Mon, 24 Nov, 2014 12:05:43 AM FTimes - Xinhua Report, Nov. 24
The two children, 2.5 years old and 1.5 months old, were found dead on Saturday. The police detained the mother, considering her as a suspect. She called the police herself, the police said. The family had been recipients of municipal child protection services.
Finnish municipal child protection officials have far reaching rights to intervene, if they choose so. Their resource level has been in public focus since 2012 when an eight-year-old girl in Helsinki was killed at home. Besides life sentences to the mother and step-father, the incident led to several charges raised in the past summer against medical professionals and other service providers for neglect of civil servant duties. Strict privacy laws in Finland have also hampered communication between civil servants in child protection cases. Regulations are to be eased from the start of 2015.
The Minister of the Interior Päivi Räsänen noted in a statement that the resources of child protection in Finland are not sufficient and that officials in the sector have to work under pressure. However she pointed out that the number of killings within families has declined during recent decades. The killings in Kuopio took place some weeks after a mother drove her car, with three children in it, to the front of a bus in the same region. All four were killed and the police concluded she had done the collision on purpose. The father and mother had quarrelled in public just before the collision.
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