Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Giota Manthou

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Over a year ago, an unprecedented advertising campaign appeared in the streets of Athens: part of it was authorless and guerrilla-like, graffiti or banners hanging on road bridges and overpasses with slogans such as “joint custody” and “dads are not visitors, they are parents”; and part of it had the hallmarks of high-powered lobbying, with posters calling for “equal time with both parents” and “alternating homes” covering advertising spaces in bus stops all over the city.

The bus stop posters, sponsored by Politis Group, a major street advertising company, bore the logo of an organisation named “Active Dads for Children’s Rights”. Other organisations, such as the “Joint Custody Association”, and the Association GON.IS., also became more vocal in the press and in social media in advocating for the overhaul of child custody laws. 

A few months previously, the minister of Justice, Kostas Tsiaras, had appointed a legislative committee tasked with drafting a bill that would reform Greek family law. Konstantinos Bogdanos, a member of Parliament for New Democracy, whose candidacy and parliamentary tenure have been as controversial as his preceding journalistic career, boasted in a social media post that it was thanks to his own efforts that the protection of "dads' rights", to be achieved through the new bill, came to the attention of the minister. Bogdanos claimed he had been alerted to the issue by Nikos Tsilipounidakis, a journalist connected with the Joint Custody Association. Bogdanos called him a "dynamic dad".

The street campaign turned the pressure up. As the Joint Custody Association was quick to point out to its followers, there was no guarantee that the committee would move in a direction favourable to the association’s demands. 

These demands targeted what the Joint Custody Association and the other groups considered unjust privileges accorded by the courts to mothers after a divorce, such as exclusive custody over the children. Their proposed solution was for the government to legislate that children after a divorce would by default spend equal time with both parents, within a regime of “shared parenting”, meaning that a child would live half the time with one parent and half with the other. 

Through the efforts of such groups, similar legislative measures, concisely known as “joint custody”, had been pursued by some sympathetic — or misled — politicians over the years, but they never went beyond the stage of an informal meeting, a proposed amendment or at most a draft bill that never left a minister’s desk drawer.  

The danger that the same would happen in this case, according to the Joint Custody Association, lay in the fact that Ioannis Tentes, an emeritus chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court and chairman of the Society of Family Law, was appointed to head the legislative committee. Members of the Society of Family Law, a scientific association of legal scholars, lawyers and judges, some of whom are also former politicians, had previously taken a public position against “joint custody”.

According to official sources, 70% of divorces during 2017 in Greece were consensual. Members of Parliament both for the government and the opposition cited additional evidence during parliamentary discussions on the new bill, which brings the number of consensual divorces up to 86%. Of the remaining 14%, only about half proceed to a full lawsuit and of those only 3% reach an appellate court. It is therefore evident that even if the grievances proponents of “joint custody” have against court decisions are justified, they only concern a very small proportion of divorces that are highly acrimonious.

The start 

While officially they appeared to advocate for the benefits of both parents participating in child rearing, some media appearances and a multitude of social media posts began to reveal that the groups pushing for “joint custody” formed a burgeoning “men’s rights” lobby, representing divorced fathers who believed that the courts had wronged them in awarding custody of the children to their former spouses. 

The Association GON.IS., which was approved as a “primary social care” institution by ministerial decision in 2015 and claims that it supports “both parents”, was founded by former members of an older organisation, named SYGAPA that tellingly translates as “Association for Male and Paternal Dignity”. 

Nikos Tsilipounidakis, the journalist who Bogdanos said had enlightened him about "dads' rights", famously quipped during a TV interview: “There are many dads who pay too much rent for nine months of pregnancy.”

Increasingly after the summer of 2020, the lobby succeeded in placing more interviews by its representatives in mainstream media, and enjoyed favourable coverage of its positions in articles not only by journalists, but also by psychologists and legal scholars. This was accompanied by increased activity in social media.

Despite the Joint Custody Association’s professed worries about the composition of the legislative committee, two prominent figures of the lobby, Marios Andrikopoulos and Patrina Paparigopoulou, were also appointed as members. Andrikopoulos is a legal director for a major energy company who runs a popular Facebook page, “Act against Parental Alienation". Paparigopoulou is a law professor and sister of Ioannis Paparigopoulos, frontman of Joint Custody Association, board member of the International Council on Shared Parenting, former member of “Male Dignity” and co-founder of GON.IS.

The legislative committee presented its draft and report to the Ministry of Justice in November 2020. Unbeknownst to the wider public, the majority of the committee’s members had rejected some of the more radical provisions advocated by the men’s rights lobby. (As the minister is not legally obligated to publish the legislative committee’s draft, this only became evident much later — when the minister was compelled to disclose it after the opposition had filed an official request.)  

This led to disagreements within the lobby on whether the proposed bill, which was soon leaked to the press, was worthy of their support. In the event, the Joint Custody Association published its own draft bill in December 2020 and sent it to the ministry, which rejected it.

During an online panel discussion organised by the Joint Custody Association in February 2021, Marios Andrikopoulos claimed that the majority of the committee was intent on “letting the proposal rot away”, and that he and Patrina Paparigopoulou “put up a great fight”.

Ioannis Paparigopoulos, who is apparently regarded as the éminence grise of the lobby and had expressed doubts about the leaked bill, retorted that “if the bill that you [Andrikopoulos] prepared is voted in, you still won’t see your children”.

Nikos Tsilipounidakis challenged Paparigopoulos by claiming that they should all support the minister of Justice. “Last Monday,” he said, “I personally called Mr Paparigopoulos and told him that Mr Tsiaras wanted to see him. When I called him, I was in Mr Tsiaras’s office.”

He went on to say that Tsiaras has been facing heavy opposition within his own party, New Democracy, but he was the first minister of Justice in recent years that had agreed to meet with “their group”.

Tsilipounidakis identified the Society of Family Law as the scourge of the new bill, and claimed that “they” (presumably the society) enlisted the help of Giorgos Gerapetritis, the minister of State, to plant doubts about the bill in the Prime Minister’s mind. He claimed that he knew this because he was “virtually present” at a teleconference between Tsiaras, Gerapetritis and Mitsotakis, where the minister of Justice defended his bill.  

Andrikopoulos argued that the spirit of the new law was in the right direction, particularly in providing that the two parents exercise their parental function after the dissolution of marriage “in common and equally”. “You have won,” he said to Paparigopoulos.

Tsilipounidakis also argued that the bill was “a start” and that they should now “organise their attack” during the public consultation process.  

The attack

When the draft was presented for public consultation on March 18, some members of the Legislative Committee protested that it exhibited important deviations from their recommendations. Some of the provisions advocated by the men’s rights lobby had found their way back into the draft, despite the committee not including them. Although legislative committees’ reports are not binding, deviating from them widely when a draft law is reviewed by a ministry is not only less than transparent in terms of who influences the final draft, but also entails the risk of technical mistakes, such as vague or unenforceable provisions, which was one of the issues some committee members protested about. 

Close to 15.000 comments were posted in all articles of the draft bill, the public consultation platform. The Active Dads Association announced, in its memorandum to the Parliamentary Committee, where the bill landed after public consultation was concluded on April 1, that “out of 15.230 comments submitted, 12.289 were IN FAVOUR of joint custody”. And they concluded that “the consultation has spoken loudly and given a popular mandate for a self-evident change”.

The same argument was employed by Kostas Tsiaras, both in an interview and during discussion in Parliament, where he said that a “record breaking number of comments” signalled a “favourable reception” of the bill. 

However, Aggeliki Adamopoulou, an MP for Mera25, disputed the minister’s claim and said that according to an analysis conducted by her staff, one supportive comment had been copied and pasted over 1200 times, while 6 supportive sentences appeared in identical form up to 1400 times. 

“Is this what overwhelming support means?” Ms Adamopoulou said. “Out of 15000 comments, 9200 at a minimum, that is 61%, are copied and pasted again!”

We decided to check the accuracy of these claims by conducting an analysis of the comments on the public consultation platform. The result supports neither the minister’s claim nor that of the Active Dads Association, being much closer to the numbers cited by Adamopoulou, but it also raises significant questions about the vulnerability of the public consultation process. 

After scraping the comments on the 23 articles of the draft bill (14.814 in total), we trained a machine learning model in order to categorise comments according to whether they were in support or in opposition to the bill. According to our model, within a +-3% margin of error, it does initially appear that out of 14.814 comments, το 77% (approximately 11.500) indeed is supportive, whereas 23% (approximately 3.400) is in opposition. However, out of the 14.814 total comments, only 47% (6.920) are original, whereas 53% (7.894) are copies of other comments. The picture therefore changes considerably if we only take into account original comments and not copies. In that case, the percentage of comments that support the bill falls to 60% and the percentage of those that oppose it rises to 40%. 

Out of approximately 11.500 comments that we estimate to be in support of the bill, 63% (more than 7.200) are copies of other comments, and only 37% (more than 4.100) are original. 

The 7.200 comments in support of the bill that have been copied essentially correspond to only 658 original comments that have been pasted multiple times. For example, just one of the 658 original comments has been copied and pasted 343 times, while two variations on it have been pasted 358 times (for a total of 701 copies).  

Conversely, out of approximately 3.400 comments that we estimate to be in opposition to the bill, 80% (more than 2.700) are original and 20% (about 670) are copies. The 670 copies correspond to 225 original comments.

Our analysis therefore shows that not only the numbers of supportive and opposing comments are more balanced that the minister and the supporters of the bill claimed, but also that:

Firstly, over half of the comments in the public consultation are misleading, being simply repeated up to hundreds of times each.

Secondly, the majority of these misleading comments are in support of the bill.

Thirdly, there appears to have been a major intervention in the consultation, as the volume of the supportive comments that were copied and repeated (over 7.200 or 63%) is enormous.

The criticism

During public consultation, as well as during discussion in the Parliamentary Committee and in the media, the draft bill was heavily criticised by a wide range of experts, organisations, institutions, feminist groups and NGOs, including the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls and the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; the Hellenic Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; the Family Law Society; the gender equality organization Diotima; the Lawyers Committee on Legal Issues of Co-Custody; and Bar Associations across the country.

The overarching issue for those opposing the new law was that it departed from the child-centered approach of previous legislation, prioritising instead the rights of parents. This was particularly evident in its definition of “the best interest of the child” as equal co-custody between parents, as opposed to a provision that it needs to be defined on a case-by-case basis, as required by international law. 

Another major point of contention was that the bill did not limit visitation/communication rights, even if a parent was accused of child abuse, unless there was an irrevocable conviction for the act. This seemed to reflect a view, espoused by men’s rights groups but also shared by some child protection professionals, that many allegations of child abuse are false and are employed by mothers against fathers in order to alienate them from their children. The Active Dads Association highlighted data from a child abuse hotline run by The Smile of the Child, a prominent child protection NGO, that appeared to show that most abuse allegations are made against mothers. And Maria Kaperoni, a clinical psychologist with Ippokrateio General Hospital in Thessaloniki, who supported the new bill in the media and has been cited by men’s rights groups, has said that she has been asked to provide mothers with reports stating that their children are being sexually abused by their father. “Very often,” she claimed, “the accusations are false.”  

Giorgos Nikolaidis, a psychiatrist who heads the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate at the Institute of Child Health, and an internationally acknowledged expert on the psychosocial support of child abuse survivors, told us that in Greece there is no unified system for recording reported incidents of child abuse and neglect, and therefore partial data and statistics published by individual services or institutions bear little relation to the characteristics of the totality of incidents in society, as they emerge from studies in random segments of the general population. He went on to say that “using such ‘evidence’ to create a certain impression just before a new family law reform is to be enacted, is plainly a communication game, and has no value for designing social policy for families”.  

Critics of the new bill further noted that in Greece, where court delays are a persistent problem, a provision requiring an irrevocable conviction would mean that a potential abuser could remain in unsupervised contact with their victim for a period of up to ten years. 

This was the only part of the bill that was partially amended in the face of expert criticism. After the changes, the visitation/communication provisions made no mention of the issue of child abuse, while the provision about the loss of “parental responsibility” called for a “first instance conviction”.

