Mother gets suspended prison sentence for hitting head teacher of daycare centre
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According to Tuesday’s edition of the Finnish daily Turun Sanomat, on Thursday of last week the Turku District Court handed down a suspended prison sentence of four months and 14 days for violent resisting of a public official and making unlawful threats, to a mother who had struck the head teacher at a daycare centre last March.
In addition, the 37-year-old Turku woman was ordered to pay the head teacher EUR 425 in compensation for pain and suffering.
The woman’s daughter had been on a night trip arranged by the daycare centre in March.
Her mother was supposed to pick her up at 8:30 in the morning. However, the woman started phoning the cay care centre around 6:30, saying that she would not be able to fetch her child. The mother sounded drunk.
The personnel of the municipal daycare centre then contacted the social services, who placed the child in a local children’s shelter, forbidding the personnel to give the child to her mother.
The mother arrived at the daycare centre at 11:00 a.m. in order to pick up her daughter, whereupon she was informed of the situation.
The mother admitted that in her anger she had struck the teacher on the face with the side of her hand, but claimed that she did not know that the head teacher was a public official.
The mother explained that she had ”imagined that only police officers and social welfare authorities were public officials”.
Furthermore, the woman had threatened the nurse who was caring for her child, saying: ”You will regret this, I’ll [expletive deleted] kill you”.
The mother defended herself later on, saying that she had met the nurse every day and they had been getting on well with each other .
The mother could not imagine that the nurse would take seriously what she shouted in a fit of rage.
According to the court ruling, the Turku social services department had made a decision on the urgent placement of the child in a children’s shelter. In the process they had been assisted by the head teacher of the daycare centre, who had been exercising public authority while refusing to give the child to the mother.
As a consequence of the incident, the head teacher sustained a traumatic stress reaction which resulted in incapacity to work and led to a lengthy sick leave.
The head teacher claimed EUR 1,500 in compensation for damages.
The court decided nevertheless that it could not be proved that the head teacher’s symptoms were caused by the assault alone, as the teacher also suffered from another basic infirmity.
While threatening to kill the nurse, the mother behaved aggressively and struck the head teacher, which is why the court regarded it as likely that the nurse would take the threat seriously.
Helsingin Sanomat
