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Home NATIONALAlleged family killings raise concern over child protection
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Mon, 24 Nov, 2014 12:05:43 AM
FTimes - Xinhua Report, Nov. 24

 

The killing of two under school age children allegedly by their mother in Kuopio, east central Finland, has again raised concern over the lack of resources of the municipal child protection.

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.

The Director of Municipal Social services in Kuopio Arja Kekoni told national radio that a child protection official had visited the family this week. "The official had not been able to assess that the situation could lead up to something like this. Otherwise we would have acted differently", she said.

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.

Work to change the laws started after a cluster of child killings within families in 2012.

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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