Further criticism of the new bill focused on both substantial and technical matters, the most important of which were:

• Τhe bill provides that after separation parents continue to exercise their parental function “in common” and “equally”. The meaning of “equally” (whether, for example, it refers to “equal time”) is vague, which according to opponents of the bill will lead to confusion in the courts. The same provision extends to children whose parents have not married or entered into a cohabitation contract, and were not living together after the recognition of the child by the father. Opponents of the bill pointed out that this essentially awards “equal” custody to a parent — usually the father — who never provided care for the child, without any obligation to prove their suitability or interest.  
• The bill provides that if the child after separation is living with one parent, then the other parent is by default entitled to visitation/communication amounting to ⅓ of the “total time of the child”. Opponents of the bill pointed out that the term “total time” is vague, as it can be interpreted to mean 8 hours per day, 10 days per month, 4 months per year, or even calculated based on weekends, holidays, and spare time, thus leading to the so-called “⅔ parent” assuming full responsibility for care and the “⅓ parent” becoming a “holiday parent” without responsibilities. Opponents also pointed out that the bill allows the ⅓ parent to actually request less time, leading therefore to a situation where visitation/communication is determined by the needs of the parents instead of the children, contravening international law.   
• The bill obliges the parent who lives with the child — the ⅔ parent — to inform the other parent — the ⅓ parent — about every decision relating to the care of the child, prior to acting upon it. Opponents of the bill pointed out that this constitutes a violation of the ⅔ parent’s private life, and can be used as a means of harassment or revenge in cases of particularly strained or hostile relations between former partners. 
• The bill provides that parents have an obligation to “maintain and strengthen  the relationship of the child with the family of the other parent”. Opponents pointed out that this broadens the obligations of the parents towards the child to an unlimited number of other persons, while leaving no room for appreciation of the best interest of the child in relation to its contact with the extended family members of the other parent.
• The bill makes mediation mandatory, a violation, opponents say, of the Istanbul Convention to which Greece is a party. 
• The law relies on the “parental alienation syndrome” theory for the determination of the best interest of the child, the description of child care, and the regulation of communication and visitation. Opponents of the bill pointed out that the theory is disputed.

The support

Even before the draft of the new law was revealed, it was evident that the “parental alienation syndrome” theory was employed by the men’s rights lobby as a scientific argument in support of the reform. According to the theory, the “syndrome” occurs when a child becomes alienated from a parent as a result of the psychological manipulation of another parent, particularly in the context of conflictual family separation. Interestingly, during discussions in the Parliamentary Committee, the “syndrome” was not only defended, but presented as the prevailing academic consensus, by Marieta Papadatou-Pastou, a professor of psychology representing the Hellenic Psychology Society. 

When asked to cite her sources, Ms Pastou pointed to what she calls “the Warshak report”, meaning a 2014 paper by psychologist Richard Warshak, titled Social science and parenting plans for young children: A consensus report. The conclusion of the paper was that equal time spent between parents was beneficial to the child. The “consensus” part of the title was based on the fact that the paper was accompanied by a list of 110 scientists that endorsed its findings. As the paper itself admits, this is “a rare occurrence in social science”. Both for the author of the paper and Ms. Pastou in the Greek Parliament seven years later, this was an advantage of the paper that allowed it to support its claim of offering a “consensus”. In truth, it did not make Warshak’s view any less controversial.

Richard Warshak has picked up the mantle of child psychologist Richard Gardner, who proposed the “syndrome” in 1985. He is considered his scientific successor, so much so that after Gardner’s passing, Warshak inherited his unpublished instructional video and audio tapes from his family. Warshak is the author of a best-selling book titled Divorce Poison and more importantly, he has inspired a business as an applied version of his ideas called Family Bridges, where he holds a role as scientific advisor.

Family Bridges are often called by their opponents “reunification camps”. They are workshops that aim to heal “parental alienation” and repair the relationship with both parents. In reality, according to a series of stories told by outlets such as The Atlantic, NBC and Reveal, multiple testimonies of children that have been through these camps tell a different story, accusing the programme of manipulating them and traumatising their relation with the parent who had custody. An expert was quoted in The Atlantic calling them “torture camps for children”. And since these workshops are quite expensive and mandated by judicial orders, a lawyer involved in a legal battle against Family Bridges told the Washington Post in 2017 that “the programs are basically shams. It was clear to me what they were doing was reaping massive fees by selling a custody change”.

According to psychiatrist Giorgos Nikolaidis, the claim that the existence of the syndrome in question is widely accepted is false. “This so-called syndrome,” he told us, “is a communication tool, systematically promoted by various organisations of divorced men. It has never been recognised as an actual clinical entity by prestigious international or national scientific institutions. Recently, in order to clarify the issue and avoid misinterpretation, the World Health Organisation decided to omit any mention of deprivation of contact with a parent in its most recent revision of the International Classification of Disorders.”

Another source of support for reforming family law in the direction espoused by the Ministry of Justice was the Greek Ombudsman, or Citizen’s Advocate, an independent authority, headed by lawyer and law professor Andreas Pottakis. As early as August 2020, Pottakis addressed a letter to the minister, where he argued for the benefits of “joint custody” and “shared parenting”, citing Council of Europe resolutions of 2013 and 2015 that urged member-states to legislate providing an "option for common custody in case of separation" and introduce "the principle of alternating habitation".

In May 2021, when the draft bill was being discussed in the Parliamentary Committee, the Ombudsman addressed another letter, this time to the chairman of the committee, Maximos Charakopoulos, where he reiterated his approval of the ministry's efforts to reform family law, but criticised it for not going far enough in legislating "alternating habitation".

Yiota Masouridou, a lawyer who also serves as the general secretary of European Democratic Lawyers and a vocal critic of the bill, told us that "the Council of Europe’s recommendations are non legally binding policy agreements which constitute soft law. They are often used for political pressure on governments to act or regulate an issue according to a specific guidance."

"Lobbies supporting changes on family law, as well as institutions such as the Ombudsman," said Masouridou, "recall specific extracts from selected CoE’s recommendations, causing, deliberately, confusion over the scope and the context of Greece’s obligations deriving from international law. It should be clarified at all levels that the protection of victims of domestic violence is absolute and does not allow for any measure that protects or covers the perpetrators at the detriment of the rights of the victims."

According to Nikolaidis, who is also a member and former chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, the Council of Europe body responsible for monitoring the Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse,  there is now a tendency in various European countries to revise “shared parenting” or “alternating habitation” measures, as they are proving “non viable”. 

“The same is true,” Nikolaidis told us, “for international institutions such as the Council of Europe and its various committees: in a recent discussion of the committee for the protection of the rights of children who are deprived of parental care due to divorce or other causes, any mention of such measures was omitted to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations.”  

“There is a confusion,” he said, “between the widely accepted benefits for a child of continued contact with both parents and the dubious promotion of the spurious ‘alienation syndrome’ or ‘alternating habitation’ as a general rule. It is one thing to observe that children of separated couples can benefit from quality contact with both parents. But this is achieved primarily by former couples that find a way to communicate for the benefit of their children. To apply findings based on this observation to cases of separated parents in conflictual divorces and legal battles, and to use them to support legal and administrative measures, such as those we saw in Greece, is a leap of logic and a methodological sleight of hand.”

“It is a shame,” Nikolaidis concluded, “that even respected academics, but also institutions like the Greek Ombudsman, have had such a lapse of judgement.”

The split 

In the days leading up to the Parliament Plenary Session debate, the disagreements over the bill that had been brewing within the governing party became public. Two New Democracy MPs, former ministers Marieta Giannakou and Olga Kefalogianni, publicly expressed their objections to the bill, reiterating the main points of criticism that had emerged during public consultation.

Τhe minister of Justice retorted in an interview that the two MPs’ objections were rooted in their “personal experiences,” which was “no way to legislate”. Giannakou countered with the question if the minister would have said as much if the objections had been raised by men. 

The two MPs then went on to file a proposal for ten amendments to the bill, tackling the most problematic points. It was the first instance of such determined opposition to government policy during New Democracy’s two years in office. The ministry rejected the amendments.

During discussion in the Parliamentary Committee, Giannakou criticised the ministry for not meeting with established women’s organisations and excluding them from the dialogue on family law reform. “By contrast,” she said, “we saw improbable organisations, such as GON.IS., Joint Custody, Active Dads, tremendous adverts in support of the bill, which means a lot of money, and an identical letter emailed to us with various names but no actual identification. All these people love their children so much that they can’t write a letter about this issue? Or is it a company, which has the money to send all this with false names? I believe it is the second.” 

At the Plenary Session debate, on May 20-21, the opposition vigorously opposed the bill. There were some differentiations: Andreas Loverdos, former minister and MP for KINAL (Movement for Change) voiced his support for shared parenting. And Elliniki Lysi (Greek Solution), a far-right party, opposed the bill on homophobic grounds, as in their opinion it does not safeguard the traditional family. Although a few more New Democracy MPs expressed reservations about it, notably former minister of Justice Charalambos Athanassiou, most defended it strenuously — some a little too strenuously, as evidenced by one parliamentarian’s opinion that “a woman may hate her ex husband, who cheated on her, beat her and abused her, but still the child has the right to grow up with both parents”.

In an unusual turn of events, at least for parliamentary norms, when the minister of Justice was confronted by criticism that the civil code does not include a provision to the effect that parents exercise their parental function “equally” during marriage, and therefore the bill’s provision that they are to “continue” doing so when divorced is nonsensical, he decided to amend the civil code on the spot, and add “equally” to the relevant article.

It was also revealed during the debate that the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls and the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, had addressed a letter to the Prime Minister on May 17, which was highly critical of the bill and recommended “review and reconsideration of those provisions in the Bill taking into account Greece’s international human rights obligations”. It also requested that its contents “be shared with the Parliament at the earliest”. The government had not disclosed the letter to Parliament, and when confronted with it by the opposition, the Minister of Justice denied knowledge of it. 

The bill was finally enacted on May 21, with opposition parties either abstaining or voting against it. No corrections were made, despite the extensive criticism. The new legislation is the first to radically change provisions regarding the custody of children after a divorce, since the modernisation of family law that took place in 1983.

Barely a few minutes after the voting was concluded, Act Against Parental Alienation, the facebook page run by Marios Andrikopoulos, shared a curious post: a photograph of Grigoris Dimitriadis, General Secretary to the Prime Minister. No explanation was offered.

Other social media accounts associated with the lobby celebrated their victory in more overt ways: 

“The battle was triumphantly won, gentlemen,” one post read. “We move ahead according to the basic plan, without a STEP back. We turn our heavy artillery against the judiciary, we load, we lock and we WAIT! Let the members of this group who leak things tell the Union of Judges and Prosecutors that we have them in our sights.”

Yiota Masouridou

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Modern Greek history has seen its fair share of brutalities, but few among them have been as little discussed as the ways in which children have been mistreated, abused, neglected and institutionalised by the State. From the late 19th century, when a prototype welfare system was first put in place under the Greek Royal Family, all the way to the nationalisation of welfare from the 1970s onwards, one constant has been that children have concerned the State as props in the political game or as potential perpetrators of crime — usually both. This chronic undermining of children’s rights affected most aspects of the public sector; and its traces are still visible today.

A recent video of a policeman beating up an eleven-year-old child in the outskirts of Athens, that surfaced on social media, raised the question of what ideas police and other authorities continue to have regarding the treatment of minors — whether suspected offenders or not. ((The video is available (in Greek) here, from ERT, the Greek Public Broadcaster.)) The Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, took to Twitter to condemn the incident, stating that “whoever hits minors does not have a place anywhere”. ((Tweet is available (in Greek) here.)) The speed of the Minister’s reflexes can perhaps be explained by the fact that the memory of the 2008 murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, shot by a police officer in downtown Athens, is still fresh. 

The consequences of Grigoropoulos’s murder were staggering: Athens, and other Greek cities, burned during spontaneous riots that lasted for weeks. But the mistreatment of children by officials has also been documented in many other, less explosive, instances: some research has shown that children victims of abuse have been made to recount their ordeal to authorities up to fourteen times, in what cleary amounts to secondary abuse in the hands of the State; children who have been removed from their families are kept in hospitals, despite not being in need of hospitalisation, sometimes for years; and at least one institution has been strapping disabled children to their beds and locking them in cages. ((See our detailed report on the Lechaina unit for children with disabilities: "Hell as an Institution".)) Authorities have described such practices as unavoidable, necessary, or “for the good of the children”.

