Our View: How many more brutal deaths before state services assume responsibility?

It may be too much to say with any certainty that the tragedy that unfolded in Ergates village last Thursday would have been avoided if the state services had performed their duties professionally and conscientiously. What can be said, however, is that there would have been a much greater probability that the killing of a mother and her son would have been avoided if state services showed more care when carrying out their responsibilities.

The state services were alerted to the problems faced by the family a month-and-a-half earlier and chose to do nothing. When the sister of the mother called the police to report that the father had tried to strangle his 20-year-old son, she was put through to an office that supported children. The advice she received was that the youth should leave home as he was an adult. She called the social welfare department but got no response. The family had been visited by a social worker, some days after the event and left after a 10-minute chat, according to the victim’s sister. The sister had also spoken to the officer from the Mental Health Services who visited once a month to give the suspect his medication and told her that he was not stable. The officer apparently said there was nothing she could do.

Predictably, after tragedy struck, all the different state services that had let the family down engaged in the customary shifting of responsibility. Lakatamia police, according to one press report, had no record of receiving two calls from the sister, relating to family violence. The Social Welfare Services said it had received no reports of violence in the family, its social workers visiting the family having noticed nothing worth reporting. Meanwhile, the Mental Health Services, which was monitoring the suspect, said that if any worker from another state service had noticed family violence, they should have reported it to the police. Social Welfare Services disagreed, saying mental health issues were the responsibility of the Mental Health Services.

This gives a very clear picture of how state services operate – providing support and help to people in desperate situations and under their care, is not high on the list of priorities. We saw this again less than two years ago when a 15-year-old boy, Stylianos, who was psychologically abused for years by his father, committed suicide. Social welfare services, that were supposedly monitoring the family in which there was also a pattern of violence against the boy’s mother, did nothing to protect the boy. Ombudswoman, Maria Stylianou-Lottides, who carried out an investigation, found that social welfare officers dealing with the case exhibited “utter criminal negligence”, while police failed to inform the relevant state services about the incidents of domestic violence. A criminal investigation, ordered four months after the event, was completed at the end of last year and was handed to the attorney-general. No action has yet been taken.

Whether charges will be brought against anyone is unknown, but because a criminal investigation was in progress no disciplinary action was taken at the time against the social workers who claimed they were not to blame. In fact, responding to the public outcry at the time of the boy’s suicide, the Social Welfare Services staff called a strike in protest against the criticism of their colleagues. In doing so, they unintentionally highlighted one of the main causes for the ineptitude, ineffectiveness, indifference exhibited by state services – heavy unionisation. This unionisation protects ineptitude, laziness, indifference and a lack of professionalism and care, all of which have been evident in the way first Stylianos and then the family in Ergates were let down.

This is how the entire public sector operates. Thanks to the powerful unions, public employees operate under the illusion that the public sector exists primarily to serve its workers – to offer them secure, well-paid employment and favourable working conditions – rather than the public. Serving society is of secondary importance, while assisting the people in real need – the poor, weak and vulnerable – seems to be a nuisance rather than a duty. Nothing reflected the disregard shown by the authorities for the less fortunate members of our society than the failure of the police to investigate the disappearance of the women, subsequently found to have been murdered by serial killer Nicos Metaxas.

The question is how these deeply rooted attitudes and old practices, safeguarded by union power, can ever change? How can the state services be made to carry out their duties in a professional and competent manner which does not let down the people they are supposed to support and protect? Those who thought that the level of care for the vulnerable would have improved after the tragic case of Stylianos were proved spectacularly wrong by last Thursday’s killings in Ergates.