Protection of the rights of children who are in conflict with the law or become victims of criminal assaults is extremely important and requires special attention from the state. For the first time in 30 years of independence, the Prosecutor General’s Office raised this urgent issue at a joint meeting of law enforcement and other government agencies.
More than 5,000 children, who last year alone suffered from criminal assaults, need urgent real help and effective protection. A third of the mentioned assaults were serious and especially serious. This year, the number of child victims increased by 17%.
A significant number of children become victims of willful murders and attempted willful murders. In 2020, more than six dozen children suffered from such crimes, and their number increased by almost a quarter. And this year such crimes were already committed against 15 children.
Torture of children in basements with cutting off their fingers and scalping them for trying to taste apples from the owner’s garden, killing a five-year-old child for occult reasons in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast; 40 stab wounds for a seven-year-old boy from his father during mushroom hunting in Chernihiv Oblast; the audacious murder of two girls on Christmas Eve with the aim of getting a phone and a chain, as well as holidays of a six-year-old boy in the capital, who suddenly died from a knife at the hands of his father, with subsequent burning of the boy’s body; brutal murder of two children as a result of a domestic conflict in Zakarpattia; the murder and rape of a 7-year-old girl in Kherson Oblast. It all sounds like a horror movie script, but it is our reality.
Everyone involved in the upbringing and protection of children must make every effort to prevent such developments. However, law enforcement agencies, while annually analyzing the criminological situation, do not actually study either the factors contributing to juvenile delinquency or crimes committed against children. which is one of the key tasks of criminal proceedings. As a result, we see the one-sidedness of the existing juvenile justice system, in which the child victim does not seem to be the first priority.
Children who committed a criminal offense due to certain circumstances also need special attention from law enforcement officers and professionals from relevant state services. Every year, at least 3,000 children commit illegal acts, half of which are serious and especially serious crimes. This year, the number of crimes committed by teenagers has decreased by more than a quarter.
Often due to insufficient social maturity, children perceive certain criminal offenses as monkey tricks only and do not realize the illegality of their actions.
We are gradually changing the nature of adolescent responsibility from repressive to restorative. Together with the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine and with the assistance of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), we implemented a pilot project “Recovery Program for Juveniles Suspected of Committing a Crime,” which became the basis for the implementation of restorative justice throughout Ukraine.
This position has been supported by the judiciary and, as a result, 119 teenagers were exempted from criminal liability by the court. According to comparative data from other states, the application of restorative practices significantly reduces reoffending. Our pilot program is the basis for enshrining the principles of restorative juvenile justice in national law.
Internet and social media play a significant role in juvenile delinquency. The digital environment, which is one of the components of a child’s right to freedom of expression, also involves interaction with harmful content that, in addition to negative consequences for children themselves, forms such kind of behavior that can harm others.
Last year in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, a 15-year-old grandson killed his grandfather, stabbing him 35 times, while recording it all on video and then posting it on the Internet, just to show off his “achievements.” And in Mykolaiv Oblast, a 16-year-old teenager killed his grandfather because he had forbidden him to play gadgets.
An extremely painful problem today is the rapid increase in suicide attempts among adolescents. According to the World Health Organization, more than 200 children and 1,500 adolescents in the world commit suicide every year.
In Ukraine, in just five months, there have been 149 suicide cases this year. Their number has already exceeded the figures for 2019 and 2020, when there were 111 and 123 cases, respectively.
Thus, one-third of suicides were committed by minors who had not reached the age of 14, and one in five who had committed suicide were between the ages of 11 and 13.
I have stressed to law enforcement officers that it is unacceptable when investigations into such facts are mostly limited to just the formal collection of evidence regarding the absence of violence against children. The clear testimony to this is that, during 2020–2021, no person was notified of suspicion of having driven a child to suicide. Under such a superficial approach, those guilty of driving children to suicide will remain unpunished.
This comes at a time when “death groups” are increasingly being talked about in Ukraine, whose administrators are deliberately driving teenagers to suicide. Instead, the rapid spread of information about their existence leads to the fact that children themselves create such groups, calling themselves curators.
This year alone, the Cyber-Police Department has already blocked more than two dozen thematic communities that have promoted a cult of violence and suicide.
Due to the principled position of prosecutors in Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts and the city of Kyiv, the pre-trial investigation in criminal proceedings has been significantly intensified. Only when the prosecutors provided specific instructions in the proceedings, it was possible to identify a number of children who were involved in these groups and to prevent them from self-harm and suicide.