It is impossible to explain the persistence of such practices, at least in part, without considering the way that historical events have shaped Greek authorities’ attitudes toward minors. 

In the Hands of the Lord

Institutionalisation of children had been introduced very soon after the foundation of the Greek State, with the City of Athens already operating an Orphanage for Abandoned Infants in 1838. However, a quasi-system of fostering also existed, with foster families often paid a meagre fee to host abandoned children, and institutionalisation was in part seen as a solution to abuse and neglect within this unregulated framework. 

The Athens Municipal Nursery was founded by the city’s Mayor in 1859, and brought under the auspices of the Royal Family in the 1870s. According to its own data, between its foundation and the mid 1960s, it hosted over 50.000 children. During its peak, it hosted about 600 at one time. As Maria Athanassopoulou and Marianna Drakopoulou write in their Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece, it was within the Municipal Nursery that the first attempts were made to systematically document child ailments and statistically study infant mortality. ((See Maria Athanasopoulou, Mariana Drakopoulou, A Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece (Istoriki anadromi gia ta ektheta vrefi stin Ellada), To Vima tou Asklipiou, tome 9, issue 1, Jan-March 2010, available online (in Greek) here.)) 

As was common in many countries — and remains today — the Municipal Nursery also introduced a vrefodohos, or baby hatch, where mothers could abandon their babies anonymously. On the outside, there was an inscription from Psalm 27: “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.” 

Also on the initiative of the Royal family, the Patriotic Foundation for Social Welfare and Perception, or PIKPA, was founded in 1914, initially as the “Patriotic Association of Greek Women”. Although its initial mandate was to cater for the families of soldiers fighting in the war, after the 1920s it gradually shifted to the sheltering of orphaned and displaced children. 

By the end of the 1930s, even the few progressive ideas about government and lawmaking that had emerged in Greece during the interwar period had been snuffed out — first by dictatorship, then by war and occupation. Civil war followed, then two decades of “feeble democracy” and a military junta, until a tumultuous return to democratic politics finally led to stability and the relative strengthening of public institutions. Only then, near the end of a seventy year period, did a political consensus appear that the State should provide a safety net for children, who had either broken the law or been neglected or abused. 

The Youth Problem

Dictator Ioannis Metaxas ruled Greece from 1936 to 1941, a period known as the 4th of August Regime. Although his legacy of oppression has been somewhat tempered by the fact that he denied fascist Italy’s demand to allow Italian troops to occupy Greek territory, his regime was totalitarian and he was an admirer of fascism. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had reciprocated Metaxas’s admiration in his official visit to Greece in 1936. Although the 4th of August Regime was not in the strictest sense fascist, and Metaxas personally was more influenced by Portugese dictator António Salazar, it did have common traits with fascism and nazism, including the targeting of youth for indoctrination. In 1936, Metaxas created the National Union of Youth, or EON, the Greek version of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio and the Hitlerjugend, which sought to shape minors into future supporters — if not functionaries — of the regime.

As was the case with every other fascist government in Europe, Metaxas’s policy choices often attempted to counter the voices pushing for progressive reforms, inspired by European Social Democracy that had bloomed in the beginning of the century. In her 2013 book “Youth in Peril: Supervision, Reformation and Justice for Minors after the War” ((«Νέοι εν κινδύνω»: Επιτήρηση, αναμόρφωση και δικαιοσύνη ανηλίκων μετά τον πόλεμο», Polis publications, 2013)), Efi Avdela, a Professor of Modern History in the University of Crete, has written about a number of progressive sociologists, legal theorists, feminists and socialists in the interwar era, who advocated among other things in favour of introducing welfare instead of penalisation for minors. According to Avdela’s account, the “criminalisation vs. welfare” debate would go on for decades after the war, although the scales would always tip heavily towards the former.

Two laws by the Metaxas government would cement the idea that children in peril should be treated as criminals (with all the implications that this word entailed at the time) to be reformed, instead of more progressive approaches to welfare. In December 1939, a law introduced Judges and Prosecutors for Minors. A year later, after Greece had entered the war against the Axis, a concise plan on operating reforming institutions was made into law, introducing two new entities subject to the State Prosecutor: the State Prefect for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors. They were both mainly tasked with guiding minors through the justice system, whether that meant carrying out social research on a minor’s background, or providing support for the minor that went through the system. They were mostly staffed by volunteers.

A month after passing the 1940 law, with Greece on the brink of Axis occupation, Metaxas died. But conservative conceptions of juvenile delinquency were crystallised in his laws, and the newly founded entities began working on minors, although their practices were modified to also address the humanitarian crisis caused by the occupation. According to Avdela’s findings, 4.600 minors went through the justice system in 1941 alone, but most of the volunteers’ work was focused on gathering and distributing food and clothing.

From 1947 onwards, some Societies for the Protection of Minors began operating their own institutions, which provided an interim shelter for rehabilitation between the time a minor was released from a reformation centre and the time they went free back to society. Until the fall of the Military Junta, in 1974, when Greek state institutions would gradually become more “liberalised”, the Prefects for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors would deal with all sorts of “moral panics” that focused on youth cultures: “teddy-boyism”, rock ‘n’ roll, sexual liberation and leftism — all filed under “anti-social behaviour”.

War, Children

During the Greek Civil War, the issue of child protection took a darker turn for both competing sides, and the particulars of what actually happened are subject to debate until today. In 1947, the United States of America began providing military, technical and financial assistance to the Greek government and its National Army against the Democratic Army of Greece, formed by the Greek Communist Party and former resistance guerrillas. The scale of U.S. military assistance meant that the government could now launch air attacks against guerrilla strongholds, which included the first documented use of napalm bombs. 

From 1948, when the war scales started tipping in favour of the government, the guerillas began transferring children away from the conflict zones of northern Greece that were being bombed, to countries of the Eastern Bloc. Pro-government voices named this paidomazoma (literally, “child-gathering”), after the much older practice of Devshirme, or “child levy”, in which Ottoman authorities abducted children from among their Balkan Christian subjects, converted them to Islam and trained them for military or civil service. Pro-Democratic Army voices, in turn, countered by calling the practice paidososimo (“child-saving”) or sotiria (“salvation”). Up to this day, left-wing and progressive historians have been debating with conservatives, as well as the far-right, on whether this was a humanitarian operation or recruitment.

A year earlier, Paul I had ascended the throne of the Kingdom of Greece and his wife, Frederica of Hanover, had become Queen. More than any of her predecessors or successors, Frederica was actively involved in politics and was often in the public spotlight.

Τhe Royal Family of Greece had patronised all sorts of high-society philanthropic societies since the 19th century, among which several devoted to children, with a special focus on juvenile delinquency. Frederica combined the Royal Family’s tradition of philanthropy with her own penchant for politics, and began an operation parallel to the guerrillas’ paidomazoma, thereby removing children from conflict zones and placing them in special institutions that she founded, called Paidopoleis (“Child cities”). 

This operation, introduced by Royal Decree in 1947, was named the “Charity Drive ‘Welfare for the Northern Provinces of Greece’ Under the High Authority of Her Majesty, the Queen”, although everyone would refer to it simply as Charity Drive (Eranos in Greek), or after 1955 as Royal Welfare. It was carried out by the National Army. Fifty-two such Paidopoleis were opened all over Greece, all working under a similar model: a strict upbringing, and a daily military-style regimen that would inscribe “proper values” to children.

During her youth in Hanover, Frederica had been a member of the Hitler Youth, and in Greece she was considered sympathetic towards the Nazi regime (as well as the United States). In his book on the children of the civil war ((Λουκιανός Χασιώτης, Τα Παιδιά του Εμφυλίου, Βιβλιοπωλείο της Εστίας, 2013)), historian Loukianos Hasiotis claims that the Charity Drive was at least partially modelled after the Franco regime’s Auxilio Social, which employed similar messages. 

Since the Greek Civil War is now widely accepted as the first episode of the Cold War, it should come as no surprise that the conflict over children was also played out on an international level. The Greek government branded the removal of children from conflict zones by the guerrillas as a “genocide”, a position accepted by the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) in its 1948 report. The idea was also promoted by officials with prominent positions on the international stage, like the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul. The United Nations Committee was tasked with investigating what the guerrillas were doing — but, naturally, not what was happening in the Paidopoleis. 

Thus, until historical research caught up, what is known about the Paidopoleis of the era mostly came from oral narratives of the children that grew up in them. In 2007, when a popular historical programme on Greek television, The Time Machine, aired two episodes about the children of the Civil War, the testimonies of people that had lived in the Paidopoleis during their childhood were divergent even within the same episode. This disagreement in testimonies of the children, now in their old age, persists in the popular press to this day.((See, for expample, Marina Karpozilou, “Growing up in Frederica’s Pedopoleis: The ‘Guerrilla-striken children of the ‘Big Mother’” (in Greek: “Μεγαλώνοντας στις παιδουπόλεις της Φρειδερίκης: Τα 'ανταρτόπληκτα' παιδιά της 'Μεγάλης Μητέρας'”), News247.gr, 9/1/2016)) Some reminisce about their time in the Pedopoleis with nostalgia and others with a more critical view, even sparking literary debates: in his 2009 book, The Blurry Deep ((Γιάννης Ατζακάς, Ο Θολός Βυθός, Άγρα)), author Yiannis Atzakas recalls his time in a Paidopoli as trauma haunting him well into his middle age, while Antonis Venetis, in his 2014 book Letters ((Αντώνης Ν. Βενέτης, Επιστολές, Αρμός)) considers Frederica’s Drive beneficial to children and states his belief that “the ‘blurry deep’ can only be found in fixations, prejudices and obsessions”.

Under Frederica, the PIKPA became the second pillar of childcare, a sort of supplement to the Paidopoleis, housing children that had been orphaned in the war. PIKPA structures followed a similar regiment of strict, military-style upbringing and carried out adoptions, as well as absorbed some of the prominent figures of Frederica’s Charity Drive. Lina Tsaldari, the widow of former Prime Minister Panagis Tsaldaris, was one of the aristocratic “Appointed Ladies” who actively participated in the Charity Drive. Ιn 1950 she became the President of PIKPA.

The third pillar of Frederica’s childcare initiatives was the “Houses of the Child”. These were small daycare centers in the villages of rural Greece (mainly in the north) that after 1950 started taking in children while their parents were working. Without a public education system in place, especially in these remote areas, the Houses of the Child, 140 in total, acted as a nursery or elementary school — with a twist. In them, children would be taught farming and technical skills, while also being indoctrinated with “religious and patriotic values”.

The Eranos might have been Frederica's personal project, but its funding was very much public. Royal Welfare was funded by special import taxes, tariffs on cigarettes (two cigarettes in every pack), percentages of cinema tickets, a part of workers’ wages, and other measures. Researchers have calculated that between 1949 and 1956, the Royal Welfare Foundation took in more than 186 million drachmas — and a lot more after that.((More information on relevant activities by the Greek Royal Family is available (in Greek) in research by the Ios journalistic outfit.))

For the majority of children that were taken to Eastern Bloc countries, it wasn’t until the 1980s and the campaign of the centre-left PASOK government for the right-of-return of political refugees that they would see Greece again.

Leftists and progressives have been claiming for decades that the Charity Drive was the real paidomazoma. In any case, after the Democratic Army’s defeat and the end of the Civil War, only 14 of the paidopoleis continued to operate. Nowadays, four of them are still working as institutions for children without families.

Searching for Roots

Mary Theodoropoulou runs “Roots”, an NGO, from a small apartment in Kesariani. Historically known as the place where in 1944 the Nazis executed 200 communist political prisoners that had like many others been handed over to them by the collaborationist authorities, Kaisariani is a working class neighborhood in Athens, where the Communist Party still gets one of its highest percentages. 

Abandoned as a newborn in the Athens Municipal Nursery baby hatch, Theodoropoulou has often appeared in the media talking about her quest to find her biological parents, after she discovered in her twenties that she had been adopted. Her efforts to date have not been successful. She and seven others, all of whom had also stayed at the Municipal Nursery as children, founded the NGO in the late 1990s, to help people search for their biological parents.

Theodoropoulou has done extensive work on institutions. Not only did Rizes produce the only comprehensive study that looked into the state of Greek institutions for children in 2015, but her work on tracing the roots of adopted children means she has heard a massive amount of personal stories about what has been happening inside these institutions.

