Commissioner for the Protection of Children’s Rights, Despo Michaelidou, has rightly demanded explanations regarding a child abuse case recently uncovered in Larnaca, where five children were reportedly subjected to years of abuse by parental figures.

The children, four girls and one boy, aged seven to 23, two of them from a different father, said they had suffered psychological and physical abuse. One of the girls had reportedly been sexually abused for ten years and all had been subjected forced labour on the family farm.

Among her queries, the commissioner asked how frequently and for how long social workers visited the family’s home, whether the children were interviewed without their parents present, whether investigations went beyond assessing their living conditions, and whether school visits were conducted or contact made with teachers regarding the children’s behaviour.

Amid this, the deputy minister for social welfare, aside from announcing an administrative investigation, has otherwise deflected the case onto the courts since the parents aged 48 and 41 were arrested.

More egregious, because the admin investigation will probably not end with anyone being fired and with a host of empty promises to do better by “setting up a committee”, the Isotitia union almost unbelievably tried to present the social workers as the victims.

They even went as far as staging a two-hour work stoppage. Isotita said it also opposed the launch of the administrative investigation.

“The targeting of our colleagues continues… The responsibility for the pathologies of the system belongs exclusively to the state and its administration and we won’t allow the transfer of responsibilities to professionals who selflessly serve society,” the union said.

If this particular case had gone totally under the radar due to the fault of the state in terms of staffing or lack of financial resources, the union’s position might hold some water but this wasn’t the case.
Fellow villagers had turned to the social welfare service to report the alleged abuse of the children before the case was made public, suggesting that the service had not taken sufficient measures to protect the children.

In fact, they had been monitoring the family for three years but will still probably claim they could not have known what was really going on. This is where the real failure of this case lies.

If in three years of visits and monitoring, you haven’t been able to gain the confidence of any of these five children, that they did not trust you enough to have to courage to tell you what was happening to them, that they couldn’t be sure they would be protected, it means you have not done your job.

The child commissioner was clear in this. She said that for a child to come forward, “a stable and trusted reference point is needed”. Visits and monitoring are clearly not enough.

Isotitia’s move in staging a work stoppage to defend the “poor social workers” was extremely bad judgement in the circumstances and has only served to direct even more criticism their way.