We have pointed out to the law enforcement bodies the shortcomings of the investigation, which exist despite the impressive statistics on suicides. There are cases of failure to carry out even the first-priority investigative actions which lead to the risk of losing evidence and they are often limited to only forensic examinations. There is also no inspection of mobile phones, computers, or tablets used by the child and his/her social media profiles to investigate the presence of suicidal content, and no computer forensic examinations are ordered. In many cases, the examination of bodies is carried out in the absence of a forensic expert or doctor. Further, all this leads to the red tape of investigations and raises doubts about the causes and circumstances of the child’s death or bodily harm.
The joint efforts of authorized state and law enforcement bodies, representatives of educational institutions, social services, and parents should be aimed at early detection of children at risk, as well as at carrying out preventive work with them, which will help to avoid such serious consequences as the death of children.
Another challenge for the whole world is sexual exploitation and sexual violence against children.
The Council of Europe’s statistics on this issue are noteworthy – one in five children has experienced sexual violence at least once in their life.
Of particular concern is the dynamics of criminal offenses against sexual freedom and sexual integrity committed against children. If last year the number of such crimes increased by 9%, this year, it increased by one-third.
The number of children who were raped increased by more than half last year and by almost a quarter in 2021. In most cases, sexual violence against children is committed by persons close to them, at least 30% of whom are relatives of minors.
Therefore, the full launch by the Ministry of Justice of the Unified Register of Persons Convicted of Having Committed Sexual Crimes against Children, which should become an effective method for prevention, is relevant at the present time.
According to the independent organization Internet Watch Foundation, Ukraine is in the top 3 leaders-suppliers of child pornography in the world. The situation requires an immediate response from all law enforcement bodies.
A fundamental step in this direction should be the Law adopted by the Parliament this year, which not only brings Ukrainian legislation in line with the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse, but also strengthens responsibility for the production and distribution of child pornography.
So far, between 2020 and 2021, police uncovered only about three hundred cases of child pornography distribution, while, according to available data, more than 5,000 devices in Ukraine download and distribute child pornography every week!
As Prosecutor General, I tasked law enforcement agencies to accelerate the fight against the spread of child pornography, sexual exploitation and sexual violence, which is currently ineffective.
The situation with the fight against domestic violence also requires increased attention. In total, more than 800 criminal proceedings related to domestic violence offenses were initiated between 2020 and 2021, for comparison – 613 cases were initiated in 2020, and – 220 in 2021. Annually, an average of 7% of the total number of victims of criminal offenses related to domestic violence are children.
Therefore, there is an urgent need to create a Unified State Register of Domestic and Gender-Based Violence and to ratify the Istanbul Convention, which will provide a comprehensive approach to preventing and combating domestic violence and introduce an effective mechanism to protect victims and finally bring perpetrators to justice.
I called on law enforcement and government officials to take control of the fight against violent crimes against children deprived of parental care. Over the past two years, in almost 100 criminal proceedings over such elements of crime, the investigations were initiated.
Law enforcement agencies should pay close attention to the state of observance of the rights of minors in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, where more than one and a half hundred children were injured and more than four dozen died during the armed conflict. In addition, children are involved in illegal activities of illegal armed groups, are restricted in access to education, free meals in schools, etc.
We are changing our approach to the investigation of cases where the victims are children, so that, regardless of the status of the child in criminal proceedings, this issue is comprehensively taken care of by one specialized unit. In the Prosecutor General’s Office and regional prosecutor’s offices, such approaches were changed last year, a similar procedure was introduced in district prosecutor’s offices and it is already bringing good results.
We are building child-friendly justice. The Prosecutor General’s Office initiated the introduction of online channels of trust in social networks and messengers in order to detect offenses committed against children and prevent them in a timely manner, as well as to communicate with children who have become victims of crimes, or witnesses. The Council of Europe Office and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, the Ministry of Digital Transformation, the community organization La Strada-Ukraine and the informative and educational campaign #Stop_sexting are involved in their creation and launch. This initiative was also supported by regional prosecutor’s offices.
In addition, to ensure compliance with international standards of children’s rights and freedoms in criminal proceedings and beyond, according to the initiative of the Prosecutor General’s Office, in the city of Vinnytsia a specialized center for working with children who have suffered or witnessed a violent crime – implementing the Barnahus model. This was made possible with the assistance of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Ukraine, to whom we are grateful for the support and training of juvenile prosecutors.
We have already agreed on the steps for signing a memorandum of understanding on promoting the implementation of the Barnahus model, and we hope that this project will be successfuland other regions will join this initiative as well.