After World War II, according to Theodoropoulou, there was a further, major shift towards institutionalisation. “The practice of trofoi, foster mothers that were paid to breast-feed and take care of babies, had been in place since the late nineteenth century,” she said. “A shortage of milk and absolute poverty meant that babies would die otherwise”. State institutions mostly acted as halfway houses that would assign a newborn to a trofos after a short stay. Later, after the War, the trofoi acted as a means to relieve the institutions from the strain caused by the huge numbers of children.

Theodoropoulou told us how, after the war was over, the trofoi framework was expanded. PIKPA, which took care of many of the orphaned or abandoned children, would now hand them over to families, some of whom took in numerous children. “But there was no framework,” she said. “There were no rules on hygiene, no supervision and the remuneration of foster parents was low and infrequent. A trofos would bring back the body of a baby she had taken in and say to the Nursery staff that ‘this is frozen’ — meaning dead. In other cases, foster families abandoned children all over again. There were also cases of abuse, even rape. All these things undermined foster care and institutions gained ground.”

The suffering of children that went through the foster care system unsupervised could be prolonged even after they were out of it. Theodoropoulou told us the story of a boy who tried to report that his foster parents had sexually abused him. He was deemed mentally ill and forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution. In other cases, disabled children, and children with mental illness or developmental problems, would end up in the PIKPA of Leros, founded in 1963 to take in children from the Public Pediatric Neuropsychiatric Hospital “Daou Pentelis”, as part of the overall project of transferring — and isolating — the mentally ill from all over the country to Leros. The PIKPA of Leros formed part of the so-called “Psychopath Colony”, established on the island in 1957, and now known as the infamous kolastirio (“hellhole”). Many of those committed to the kolastirio would not leave until an international deinstitutionalisation initiative in the 1990s, funded by the EU, after a series of stories in the international press and a documentary had revealed the horrible conditions to which patients had been subjected. ((Deinstitutionalization in Leros has been documented in various sources. Psychiatrists who participated in the process like Ιοannis Loukas, Ιοannis Tsiantis, Theodoros Megalooikonomou and Felix Guattari, among others, have all written their own accounts and commentaries on it.))

Since 1939, when it came under the authority of the Ministry of Health, PIKPA has gone through a great number of changes in administrative structure and oversight, but by the 1950s and 1960s, it expanded almost to the size of a full healthcare and welfare system for minors. At its peak, its services included everything from schools for medical personnel and mobile medical units to clinics, hospitals and nursery schools. Since 1925, it had also been operating summer camps from June to the end of September for quality time and healing for children suffering from tuberculosis. The “exoches”, as they were called, stopped during the war, but began operating again after 1945. In 1948, their mandate was expanded to accept impoverished children with problems in development, or any chronic disease, and in 1951 to include working children, and all children monitored by doctors. In 1956, PIKPA put together its first structure for disabled children in Voula. Gradually, it would end up running most of the institutions for disabled children in Greece. 

Institutionalisation in the Paidopoleis, the orphanages and the nurseries gave rise to a different problem that haunts families until today: illegal adoptions. In her memoirs, Frederica had claimed that communist women had been abandoning their children and even that she witnessed a woman literally throwing her baby away, which was supposedly picked up by an army officer and handed over to her. After the military junta of 1967-1974 fell, communist guerrillas that had been exiled in camps in the islands reported that their children were abducted from there. In fact, the children were taken to the Paidopoleis or the PIKPA, and were then sold to foster parents in the United States, often assisted by officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, as well as Greek-American Organisations ((The Greek-American Organization AHEPA was found to have been involved in a trafficking ring for children - see, for example: The adopted Greek children of the Cold War, Margarita Pournara | Kathimerini)). Although the Greek press had published stories on the issue since the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1996 when U.S. media would start digging into the story and get to the bottom of it, that the full extent of what had happened would be revealed.

Discovering the Victim

After King Constantine’s failed counter-coup attempt against the Military Junta, in December 1967, the Royal Family was forced to flee the country. So, in a strange twist of fate, it was the dictators who brought welfare, including child protection, under the purview of the State. With a Law Decree, in 1970, all the Royal Foundations and Charities — along with their funding provisions — were absorbed into the National Welfare Organisation. Their role did not change significantly for the next decade, although Greece’s evolution into a more advanced economy, after the long and tumultuous process of post-war reconstruction, meant that the numbers of children in peril would gradually start to decrease.

It wasn’t until 1981, when centre-left PASOK came to power, that the welfare system would advance into the next phase. One of PASOK’s most important and enduring achievements was the creation of the National Healthcare System, or ESY, in 1983, which put in place a concise framework for healthcare that also included aspects of welfare. The Ministry overseeing it was now renamed the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The first eight years of PASOK in power, from 1981 to 1989, included many decisive progressive reforms in worker’s rights, civil rights and education, but welfare was still mostly understood as benefits, and were lagging behind the drastic changes overtaking Greek society. Not only did the National Welfare Organisation go through no significant change in the 1970s and 1980s, but especially with regard to child protection, the idea of preventing victimisation and abuse, although gaining traction in Europe, was not present in any sector of the Greek state.

Xeni Dimitriou, the former Chief Prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court, has served three tenures as a State Prosecutor for Minors over three different decades. She has gone through thousands of pages of legal theory on children, attended hundreds of conferences and exchanged opinions with dozens of other prosecutors all over the world. When we met her, shortly after her recent retirement, she spoke to us about her firsthand experience of what Greece’s long refusal to acknowledge the victimisation of children had led to. In her early days as Prosecutor for Minors in the 1980s — ”an unprivileged position, almost a punishment back then” — she witnessed time and again policemen marching into her office with arrested children that had been severely beaten. One boy came in with massively swollen ears. He told her that they had put clothespins in his ears to interrogate him and had hanged him upside down from the precinct’s balcony to scare him into confessing. In other cases, following the letter of the law, she was forced to put six and seven-year-old kids on trial, or send underage lawbreakers away in institutions that were practically prisons.

Dimitriou referred to Kalliopi Spinelli, a well-known criminologist as her “teacher, the teacher of all of us”. Spinelli is credited, among many things, with proposing the replacement of the term “juvenile criminals” with “juvenile offenders”, and with advocating for a pedagogical instead of a penal approach to justice for the underage. A few other prominent legal theorists and professionals gradually began to advocate for a different relation between the children and the State.

Modern international ideas on children’s rights speak only of “victims,” Dimitriou insisted. “We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking,” she said. “Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who took that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world. The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold aspect. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold aspect. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim. Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.”

In a conference speech Dimitriou gave in 1991, in-between her tenures as Prosecutor for Minors, she said that a bill for “Units of Care for Minors” had been drafted since 1984. The purpose of the plan was to set up a structure so that “juvenile offenders until 12 years of age would not be involved in any way with suppression mechanisms such as the police, the Prosecutor and the Court for Minors, but would be taken care by welfare services instead”. She then went on to describe best practices found in existing institutions — stopping at one point to wonder whether “it’s time to legislate that juvenile delinquents could be placed into foster families. The society responds positively. Why delay any more?”

Dimitriou’s 1991 speech echoed the ideas that would start to shape new concepts of child welfare. In 1985 and 1990, the UN had published guidelines on handing justice to juvenile delinquents and the prevention of delinquency in minors respectively. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was also signed at the time.

Things were changing, but in the case of Greece, the pace was and remains slow. The Greek governments of the 1990s made a few attempts to modernise the welfare system, or rather to establish one, since throughout their evolution the various services had operated independently. In 1992, a law practically dissolved the National Welfare Organisation and the PIKPA, in an attempt to create a unified system that was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. 

Another law, in the same year, introduced legal procedures for foster care and was amended in 1996, by adding a stricter framework for the role of social investigations in adoption and foster parenting procedures. That law also took an important step by changing Metaxas’s laws to introduce social services in the courts and the State Prosecutor offices, although their mandate remained to handle the delinquency of minors. 

Probably the most important step at the time was taken in 1998 by another PASOK government, this time under Prime Minister Kostas Simitis, when the creation of a National System of Social Care was attempted. In the following years, the former PIKPA units were successively centralised, then decentralised again. Generally under the oversight of regional administration, these units followed divergent courses. One post-PIKPA incarnation, the Lechaina unit for disabled children, achieved world-wide notoriety for its horrific conditions.

The new system gave explicit roles to regional governments, but also cleared up the terms under which private NGO’s could carry out welfare programmes. Thus, the 1990s was also the decade when NGOs would increasingly start to step in and cover for the shortcomings in child protection. The Greek branch of SOS Children’s Villages had been active since 1975, but now non-government care for children would diversify. The Smile of the Child was created in 1995 and The Ark of the World would follow in 1998. All three of these organisations would grow in the years that followed and actively supplement state welfare. 

The decade ended with a presidential decree in 1999 that attempted to contain illegal adoptions by also giving all oversight responsibilities to regional welfare services — Regional institutions and Directorates of Social Care. With an amendment in 2003, even more welfare responsibilities would be directed to the Regional Health Services that had been created a year earlier. According to the explanatory report that came with the draft of the bill, this would allow for “better coordination, monitoring and evaluation” of social welfare services. The UN Committee overseeing the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child noted this attempt, but still found it fell short of a coherent Child Protection System. Some of the problems highlighted by the Committee included the lack of a clear mandate between authorities and a central body that would coordinate all services, problems that are still partially present to this day.

Xeni Dimitriou’s 1991 speech ended by saying that “maybe it is time for juvenile law to grow up”. It marked the beginning of a period of intense pressure by child protection professionals for a proper children’s welfare system to be designed and implemented. But in the 1990s, a welfare system that would address problems that could not be solved with benefits was still a challenge. Also, the word deinstitutionalization had just been popularised for the first time after the attempts to change conditions in Leros, but that programme, which continued for the best part of the decade, would suffer setbacks. Voices of experts speaking about the need to address different vulnerabilities or how institutionalised child welfare could actually be harmful, were only just beginning to be heard.

As it happens, the regressive character of children’s welfare was officially, albeit mostly symbolically, challenged in 2010, by an amendment to a law of the Metaxas regime, mandating the Societies for the Protection of Minors to not only deal with “delinquency”, but also the “victimisation” of minors.

However, just as the need to shift the focus of the child protection system was becoming obvious to policy-makers, Greece found itself in the throes of a terrible financial crisis. Successive governments have since then introduced a variety of “plans” for children’s welfare, which have one thing in common: almost none of their provisions have been implemented.

Ioannis Metaxas

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The Unit stands at the exit from the town of Lechaina in the direction of the village of Myrsini, facing the substation pylons of the Greek public power corporation. The building, which belongs to the episcopal see of Elis, is a four-storied, cross-shaped construction crowned by a dome. Its design could hardly be described as suitable for its intended use.

Perhaps that was the reason it was deemed necessary to restrain the seven-year-old blind girl who had been admitted to the institution at the age of three. Fully mobile yet blind, brimming with the energy of childhood, she would have needed someone to watch over her constantly. Lechaina has always been understaffed. “For her own good”, then, someone decided that she should be locked up in a cage. By the time she was sixteen, she could not even articulate her own name.

The Lechaina Unit was founded in 1987 as a "Child Care Centre", or KEPEP, and began operating two years later, with the mandate of caring for disabled children between the ages of six and eighteen. In its initial conception, it was intended for the children of the Region of Elis and the wider Peloponnese. Progressively, disabled children from all over Greece were brought in, either following a request by their parents or a State Prosecutor's order. Formerly an independent institution, since 2013 it is one of the annexes of the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, which is supervised by the Welfare General Secretariat of the Ministry of Labour. As a rule, the care workers at the Unit are unskilled and their numbers insufficient: five healthcare workers, seven assistants and five auxiliary contract staff for 44 residents, at present. The carpenter who fashioned the cages is also considered institution personnel.

Frozen in Time

In the Lechaina Unit, disabled children were strapped to their beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. These practices were hardly a secret.

In 2008, a group of European volunteers who spent some time at the Lechaina Centre, shocked by the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children, drafted a report which they distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations.

