Nowadays, age estimation of living persons is a recognized discipline in the forensic panorama. Age is a fundamental piece of information in our society for the exercise of personal rights and duties. Thus faced with persons unable or unwilling to declare their age, judicial or administrative authorities often request an expert opinion. Such request have been on the rise recently, since the number of individuals of questioned age has increased, not only due to the tremendous tide of migration movements, ease of world travel, but also due to the professionalization of criminal organizations involved in human smuggling or trafficking (Law et al., 2010). As highlighted by Schmeling et al. (2007), a question to be answered in case of age diagnostics for living persons mostly concerns the probability of a person being younger or older than a legally relevant age threshold, such as the age of majority. In other cases a point estimate of the real age can be of interest. In any case the two pieces of information are strictly related, since the former logically depends on the latter. Although European Asylum Support Office (EASO, 2018) recommends a holistic perspective for age estimation in living individuals (including psychological assessments), we believe that scientific evidence-based anthropological/medicolegal methods should provide the basis of an age estimate. The Study Group on Forensic Age Diagnostic (AGFAD) has provided, particularly in Europe, a strong contribution to this field, by publishing a set of recommendations mainly focused on operational perspectives (Schmeling et al., 2008). These recommendations include the choice of reference studies, the examination steps that ideally ought to be performed during a medicolegal age estimation appraisal, and the structure of expert reports. Similar recommendations were published by the Forensic Anthropology Society of Europe (Cunha et al., 2009). An evaluation of multiple items of evidence is highly recommended to increase the accuracy of the age estimate (Schmeling et al., 2003, 2008; Bassed, 2012). However, in the early stages of applied forensic age estimation, the domain suffered from a lack of adequate (statistical) methods that would allow to comprehensively evaluate the age-related evidence (Ritz-Timme et al., 2000). The aim of this contribution is to illustrate that forensic age estimation is a problem of inference and decision and should not be considered only from a statistical perspective. Provided that uncertainty is unavoidable and should be measured by probability, the Bayesian paradigm represents a formidable tool to combine different sources of information that are at the disposal to the different actors involved in the legal disputes regarding a person’s age.

Age estimation of living persons: A coherent approach to inference and decision

Bozza S;
2020-01-01

Abstract

Nowadays, age estimation of living persons is a recognized discipline in the forensic panorama. Age is a fundamental piece of information in our society for the exercise of personal rights and duties. Thus faced with persons unable or unwilling to declare their age, judicial or administrative authorities often request an expert opinion. Such request have been on the rise recently, since the number of individuals of questioned age has increased, not only due to the tremendous tide of migration movements, ease of world travel, but also due to the professionalization of criminal organizations involved in human smuggling or trafficking (Law et al., 2010). As highlighted by Schmeling et al. (2007), a question to be answered in case of age diagnostics for living persons mostly concerns the probability of a person being younger or older than a legally relevant age threshold, such as the age of majority. In other cases a point estimate of the real age can be of interest. In any case the two pieces of information are strictly related, since the former logically depends on the latter. Although European Asylum Support Office (EASO, 2018) recommends a holistic perspective for age estimation in living individuals (including psychological assessments), we believe that scientific evidence-based anthropological/medicolegal methods should provide the basis of an age estimate. The Study Group on Forensic Age Diagnostic (AGFAD) has provided, particularly in Europe, a strong contribution to this field, by publishing a set of recommendations mainly focused on operational perspectives (Schmeling et al., 2008). These recommendations include the choice of reference studies, the examination steps that ideally ought to be performed during a medicolegal age estimation appraisal, and the structure of expert reports. Similar recommendations were published by the Forensic Anthropology Society of Europe (Cunha et al., 2009). An evaluation of multiple items of evidence is highly recommended to increase the accuracy of the age estimate (Schmeling et al., 2003, 2008; Bassed, 2012). However, in the early stages of applied forensic age estimation, the domain suffered from a lack of adequate (statistical) methods that would allow to comprehensively evaluate the age-related evidence (Ritz-Timme et al., 2000). The aim of this contribution is to illustrate that forensic age estimation is a problem of inference and decision and should not be considered only from a statistical perspective. Provided that uncertainty is unavoidable and should be measured by probability, the Bayesian paradigm represents a formidable tool to combine different sources of information that are at the disposal to the different actors involved in the legal disputes regarding a person’s age.
2020
Statistics and Probability in Forensic Anthropology
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/3729951
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