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© 2022 Anna Liminowicz
Krzysztof Sarzala - coordinator of The Children's Aid Centre.
Krzysztof Sarzala:- The pandemic and the isolation have not created new risks, but have brought out the ones that previously troubled us. It is as if the institutions have given themselves permission to do less, to be less involved, and the children will suffer because they are waiting a year to be examined by an expert psychologist and to be heard by the courts.
During the pandemic, the judges stopped coming to the Centre for hearings, even though we keep inviting them. I am very worried about it, because the hearings here are much better than in court, our room is specially prepared not to make the child feel threatened, and even if the court had a similar room, cosily furnished, one enters the court building through gates with security, which makes the atmosphere of the meeting difficult to bear for the child, and this affects the effectiveness of the hearing. A frightened, depressed child cannot give such testimony as he or she could give in a friendly, safe atmosphere.
There was a time when, together with prosecutors from Gdansk, we organised a week of assistance to victims of crime, and these were nice events where prosecutors came to the Centre for duty, talked to parents, gave advice, but that was in a different political era. Today there is a wall between us, we have no contact. They don't respond to our invitations.
As long as there is no hearing of the child, we as The Children's Aid Centre have our hands tied - if we provide permanent help to the child, therapeutic support, and the child would be before the judge's hearing, we do harm to the child, because the child will stand before the court, and the judge will say - but this child went to a psychologist, and I don't know what the psychologist talked about with this child - We often have dilemmas about what to do, on the one hand we see that the child needs immediate help, and the procedures will be lengthy before the hearing takes place.
How do we weigh up what is more important - the correctness of the proceedings and the judge's feeling that he or she has objective information, or the immediate protection of the child, who may kill himself or herself because he or she cannot wait for the end of his or her case?
Gdansk, April, 2021