In September 2009, a delegation from the Children’s Ombudsman's office, comprised of the Ombudsman himself, Giorgos Moschos, the Ombudswoman for Health and Social Protection, two scientific experts and May Papoulia, a psychologist and wife of the then President of the Republic, visited the institution for the first time. In March 2011, the Ombudsman issued a damning report on the Unit’s inhuman conditions.

Shortly before the publication of the delegation’s findings, in February 2011, the cameras of ERT, the Greek public broadcaster, entered the institution. The news story aired in the main evening news and Andreas Loverdos, the Minister of Health at the time, intervened on air.

After lauding the work of the manager of Lechaina, the minister announced his intention to allow journalists inside all of the country’s institutions to report on the living conditions. When the newscaster observed that journalists should shed light on issues, but it was the Minister's job to solve them, Loverdos promised that five more healthcare staff and an additional three workers would be hired by the end of the year, attributing the torture brought to light by the news report to understaffing. He also promised that new premises would be secured, so that minors could be separated from adults.

Three years later, pictures from Lechaina spread across the world, when the BBC published an article headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. A few days later, Katerina Papakosta, who by then had become Deputy Minister for Health in a new government formed by New Democracy, visited the institution in a move that seemed rather forced, after the outcry that followed the article’s publication.

In her statements to the media, she claimed that the Unit did not fall within her mandate but that of the Ministry of Welfare and stated: “I came here on my own initiative to examine (the situation), because I have been informed by scientific experts that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

Having normalised cages as “cots", Papakosta, too, promised the recruitment of qualified personnel.

It should be noted that the widespread use of chemical suppression through medication, the practice of restraining children to their beds using straps, the use of cages and electronic surveillance, were already condemned in the 2011 report of Children’s Ombudsman as “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions.”

As to the reassurances given to the Deputy Minister by "experts", it should be noted that in the course of the Ombudsman's investigation, which led to the aforementioned report, the Unit’s psychiatrist at the time, Dionysios Tsangos, was asked to submit a written reply. In it, he stated: “I clearly acknowledge that restraining a patient with straps largely violates individual human rights, but they are superseded by the right of life itself. Given the severity of the patients’ mental disability, it is absolutely necessary to restrain them with straps to avert any self-harming acts which the patient will naturally not become aware of due to their condition. The straps will continue to exist for as long as such severe, high-risk level cases continue to exist. As to the matter of the wooden enclosures, a proposal was submitted by the scientific team in April 2008 and a report by child psychologist Mrs Lolou will follow. Certainly, patient accommodation can be improved with the use of more suitable beds, successfully combining the goals of development and security.”

The Ombudsman's report noted that the Unit's psychiatrist had responded without submitting “any medical opinions on specific patient cases, nor any scientific evidence supporting the need for restraint”. It also pointed out that “the Recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture under The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment do not appear to justify physical restraint, with the exception of psychiatric units for adult patients and only under certain conditions. Confinement to beds/enclosures in particular, is considered an unsuitable psychiatric practice and constitutes degrading treatment.” As to the decision to “use means of ‘mechanical restraint’, such as straps, its appropriateness is decided on a case-by-case, mutatis mutandis basis and is used rarely and only when prescribed by a doctor (or following a doctor’s immediate notification and receipt of approval). Recourse to it should be made exceptionally, as a last resort and for the minimum duration necessary, while its long-term use has no therapeutic properties and is considered misuse in therapeutic terms. This practice cannot be excused by staff shortages, as every instance of restraint demands that a member of staff provide immediate personal assistance and constant supervision, while electronic surveillance cannot substitute the constant physical presence needed. At the same time, every such instance should be recorded in a special register and in the patient’s personal medical file with specific details, such as the start and end time of restraint, the doctor’s name etc. Staff must receive ongoing training in alternative, gentler methods of patient control and be educated in the effects the practice of physical restraint has on the patient.  The Authority believes that the practices chosen clearly fall outside the scope of legality and gravely contravene the duty to respect and protect the human rights of residents with serious mental disabilities.”

The situation in the Lechaina Unit, therefore, was not only fairly widely known, but also officially documented, by March 2011.

“From Asylum to Society”

Approximately a year after Deputy Minister Papakosta’s visit, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Mideniki Anohi” ("Zero Tolerance") occupied the Lechaina premises. The occupation, a protest against the abuse of disabled children taking place in the Unit, began on November 4, 2015, and lasted for four days.

We met with Antonis Rellas, a film director, disabled activist, and member of Zero Tolerance, in his apartment. He let us in himself and led us to his studio.

“We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad," he told us. "In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, ‘Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.’ We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, those who are unable to advocate for themselves, have no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present.”

A video can be found on Zero Tolerance’s youtube channel, entitled From Asylum to Society. Rellas put the footage together immediately after the occupation, to be screened for journalists during the press conference Zero Tolerance held upon its return to Athens.

“We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime," he said, "nine people in four cars, with two cameras. We wanted to record what was happening and highlight those that society rejects by relegating them to an isolated building somewhere far away, turning a blind eye to these images. We wanted to highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living. For us disabled activists, there is no such thing as a good institution. Even if Lechaina were the Hilton, it would remain a secure-type institution that violates every notion of human dignity. I have seen people restrained with ropes in other institutions too, not just Lechaina. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism. No matter how prepared we were, the reality exceeded our worst nightmares…”

During the occupation, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the State Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the human rights violations against the disabled children and youths kept at the institution.

“To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify," Rellas told us. In fact, the Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

"There are specific liabilities at stake," Rellas said. "Who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed prolonged chemical suppression?  Not holding anyone accountable is like asking us to accept that the disabled residents are not worthy of living and therefore, no criminal liabilities arise. The UN, who saw the material we gathered during the occupation, says this is torture. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed."

On November 5, 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee publicised its concluding observations after examining Greece’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Regarding the situation at Lechaina, the Committee stated that “the State party should take immediate measures to abolish the use of enclosed restraint beds and systematic sedation in psychiatric and related institutions. The State party should also establish an independent monitoring and reporting system and ensure that abuses are effectively investigated, those responsible are prosecuted, and redress is provided to the victims and their families.” Similar recommendations had been made three years earlier, with specific reference to the institution at Lechaina.

On November 13, 2015, a few days after the occupation staged by Zero Tolerance, the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO human rights watchdog, filed a complaint at the State Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court of Greece. “In view of the fact," the complaint stated, "that the long-term torture of children took place with the knowledge of all authorities, from the Ministry down to the local prosecutor’s office, while the report of the Ministry’s Committee confirms that this is standard practice in psychiatric units across the country, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court is asked to order the judicial investigation of the claims made here, instructing a public prosecutor in Athens to this end, and demanding that the Ministry of Labour immediately cease using these inhumane methods that amount to torture.”

None of this was enough to mobilise justice to pursue those responsible for the fact that disabled children and young people were being kept in confinement, physically restrained in cages of two by two by one metres, not being let outside even for an hour, medicated for psychiatric and other illnesses — despite the fact that, according to the study carried out by the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, out of the 78 people that have resided in the Lechaina unit over the years, only five had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for psychiatric disorders. 

“In Greece today," Giorgos Nikolaidis, Director of the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, told us, "no court has the legal capacity to impose such a sentence on anyone. How is it possible to tolerate that a person be subjected to this confinement and not ask who ordered it and why? Which ministers, general secretaries, which of my colleagues gave instructions that these people be restrained? Who imposed this deprivation of their rights?”

Breaking the Cages

Shortly after the occupation by Zero Tolerance, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by Harry Potter writer J. K. Rowling to promote and advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises.

At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention, with an initial duration of six months. The intervention team would release the patients from their restraints, re-examine the use of medication, and prepare them through appropriate training, so that they could either return to their families, where possible, or otherwise move to smaller hostels, where the effects of institutionalisation would be alleviated. Meanwhile, the government was supposed to form a plan to radically restructure institutions, with the ultimate aim of deinstitutionalisation.

The emergency intervention was launched in July 2016, under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. It was to last six months, because, according to Nikolaidis, "rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?"

"Unfortunately," he said "the fact of the matter is that, after a lot of pressure, they simply gave an approval so that an initiative taken by other people and institutions, with the funding of others, could be implemented. A programme that enjoyed no jurisdictional backing vis-à-vis the unit in question, its personnel, the way it functions. The political leadership just said, ‘Great, you can go to the Unit and do what you think is best’.”

Two summers later, we visited the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health for the first time. Giorgos Nikolaidis had just entered his office and was in the process of transferring a video from his phone to his PC. He invited us to view some of the material.

The first video was shot as the carpenter of the Lechaina Unit dismantled the wooden cage of a twenty-year-old man, who had been confined to it for years. The man's initial disbelief subsides, as joy and relief burst forth in almost ecstatic laughter. The camera turns back to the carpenter and switches off.

In the second video, someone else is holding the psychiatrist’s phone. The scene takes place in the sea. Nikolaidis is holding a pool noodle, the buoyant foam tube used to teach very young children how to swim. He has passed the tube under the waist of another Lechaina resident, stretched him out on his back, and sways him gently from side to side. Another outburst of joy is heard, as a long-suffering body finds relief in the water.

Antonis Rellas decided to follow the course of events from Zero Tolerance’s occupation to the promised closure of the institution not just as an activist, but as the director of a documentary about Lechaina. Having visited the Unit over thirty times these past years, he explained: “I had the chance to watch how behaviours changed. How the residents I first met, who were uncommunicative, eyes vacant as they lay strapped to beds or locked inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, began to blossom. To watch them leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, to develop their skills. We heard them speak, utter words. Some began to express specific requests, ‘I want a bedside table’, ‘I want a remote control’, ‘I want my own clothes’. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving ‘the prescribed treatment for their own good’.”

“I witnessed their fears and inhibitions," he went on. "For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps. Even after the intervention team removed their restraints, do you know how they slept at night? In the sleeping position that they had been kept for years. For them, the most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured.”

One of the many paradoxes of this story is that, despite the admission by the political leadership that institutionalisation must end, and more specifically that the Lechaina Unit must be shut down, a decision to prohibit new admissions to the institution was never officially made.

Rellas recalled such an incident: “A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. She was evidently being pressured to abandon the disabled child and focus on her ‘normal’ children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears. She took her child and left.”

 “That was not the only incident where admission was averted,” explained Nikolaidis. “We had asked for admissions to be prohibited, everyone agreed, but that agreement never translated into a legal act. I used to arrive at Lechaina and be told that the Board of Directors had admitted a new child. Every time we had to rush to right things after the fact. I would meet the parents, explain the implications of such an admission, try to understand why the family was asking for this. Usually, there was a lot of hidden pain, the decision to leave their child at an institution was not sudden.  Therefore, we created the after-school clubs for many of them, activity clubs to occupy their children after special school. The aim was to offer families some respite so that the children did not end up in an institution.”

Most of the stories shared common ground. “These were children," Nikolaidis told us, "with mental disabilities that the family had kept until their preadolescence- adolescence and then found harder to manage. They usually had other children with typical development too and struggled to look after them all. We set up this service at Lechaina and Patras so that the child could stay at a space with qualified personnel who would occupy them, train them, and then be able to return home at night.”

Resistance

The emergency intervention that was intended to last six months ended up lasting for almost three years, after repeated extensions. Experts have pointed out that reintroducing people who had been subjected to extreme and prolonged abuse into humane conditions was always going to be difficult, but their task was continually complicated by the resistance that they met.

During one of our visits to the Lechaina Unit, we met Patty Sotiropoulou, special needs educator and member of the emergency intervention team. As introductions were made, we witnessed the following incident: one of the centre’s residents had undergone surgery following self-injury to his eye. The surgeon had recommended forty-five days of bed restraint to protect the wound. Our arrival at the centre coincided with the end of his confinement and the intervention team was asking staff to transfer him to a bed. The staff resisted this move, claiming that it could be dangerous because the resident had chewed on his mattress… ten years ago!

 “One day, members of the team took a girl outside for a walk in the courtyard," an exasperated Sotiropoulou told us. "The girl fell down and needed two stitches on her chin. Not only did the staff overreact due to their reigning fear of accountability, but the doctor who put in the stitches also instructed that she be kept inside a cage for ten days. Ten days confinement for two stitches! And when you point out the absurdity, you just get told: ‘doctor’s orders’.

