Investigating abuse can take unreasonably long from a victim's point of view
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Background: Several primary school pupils were having trouble getting to sleep. They were not eating well, and they were showing signs of anxiety. Some of the children would take long showers immediately after school and cry at home without telling their parents why. The children did not want to go to school.
6 months: Some of the children say that their teacher has been taking pupils one-by-one into a room which is not used for teaching purposes. The teacher had told the children not to talk about it, lest something bad happen to their family members.
The parents contact municipal authorities, and more than half of the parents of the small school ask the local board of education to look into what is going on.
12 months: The board does not take up the issue, and the investigation stalls. Some of the parents take their children out of school and teach them at home.
20 months: The provincial government reprimands the local authority for not taking action on the parents' request for information.
Some of the children undergo psychiatric examinations in a small unit where the interviews are not taped, and drawings by the children are not added to the research material. The studies indicate that the children have normal basic personalities, and that their symptoms are linked specifically with school.
24 months: Some of the children get into another school, and some of the families move away from the community. Some families ask police to investigate what may have happened at the school.
36 months: The prosecutor decides not to press charges. The parents appeal the decision to the Prosecutor-General, who asks police to investigate the case further. An expert interviews the children, and police take the interviews on videotape.
50 months: The Prosecutor General decides not to prosecute, saying that the children’s recollections are unreliable because so much time has lapsed since the events took place.
The parents complain to the Parliamentary Ombudsman about the inadequate processing of their complaints by municipal authorities. It has now been more than a year and a half since the complaint was submitted, but no decisions have been made. The teacher is still teaching at the school.
What went wrong?
The parents’ point of view:
"As the matter was never investigated and documented correctly, it remains unclear what happened at the school. The investigation should have been held somewhere outside the small community. The children have been left with a powerful mistrust of adults because of the abuse they suffered."
"The basic question is, whether or not the children have received the safe education to which they are entitled under the Finnish constitution. How can the children’s human rights be realised if handling such urgent questions takes about two years at every level, adding up to more than five years?"
An expert’s point of view:
"Matters related to children should be given priority in the system of justice, because it is unreasonable from the child’s point of view to drag things out for years, never bringing them to a conclusion. If the matter had been investigated professionally from the outset, I believe that things would have gone differently. One coping mechanism for a traumatised child is denial, and it is asking quite a bit to suggest that they should open up in an interview and reveal things years after the event that they have tried to push out of their minds", says trauma psychotherapist Soili Poijula, who interviewed the children at the request of the Prosecutor-General.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 13.10.2004
More on this subject:
 Municipal officials show increased readiness to report suspicions of sexual abuse of children
Reporting suspicions to child welfare authorities
Helsingin Sanomat
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