely on child witnesses, because it subjects them to such an ordeal. I mentioned earlier how hard it is for witnesses in general, for adults. It's even worse for children.
I did some work for the International Criminal Court when they were setting up the unit for witness protection, and I had a chance to review the situation with the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. They had in their statute and rules of procedure an elaborate system for child witnesses, but in fact, they never called one. Why? Not because there were none. There were children who could have been witnesses, I'm told by the prosecutors, but the reason they did not is, first, they thought they would not necessarily be very reliable witnesses; and secondly, they really did not want to put children through that if there was any other way to build their case.
That said, maybe there's another thing that requires more attention than children who are witnesses, and that's children of witnesses. Very often the witness will have children, and the impact on those children can be quite severe. Again, to my knowledge, there has not been any research on what happens to those children, because there are very few of those. But those who have talked to witnesses know this is, in fact, one of the reasons that sometimes witnesses opt out of the program. It's because of the impact the program has on their spouses, or children, or relatives.
So that is an aspect. Again, in the absence of information on what really happens within those programs, it's very hard to know. I know even protection officers working in witness protection programs sometimes themselves complain about how little information they get from colleagues, because, again, that information doesn't move freely even within the network of protection agencies.