Sotiropoulou said she had been exhausted by the constant battle over matters that should be self-evident. "No culture has been fostered," she said, "that it is unacceptable to keep children inside cages in an institution. If we had seen a child with typical development inside a cage in those news reports, the reaction would have been different. In the case of disabled children, both the system itself and, unfortunately, a large section of society accepts all too willingly that ‘there is no alternative’, that ‘the specialists say they need to be physically restrained so they must be right’, and ‘thank goodness there is an institution to house them’.”

The battle over matters that should be self-evident, as Sotiropoulou put it, rages at the Lechaina Unit even when the proposed changes are also intended to benefit the workers themselves. 

“During the intervention," Sotiropoulou told us, "we trained staff in the use of a small crane to lift people from the bed. It is essential that the residents change positions. It might not sound like that big of a deal, but there is a world of difference between spending twenty-four hours a day confined to a bed and getting up, both physically and in terms of receiving some stimulation. At the end of the day, only our team and the volunteers use the crane."

"It's a small example of the resistance here," she said. "You have a goal, to get people out of bed. And it can’t be achieved. You give them a tool that can help the carers, too. And I say this being fully aware that just changing the sheets and diapers of so many people is extremely taxing physically. And yet, they will not use it. So, on the one hand, you see a resistance to change, even when the change is beneficial to them, and on the other hand, you realise that they cannot appreciate the importance of people being out of bed.”

The deinstitutionalisation that never was

In December 2017, the Greek Government announced that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Unit and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future, setting out the transition process, the facilities to be developed, the timetable, etc.

 “Incidentally," Nikolaidis told us, "I should mention that we had already drafted such a detailed plan and submitted it to the government, as well as the board of directors of the Centre of Social Welfare, and the relevant services of the Commission and other bodies both within Greece and abroad. We had also discussed it with the permanent personnel of the Unit. I’m not saying that this was the best plan and should be adopted as the final detailed plan. I’m just saying that the commitment made by the government to form such a plan never materialised. The most disheartening aspect is that this time the funds are there, so that’s not the impediment.”

The emergency intervention ended in February 2019. When we asked Nikolaidis why the Institute of Child Health did not continue with the intervention, as well as why the collaboration between the Institute and Lumos was not renewed, he replied: “Because in February 2019, the representatives of Lumos visiting Greece met with the Minister for Social Solidarity Theano Fotiou and were informed that for as long as they cooperated with us, any cooperation with the Greek government was out of the question. So Lumos interrupted its cooperation with us and began working with NGO SOS Children's Villages, which was recommended to them.”

We went on ask why in Nikolaidis’s opinion the government, through its minister, would do this. 

“I think,” Nikolaidis told us, “it was because we kept raising the need to close down the unit, and for a number of real actions, not PR, leading to the residents’ psychosocial rehabilitation and deinstitutionalisation to be taken. Ms Fotiou had probably decided that she wanted to adopt ostensible rather than true actions. The timing also coincided with the completion of a phase of our actions in Lechaina, with the gradual and progressive transfer of all the residents out of confinement, be it cages, or straps or any of the other inventive methods used by the institution. Our task had been to provide interim emergency relief geared towards the abolition of confinement, pending the implementation of a deinstitutionalisation scheme. Having completed that work, having drawn up a plan for deinstitutionalisation and secured a budget for that purpose, and seeing that no steps were being taken in that direction, we had no intention of remaining at Lechaina to window-dress the perpetuation of institutionalisation.”

Former Minister Fotiou did not comment on these statements by Nikolaidis, despite our repeated requests. Lumos likewise did not reply to our request for comment. SOS Children’s Villages, which signed a cooperation agreement with Lumos in May 2019, replied that “after a request by Lumos and the Ministry, we agreed to become the organisation responsible for dispensing salaries to personnel that was hired for three months, without participating in any way in the scientific work, or observing its implementation on location”. 

In the event, personnel to staff the action team that would implement a three-year deinstitutionalisation programme was hired in June 2019 on twelve-month contracts. Selected by competition, team members have no work experience in matters of deinstitutionalisation. This move provoked the strong reaction of the institution’s staff, who once again reiterated their longstanding request for the recruitment of permanent personnel.

While time was again grinding to a halt in Lechaina, the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity came under increasing pressure to submit a long overdue general deinstitutionalisation strategy proposal, which was an obligation under the terms of 2014-2020 NSRF funding, and should in fact have been submitted since 2014. The Ministry asked for technical assistance from the European Commission and the Structural Reform Support Services (SRSS). A Brussels-based NGO, the European Association for People with Disabilities (EASPD), was awarded a 200.000 contract by SRSS to draw up a deinstitutionalisation plan for Greece.

In July 2019, national elections were called, SYRIZA lost power, and New Democracy found itself in government. Domna Michailidou became the new Minister. 

EASPD presented a draft paper on a national deinstitutionalisation strategy to the Ministry, as well as several experts, in January 2020. Presumably, somewhere at the end of this process, the promise made to the Lechaina residents through the emergency intervention, that they may have a chance to leave institutionalised living behind, might eventually be fulfilled. For the time being, though, they have to wait and endure - again.

When asked about the feelings their experiences at Lechaina have left them with, everyone we spoke to gave the same reply: frustration. Antonis Rellas’ response, when asked about his hopes at the start of filming the documentary, was riveting: “I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that the announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the biological family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That someone would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.”

Frustration, then, and sadness. “For us," Rellas said, "the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen and sadly, it is not mobilising.  That is the heart of the matter. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.”

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Domna Michailidou

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• Deputy Minister • Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs

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Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Michalis Kalogirou

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• Minister (former) • Ministry of Justice
• General Secretary (former) • Cabinet of Ministers

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How did you start work at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors?

The Greek Code of Criminal Procedure provided for the existence of Public Prosecutors for Minors, and they were already in place in Athens, Patras, Thessaloniki and Piraeus, but they were not functioning as an office. In the summer of 1983, when I was a young Deputy Public Prosecutor, having joined the public prosecution service in 1978, I ran into my supervisor, Mr Toumpanos, in Omonia. He told me, “Xeni, would you like to join the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors in September?” I knew what the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors was, but I had no idea of what it entailed, no relation to the various bodies and services, nothing other than the articles of the Penal Code pertaining to juvenile offenders. But I did not hesitate to accept. My agreement was driven by my love for children. I was already a mother of two and at an age where I was becoming more sensitised to issues affecting minors, in part due to motherhood.

At the time, the Public Prosecutor’s Office was housed in the Ambassadeur Hotel, an old hotel next to the IKA on Socratous Street, pending our move to the Evelpidon court complex. We were waiting for the construction of Evelpidon to be completed and office space to become available, so the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors was located there in the meantime. An office with a single secretary, who used to send summons and subpoenas to juvenile offenders. The incumbent Public Prosecutor for Minors would study the case briefs and then go try the cases at the Minor's Court, which was located on Feidiou Street at the time.

As soon as I received the proposal, I began my research. Whenever I am faced with a challenge in life, I want to get a firm grasp on the situation, to know what the new job entails. During my career, I have been called to serve at other posts too, and you don’t just turn up. You must look into things, research the field or the object of the post you have been called to serve. I did the same in anti-terrorism, where I worked for ten years. I tried to do the same when I was informed that I would be joining the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors.

Was there material available for research at the time?

I visited the Institute of Greek and Foreign Law because there was no internet at the time, or at least we did not have the skills for that kind of research. I went to the Institute and asked them to give me the international literature on the subject. They even had to order some of the books. Also, when I was officially appointed in September, someone else was appointed as my supervisor at the same time. I was a Deputy Prosecutor, so a Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance had to be appointed Supervisor, and I would be second in command. The Public Prosecutor appointed resigned. He did not want to be involved in such mundane matters, he wanted something more high-profile, he was not interested. Another prosecutor was appointed then, and our collaboration was excellent.

So, when I was appointed Deputy to the Public Prosecutor for Minors as a Deputy Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance, I went to the office to get a feel for the situation. There, I met the secretary I mentioned, who is now retired and lives in Thiva. She was very aware of the issues involved; a lot of things had registered on her radar during her time there…

Let me tell you the first thing she told me. I asked her, “What does the Public Prosecutor for Minors do here?” She said, “That is two separate questions. One question is, what does the Prosecutor do? The other question is, what can the prosecutor do?” I asked her to explain. She said, “This is what he does: here are the case briefs, theft, rape, juvenile homicide and the trial court dates for Minors' Court. But a Prosecutor can do a great many things here, Mrs Dimitriou, if they are so inclined.” A light bulb went off inside my head as I listened. In fact, while we were talking, a child entered carrying a suitcase, like a duffle bag. He had been sent to the Public Prosecutor for Minors. He walks in, the secretary asks him what he wants, and the child says, “I’ve left home, I’m not going back there, the police told me to come to tell you.” I do not remember the exact reason; he was beaten by his father or had a dispute with his father. He was a young child around twelve years old. The secretary then turned to me and said, “There you go.”

So, the secretary planted the idea of how active a role a Public Prosecutor could play for victims.

Not quite. I was cognizant of it thanks to the international literature on the subject. We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking. Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who taken that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world.

The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold mission. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold mission. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim.  Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.

Addressing the juvenile exclusively as an offender dominated at the time?

Yes. Child abuse began to be viewed as a syndrome in 1962. “Syndrome” means a condition; it now means a pathological condition with multiple repercussions. It is not a one-off event that ends with the act, its consequences extend into the future. This is what I had in mind at the time: Janus with his two faces. They are the two sides of the same coin, perpetrator and victim, and my subsequent experience showed me that such was the reality. No juvenile offender, even a juvenile traffic offender, has not previously been victimised in some way by family, friends, school, classmates etc. No one goes suddenly from being a "good kid" and so on to become an offender. They have previously been the victim of certain circumstances themselves.

You mentioned that the Public Prosecutor for Minors used to try cases in an office on Feidiou Street at the time. Why was that the case? Was it to protect minors, to avoid exposing them in a courtroom?

That was part of the thinking behind it, which persists in many provincial towns to this day. Minors' Courts inside office premises, meaning that the juvenile defendant is physically on the same level as the judges, there is no judge’s bench. That is what we saw at the time, Minors' Court Judge Maria Vasilakis and me. She was a Judge at the Court of First instance and is also a friend; we have always had a good understanding on these matters that so passionately concern us. We agreed that we did not like those premises; that it was better if the child understood that they were in a space which, while being friendly, was also a special kind of space, that they were an offender. We often tried homicide cases, children who had robbed elderly ladies or killed them, we tried murders. You cannot have the offenders in an office, the lawyers in an office, everyone sitting around a table casually, it needs to look like a courtroom.

So we made sure to move the Minors' Court to Omonia, to the building that housed the District Civil Court. The District Criminal Court and the District Civil Court, before its move to the Court of First Instance, were housed there. We requested the use of a floor and succeeded in getting it. We remodelled a room, installed a low judge’s bench, unlike other courtrooms where the judge and the prosecutor and the secretary look down on everyone. Then we moved the whole service from 8, Feidiou Street to that floor. Staff found offices where they could interview the children whose case briefs they were preparing for court or supervise them afterwards, and a more concrete service came into being. The Minors' Court became more respected and more concrete.

The courtroom, then, had a low judge’s bench, had places for the juvenile offenders, seats for the parents and the Prefects for Minors, the juvenile probation officers who assisted the minor during the trial.

We also tried to implement what the literature had taught us, namely, to have a female Public Prosecutor - male Judge on the bench and vice versa. In other words, not to bring the child before an all-male or all-female bench, to have both sexes present, because we were often dealing with a child that had a very bad relationship with their father or mother, and the child would react negatively by judging you. The child would personalise the relationships of the people judging it there and then.

Or fear on the other hand, if the parent had been abusive…

Indeed, often the parent had been abusive. We had a mother who used to beat her children mercilessly. If the child saw a female judge, they would have a terrible reaction, so we always ensured that the ratio was present. Also, after we set up the new offices in late 1985, we managed to set up a Juvenile Police Service, as we used to call it. Ultimately, it was a Subdivision in Athens with two units. There were two units in Thessaloniki and Crete respectively too, one for juvenile victims and one for juvenile offenders. In Athens, the Subdivision eventually became a Division.

