A 12-year-old girl in Poland has taken her own life after she was forced to continue living for months with her stepfather, whom she had accused of sexually abusing her. The case has drawn widespread criticism over the authorities’ handling of the case.
“It’s hard for me. I don’t know if I can say any more. This probably isn’t a conversation for Messenger,” the girl, named only as Kinga, wrote to her aunt in September last year, in messages shown by the aunt to broadcaster TOK FM.
“I’ve lost hope that it will get better,” she added the following month. “What will be, will be,” she wrote in November. On 29 December, she took her own life.
Koszmarna historia. Nie tylko o tym, że państwo nie działa. To historia o Polsce, która nie ma żadnego pomysłu na to, jak pomagać najmłodszym. Pisze @jan_czura. Przeczytajcie.https://t.co/w8LucWV1Jy
— Janusz Schwertner (@SchwertnerPL) January 5, 2022
Six months earlier, in June, Kinga had informed her teacher that she was a victim of sexual molestation by a friend of her parents. When she had told her family about the situation, she said that they had offered no support, only “quarrels and complaints”, according to TOK FM.
Later, the girl’s aunt, with whom Kinga had gone to stay, also ascertained that she was being molested by someone else, this time at home (it has now been reported that the second abuser was her stepfather). The aunt reported the issue to the police and sent a request to court to safeguard the child.
Although the court in her aunt’s home town of Środa Śląska could have issued such an order itself, instead it sent the case to the girl’s home town of Dąbrowa Tarnowska. That slowed down the processing of the request.
Further delays were caused by the fact that the first prosecutor assigned to the case was promoted and replaced, and then there was a holiday period. As a result, it took two and a half months for the case to reach the clerk’s desk, reports TOK FM.
By this stage, Kinga’s mother had been notified and had ordered her daughter to return home from her aunt’s. The girl was obliged to do so because the court had not yet issued a safeguarding order. That meant she was forced to live with one of her alleged abusers, while the other was a frequent guest in the home.
Social workers and local officials visited Kinga, but the girl told her aunt they had said it was “pretty much impossible” for her to be taken away from her mother and put into foster care.
In mid-September, a family court agreed, deciding that there was no need to place Kinga in temporary care and that she could instead remain at home while an application for her to be put in the care of her aunt was assessed.
In the meantime, Kinga was having increasing problems at school, including speaking about suicide, according to an anonymous informant from the school who spoke to TOK FM. After the headteacher intervened, she was treated in a child psychiatry ward and then discharged.
Another court hearing took place on 20 December, but no ruling was issued. Nine days later, Kinga took her own life.
“The entire system has failed, at almost every stage,” says a judge, Karolina Sosińska, head of the Association of Judges of Family Courts, in an interview with Onet. She said that the first court in Środa Śląska should have immediately removed Kinga from her home.
But Sosińska added that courts are sometimes “paralysed by fear” in such cases due to the outcry from “so-called defenders of the family”, who criticise “heartless courts for taking children away from a good family”. Sometimes “politicians, even ministers, have been involved in these attacks”.
The judge also pointed to a deeper problem, which is that “in Poland children as a rule are not believed”. As a result, “when confronted with the system of state institutions, the child is defeated in advance”.
Jolanta Zmarzlik, of the Empowering Children Foundation, likewise told TOK FM that in such situations children are often not trusted. Kinga’s story is far from an isolated incident, says Zmarzlik, but a “good illustration” of what happens all over the country.
Speaking to TVN24, Błażej Kmieciak, the head of a state commission on paedophilia, noted that Poland has a legal framework in place to deal with such cases effectively. The problem is with how the law is applied by officials. “There must be prosecutors and judges who are dedicated to these matters,” he said.
A support line for children and adolescents in Poland operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can be reached at 116 111.
A support line for adults, also operating 24/7, can be reached at 800 70 22 22.
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Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
