A trial judge's directions drawing attention to factors bearing on the credibility of a child witness — including age, cultural background, passage of time, and the natural tendency for accounts to vary between different interlocutors — constitute permissible warnings about the risk of fallacious reasoning, not impermissible expressions of the judge's own views about the facts, provided the jury is told the assessment of credibility remains their task. Inconsistencies in a child complainant's accounts to different preliminary complaint witnesses do not necessarily render a verdict unreasonable where the substance of the complaint was consistent and the detailed account to police bore hallmarks of verisimilitude.
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