So we did not confine ourselves to the Minors' Court. We were fully aware of the need to open up to other bodies and services, that a Public Prosecutor or a Judge cannot deal with delinquency or victimisation on their own. We were aware of our weaknesses and the fact that we were insufficient to handle these incidents, that we needed the assistance of people from other sectors.

In this context, we also visited the General Secretariat for Youth many times, asking it to allocate us programmes that our children from the Minors' Court could be enrolled in. 

There we met General Secretary Anna Diamantopoulou. When the opportunity for an exchange with Germany on juvenile matters arose, she called us and asked us if we wanted to participate. Of course, we wanted to go, no question about it.  She would also provide us with an interpreter because we did not speak German. The interpreter was always with us. There were five of us altogether: two of us from the judiciary corps and the rest from the General Secretariat for Youth.

That trip was a turning point. We began with a visit to the Ministry of Justice of Land Nordrhein-Westfalen and then toured all the facilities for minors in the Land. We stayed there for several days. We visited juvenile prisons and saw how they operated. We attended juvenile courts, visited “reformatories”, other detention facilities. First, we met with professionals active in the field. We saw the training they received, particularly judicial and non-judicial personnel—social workers, psychologists and child psychologists naturally, but also correctional officers, workers inside the institutions. Anyone who came into contact with the minors. Because you cannot have one service building something up and another service tearing it down. Everyone must have the same training about behaviour towards juvenile offenders. They must understand what it means to be a minor, to understand the minor’s profile, to show self-restraint.

I remember one of the workers would teach a group of children house painting. For the Germans, that is a science. There was another team learning meat cutting, the Germans see that as science too. You don’t just go to a butcher and learn to cut meat there, you have to learn the theory first, what kinds of meat there are, what beef is, the parts of the animal, how to carve it, what products you can manufacture. So, there is a science to it.

All these people had been trained in how to treat the children in question. They could be interacting with volatile children, who came from families with no boundaries, so they had to be tolerant, to be educated on juvenile issues.

To know how to set boundaries in a healthy manner?

Of course. The same applied to the correctional facility staff we met at a juvenile prison we visited. They had all received training for the specific demands of their job, it was not just a case of "you’re hired, get on with it". It was done for the juveniles concerned.

Another eye-opening experience, for me at least, was that we used to believe that this was a matter for us State bodies to deal with and no one else. There, we learned that there is room for other actors in this field, for NGOs, for private entities and individuals that can do the job well and are certified. That there is room for other bodies that can help you in the matters that arise during the handling of cases, whether they concern victims or perpetrators.  

I remember arriving in Frankfurt during the evening and being driven to Cologne. We arrive at night, and we have our first working dinner. We meet at the hotel where our German colleagues from Cologne are already waiting. We have a light dinner and the Germans instantly set to work. We almost had no time to eat, there was an agenda stating that matters were scheduled to be discussed that evening. At the hotel, as we dined, I hear them announce the schedule for our visit and find out that we will be visiting an organisation working with juvenile offenders, offenders who have committed serious acts at that. They tell us what services the organisation provides. What was that organisation? Today you would probably call it an NGO, they were called something different back then. Actually, it was a private organisation that had been set up by a former Prosecutor upon retirement.

Then they tell us that we will visit a Catholic institution that cares for victims and provides such and such things. I was in shock from the start. I used to think these were matters for the State, and I suddenly saw that they did not have to be, that we needed to open up more. And we did, my colleague and me when we returned to Greece. We said, “that’s it, we are reaching out.” We contacted universities, hospitals, private individuals and entities, institutions; we began to expand the reach of protection and come into contact with other professionals.

Up until that time, the child would come into contact with just the police officer or the judicial or correctional officer...

The correctional officer, the Prefect for Minors. Anyone who fell within the public sector would either be sent to a state institution — a place would be found if they needed protection — or to the educational institutions which existed at the time. They were akin to detention centres, one step below a detention centre if you will. There were many at the time and later they were shut down, again following our initiative.

The detention centres were the juvenile prisons, the equivalent to the current special juvenile detention establishments. At the time, there was the Korydallos Correctional Centre, and there were the reformatories. They used to be called educational institutions, and they were intended for younger children and juveniles committing minor offences. There was one for minors over sixteen at Korydallos; one for minors under twelve, situated in a building that has now been taken over by the Municipality of Korydallos. There was another educational institution, as we used to call them, for children under twelve at Kaminia. There was also the Educational Institution of Papagou for girls and the Volos Educational Institution for Minors for boys.  The Volos institution is the only one still open today, although its philosophy and the age of its inmates have changed.

How is it called today?

It is still called an Educational Institution, back then it was called the Volos Elementary Education Institution because children below the age of twelve were detained there, elementary school children. Now its orientation has changed. I visited it in 2015 because the situation was at breaking point, and I found youths up to the age of twenty-one there. The ages spanned from twelve to twenty-one. The Paraskevopoulos law rectified that.((The so-called "Paraskevopoulos law" is Law 4322 of 2015, introduced by the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Nikos Paraskevopoulos. The law provided for, among other things, changes in the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure regarding minors (Article 7). It was also controversial, because of Article 12, which provided for the "decongestion of detention facilities" through the release of prisoners who had served portions of their sentences. The latter provision was a major point of contention between the SYRIZA-led government and the major opposition at the time, New Democracy, as well as their respective friendly media. Conflict over the provision persisted until the July 2019 national elections, which were won by New Democracy.))

Consider the age-gap, imagine the sexual and all kinds of abuse taking place there. Most importantly, some of the children were held there because the investigating magistrate had imposed their stay at the institution as a restrictive condition.  This means that the magistrate had imposed a restrictive condition on youths under twenty-one, the obligation to stay there. In other words, it had been turned into a prison. A closed prison at that, nothing like I had known it in the old days when it was open to the community, just a simple institution for children under the age of twelve.   It was nothing like it, the conflicts inside were nonstop.

By then it housed 110, 120 inmates, an inconceivable number if you are talking about providing any care, no one could provide anything for them. At the time I was Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court and Mrs Koutzamani had made me responsible for minors, so with great effort and repeated visits and meetings and talks and so on, we changed the law.

For a start, no investigating magistrate can now place such a restrictive condition, it is prohibited. All the restrictive conditions placed on children detained at Volos were revoked, and the children left, except for a few cases aged 16-18 that concerned very specific offences. So an end was put to this situation, which had become a breeding ground for violence.

Were these children orphans?

They are children without a family, without a real family. They are not orphans in the sense of parental death, they are children with an inadequate parental environment. I found two brothers who had been there since the age of eight because the age range for juvenile offenders was six and a day to twenty-one years old, up until 2003, I believe. Then it became six and a day to eighteen. I tried children aged six and a day when I was the Public Prosecutor for Minors between 1983 and 1990, my first tenure at the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. I tried first and second graders because one had blinded the other with a pen or hit them. You cannot imagine what ensued, it was a real battle to change this. My belief, which I fought for, is that ten should be the lower age limit; ten to eighteen. Anyway, there was a vehement reaction, so the minimum age was raised to eight. As we speak, the age range is eight to eighteen. For those aged eight to fifteen, only reformative sentences are passed, which exclude sentences to the Volos Educational Institution for Minors. Thankfully we have shut down the other educational institutions.

What you have just described is the recurring issue: the penal management of minors. Following your return from Cologne, where the way forward became somewhat more evident, who did you start speaking to about this issue?

We addressed the ministries, the Ministry of Justice; they grew tired of seeing us all the time. We brought it to everyone’s notice, including our Supervisors. Let me give you an example. The Public Prosecutor’s Offices were moving to Building 16 of the Evelpidon court complex, where they are still housed. I campaigned for a coveted slice of the new offices to be given to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. They are the Offices of the Public Prosecutors for Minors to this day, three rooms which used to fit us all back then, I don’t think they fit everyone now. I don’t know if you have seen the premises, but to secure three rooms in such a coveted part of the building was no small feat. When the Prosecutor in charge of allocating office space to the various services managed to give me those premises, I grabbed a mop and bucket, so happy was I. At last, we would be housed in a respectable environment, we could set it up so that it was accessible to children, we could have it decorated in a way that made it accessible to the ages that would reach out to us.  That was probably one of the best moments of my life.

I remember saying, “No one touch this! I’ll clean it.” I’m not renowned for my housekeeping skills, I might ignore my own house, but I cleaned the office bathrooms, I scrubbed the windows until they sparkled, before our staff moved in. I was also given staff. Before 1990, we had grown to four Public Prosecutors for Minors, two of whom worked in juvenile justice full time. There was no such thing until then.

The other step we took was to start keeping social case files, using index cards. There was no computerisation at the time. The first approach to computerisation then was using index cards, to keep your case files referenced, as in the old movies.  The police must also keep the cases similarly filed and then, once the data can be processed, you have a computerised system. We, at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors, were the first prosecution service to implement this system. The other Public Prosecutor’s Offices, the other Departments, would not do it. We were the first to implement this kind of record-keeping, and we began to keep social case files.

What are social case files? Social case files are briefs that have nothing to do with juvenile offenders or juvenile victims. They are usually files of children in danger of either becoming offenders or being victimised by families facing problems. Children that are brought to our attention via anonymous or identified reports to various helplines, or sometimes identified reports made by neighbours, relatives or one of the parents, where the conditions at home are such that the child is led to one or the other direction.

I have to say that it was us, in Athens, who hesitatingly began to terminate parental responsibility and take children into care. Up until then, parental responsibility was never terminated. The children continued to reside with the abusers, various welfare interventions would then take place, and that was all. Parental responsibility termination by a court was implemented by us for the first time. Now it is widespread, and all the Public Prosecutor’s Offices in the country do it. They might not be experienced in these cases, but they will call Athens or Thessaloniki and ask, acquire templates, find out how this or that is done.

This happened with great difficulty over the years. To terminate parental responsibility was unthinkable at the time. The home was considered sacrosanct, the mentality was “I will do as I please in my own home, I lay down the law in my home, my child belongs to me and is not subject to rights, I will do as I please with it, I will discipline it as I please.” Let us not kid ourselves, discipline meant and still means bodily harm and demeaning conduct towards the child, verbal violence, emotional and psychological violence. Even as we speak the best families, not the families that first come to mind when you think about child maltreatment, do not know how to behave towards children.

So, you gradually start to reach out to other services.

I had done that even before 1990, before my initial seven-year tenure at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors ended. I had reached out. It was a huge step toward openness. My colleague Mrs Vasilakis and I used to visit the Korydallos Correctional Centre every week. On Wednesday or Sunday afternoons, we would go to Korydallos, without our families even knowing. We used to joke that if anything happened to us along the way, they would wonder, “How did they end up in Korydallos?” Once a week without fail, we would go to the Correctional Centre and talk with the juvenile detainees who were aged between twelve and twenty-one at the time. In fact, the talks would take place without the presence of correctional officers.

The Korydallos Correctional Centre was one of the wings of the Korydallos prison. It had a large room where the children gathered to eat all together, unlike the Avlona Special Juvenile Detention Establishment today, where every child eats in their cell, where the food is delivered to the cells. There was just a single dining space. Other than that, it was a correctional facility with terrible conditions, which we used to observe and of course, advocate for changes. We kept going to the ministry and changes were indeed made at the time. I remember the cells had a toilet in full view, there was not even a curtain to hide it. One child could be using the toilet while another child was in their bed or sitting at the table, the conditions were appalling. We could not believe it and, after a lot of pressure on our part, they placed screens at first and then doors, so that at least the children could enjoy some privacy.

We also used to visit the Correctional Centre of Kassaveteia and Volos too; mostly Kassaveteia. There, we were really disheartened, disappointed. By some stroke of luck, Kassaveteia had been operating on the German model. In other words, there were cells, each cell housing one or two children. Suddenly, during one of our visits, we saw them demolish cells to convert them into dormitories. Just when we were saying that we have at least one correctional facility that is tolerable – because being in a room with eight to ten people and being in a room alone or with another child makes a big difference to the children—we saw that that facility had deteriorated. That institution, too, had failed.

During our visits then, we used to talk with the children, some of whom we might have sentenced that very morning or most of whom we had possibly sent there. They never harmed or bothered us. Not only were they welcoming, not only were they hugging us, children who are now grey-haired, middle-aged adults, parents themselves, still come see us. I think our visits were a boost, a spark of hope. We gave them hope: “do this, enrol in that program.” There were a few programmes run by the Regional Committees for People’s Education (NELE), who ran various actions in prisons. There were no schools in prisons like there are in juvenile and youth prisons today.

We had also continued the education of police officers for several years and that, too, was a very important step.

How did the juvenile police units come into being?

Around 1983, 1984, we had instances of abused minors coming to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors from the police stations. I will never forget one child, a young boy named Fotis. When Fotis came, I looked at him and noticed his ear lobes were swollen, like red spheres. I took a closer look; the child looked like an alien. I asked him, “Fotis, what happened?” The police had brought him in for theft, detention in flagrante delicto. For a small child. I asked him, “What happened to you?” “The police,” he said. I asked him what the police did to him. He told me the officer had pinned his ears with clothespins to make him confess to other thefts. Then, he said, they grabbed him by the feet and suspended him from the balcony. I listened to what they had done, the slaps and the suchlike, and I could feel my rage mounting.

The memory of that boy has never left me. There was another juvenile, too, whom I will always remember. He was a minor who had appeared often before the Juvenile Court in the past. We used to let him go because you do not incarcerate a minor for a first offence, you help them find their way through the Supervisor of Minors. You don’t immediately send them to juvenile prison.

So he arrives, accompanied by the police, and a part of his body is wrapped in bandages. I ask him what happened. He would not speak before the police officers. I take him aside, we were in our Evelpidon offices, just the two of us, and I ask him again what happened. He tells me he has been shot, that the bullet came out the other side but did not harm any organs, but he was injured. I sent him to a forensic physician, and he did indeed have a bullet wound because the police had chased him for thefts, you can imagine the kind of theft we are talking about, nothing significant. It’s just that the child was a repeat offender.

When you become a witness to such incidents, you realise something must be done, that the police force must also be sensitised. It’s not enough to raise the awareness of judges or prosecutors. So, in the summer of 1985, we began to visit the Ministry of Public Order. We met with the Minister at first, then he referred us to the General Secretary, Mr Morphopos, who was ex-military. I will never forget his name because he was the one who agreed to our proposal for a police corps for minors made up of trained policemen. He agreed despite the objections of the police as a whole, the Chief of Police and his deputy chiefs who believed it was an impossible objective, that it would never materialise, that it was unnecessary.

At a meeting with Juvenile Court Judge Mrs Maria Vasilaki, who is currently with the Supreme Court, Mr Morphopos sat us down and said, “I am not asking you whether a juvenile police service will be set up. We are gathered here to figure out how it will be set up.” He had already made the decision, in other words. The meetings we had previously held had convinced him, and this great step forward was taken. Initially, a ministry circular was sent to all Police Departments and Services in Greece for the first time. It advised police officers how juvenile offenders should be treated, following our input too. After that, the space that would house the Division for Minors, which was a Subdivision back then, was chosen. At the time, we demanded that it contain two units, one for juvenile offenders and an equally important one for juvenile victims, who also required a specialised approach.

Back then, it was not a given that victims needed special treatment too and that you needed specialised training to avoid revictimisation through the procedure and secondary abuse during the collection of evidence. Two units were also set up in Thessaloniki and in Heraklion in Crete respectively. These still exist today, and special training was provided following the request of the police officers who wished to join those units.

Was that also your proposal?

Our proposal was that the officers should not be chosen by the police force. That the hierarchy should not appoint the officers, but that the officers themselves should express interest in joining those units first. Then, a selection could be made if the number expressing interest was greater than the number of posts.

Also, we trained police officers from all over Greece on matters pertaining to minors in the three to four years that followed. We held week-long training workshops. We used to go and teach them—myself, Mrs Vasilaki, Supervisors of Minors, psychologists and Mrs Spinelli, Professor of Criminology at the University of Athens, who is our teacher to this day. She was not only highly sensitised to issues affecting minors, but extremely knowledgeable too.  

You said that the juvenile police units were founded in 1986. That leaves another four years until the end of your first tenure at the Office of the Public Prosecutor for Minors in 1990. During those four years, then, an autonomous Police Service for minors came into being. Did you see any progress?

Yes, of course. First and foremost, the abuse of juvenile offenders stopped. Juvenile offenders used to come to us having been slapped, punched; they had black eyes. It was a noticeable change because up until then, anything involving minors, offenders or victims, in Attica, used to end up at the General Police Directorate of Attica (GADA). Nowadays, minors still get taken there– of course, there has been an increase in the number of incidents too – but they only send the most serious offences to GADA.

However, both during my first tenure until 1990 and during my second tenure between 1995 and 1998, I handled juvenile victims, particularly sexual abuse victims, myself. I did not send them to the police. I used the police as my assistants, to remove the children from the abusive environment where needed, to visit them in institutions that would subsequently accommodate them or at Children’s Hospitals where they would often be temporarily accommodated. The police would help us with all that. But, particularly in cases involving the sexual abuse of minors, I would take their statements following the example of the Germans. The international literature on the subject also informed us that that was the procedure followed in the USA too.

The only thing we did not, and should not, follow was the Code of Penal Procedure, which stated that when you question a juvenile witness – the victim is also considered a witness by the Code – you should ask a question and get an answer, ask a question and get an answer and so on. But that is not appropriate in cases of child sexual abuse. You must allow the child to narrate. Closed-ended questions are prohibitive. Questions must be open-ended, or you should allow the child to narrate and only interrupt in a very specific manner if you need to ensure that you have understood what is being said correctly. “You are telling me such and such, did I understand correctly, is that what you are telling me?”

When did you first encounter the idea of the House of the Child?

By 1989, I had received the whole text of the “Procédure MELANIE” which a colleague from the island of Réunion had forwarded. By late 1998, early 1999, I had completed my second tenure as Public Prosecutor for Minors and was Deputy Public Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal of Patras. Around that time,  I attended a conference for professionals in the field which was co-organised at a very high level – suffice it to say that the meetings were held at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the session was opened by the Prime Minister himself. The participants were Greece, France and Italy, and it was a conference on child abuse. I spoke about Greek Law and how it approached and dealt with abuse.

Talking of that conference, I just remembered something that shook me. They had drawn up a comparative table for the three countries. There, the legal provisions concerning violations of children were listed to allow a comparison between the laws of the three countries. Mostly violation of their bodies, their life, neglect, but also other provisions, such as labour law, administrative law and civil law provisions in each country’s codes and statutes. My turn to complete the comparative table comes; France and Italy had already completed it. It was my turn to complete whatever provisions the Greek law made. That was when I realised the poverty of our system in legislating to protect children.

I saw that most of our rules and laws applied to both children and adults. Be it bodily harm or rape or anything of that nature, whatever provisions applied to adult victims applied to juvenile victims too.

The child did not exist as a legal subject.

No, nowhere. I still have that table somewhere. I was so ashamed for my country when I saw it. The undisputed fact is that if you do not come out of your national shell, you cannot see your weaknesses, you cannot become aware of the steps that others have made. You think everything is fine and what goes on here is happening everywhere.

That was when I saw the deficiencies of our system. Labour law? I had no idea what to write in that box. If you see the table, I filled the box with “same as provisions applying to adults”, when the other countries had already incorporated provisions that we eventually passed in 2006, as part of the law on domestic violence.

What had changed in your absence, between your departure in 1990 and the beginning of your second tenure in 1995. When you left in 1990 the foundations had been laid, something was beginning to materialise.

When I left there was juvenile police, a public prosecution with its own offices, the social case files I mentioned ready to be computerised, we were the first service to be computerised. All of that was working, those that came after me moved things forward. We held hearings for minors every day. Currently, that is not the case. Now they have diminished; the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors has declined. It has suffered a decline.

I will tell you what changed then, what we did during my second tenure. Actually, let me go back to 1990 because it illustrates a point. In 1990, I left the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors because I was promoted to Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance and posted to Chalkida. At the time, Chalkida was an industrial zone, full of factories, poultry plants, and so on, cement plants, shipyards, anything you can imagine. It was a difficult post and I would also be the Supervisor as I was the Public Prosecutor at the Court of First Instance. At the time, the Office there had a Public Prosecutor at the Court of First Instance, and the rest were Deputy Prosecutors and an Associate Judge. It was a large service that dealt with two felonies a week, usually sent by Athens. The trials had to be attended by the Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance, no one else can attend these trials. The same applies today.  So, the post was very demanding.

As a result, I dreaded it a little. I wondered how I would cope. Well, let me tell you that compared to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors, my work in Chalkida felt so light. For the first time, I realised the pressure I had been under at my previous post, the psychological damage I had suffered. I did not feel it while I was there, I was unaware of it, but once I left, I understood what the Germans had told us, that professionals in this field, dealing with these matters, can end up being burned out.

Remaining a good professional and mentally healthy in this field to avoid burnout is a delicate balancing act. I was supervising the whole of Euboea, dealing with two serious felonies a week, I often slept on a couch at the office rather than return to Athens, I was commuting, arriving at the crack of dawn and being the last to leave, literally locking up the Chalkida Public Prosecutor’s office and still, it all felt easier than my time at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors.

The incidents I had been seeing there, especially the sexual abuse cases which I had opted to deal with on my own. The Germans had warned us, “You need to look after yourselves. In this field, it is essential to have outlets, to do things for yourself, to have a hobby, a sport, something that takes you outside the job, that clears your head.”

They had taken us to a room where Public Prosecutors for Minors, Supervisors of Minors, Juvenile Judges had group therapy every month. I remember they all sat in a circle, and everyone aired their grievances about the other: In such and such case I told you to do this, but instead, you did what you wanted to do or in this or that instance you were wrong. Everyone aired everything they had bottled up inside.  We had also joined the circle, all five of us and our interpreter, and watched the session. At the end of the group therapy session, they picked up pillows and flung them at each other. They had a pillow fight to vent their anger and be more effective afterwards.

What did you do after you saw these examples?

When I returned from Germany, I did the following. I made a deal with the Institute of Child Health, which was headed by Eleni Agathonos at the time and is now headed by Giorgos Nikolaidis. I made a deal, like a memorandum of cooperation.  I told them, “Whenever I get a sexual abuse case, one of you, a social worker or a psychologist or a psychiatrist, whoever is available at the time, will come to my office before I initiate proceedings and talk with the child. That way, I will learn something, and the procedure will be easier for the child.”

So I used to notify the Institute, because I had child abuse cases, involving victims of both sexes. I would notify the Institute and keep the child there, give it a glass of juice, sit it down to draw or do something suited to their age. Also, if the child was accompanied by the mother, I would allow them to sit together in my office. In other words, I would give children time to become familiar with the environment they found themselves in. These were approaches used by the Americans and the Germans, which I was trying to implement on my own in Greece.

But we know that Greece is not just Athens – that’s what used to bother me the most. If something is not institutionally enshrined, it is pointless. People come and go; you can’t rely on individual actions. Of course, things depend on people too, but that is not the point. There have to be laws and institutions that both oblige you and train you how to act.

So, the people from the Institute would come and talk with the child and so on, and this way I would get a first impression. Then, my examination would follow. I always used the same secretary, who was very aware and very intelligent. She now works in Piraeus. We used to carry out the examinations together, in the presence of the people from the Institute. By then, I would have a rough idea of whether what was said was true or not. Usually, children do not lie, but there is a small percentage that might. I have had instances of Munchausen syndrome, of lying, but there was an explanation for the lying too. You need to find that reason; you must identify that, too.

We have heard professionals speak of “service chauvinism”, i.e. that the services are so confident that what they are doing is right that they are incapable of listening to criticism. Systemic abuse, however, is occurring to this day.

That is the case, unfortunately. It still occurs because we have not decided who does what, we have not acknowledged that some professionals think we are better than others. Even public prosecutors have an attitude that they are superior to the child psychiatrist, superior to the social worker. We are overweening, Judges too.

The other reason is that we have not learned to cooperate from a young age. We are not taught how to cooperate in school. Everyone gets tested individually, does homework on their own, reads out their assignment, does this and that on their own. They have not been taught to cooperate the way it is done abroad.  I experience Germany through my grandchildren, who are in German schools, and I see what they are taught once they are enrolled in the schooling system. The first thing they learn is how to cooperate. Group projects, group activities. One person looks this up, another person looks up something else, they pool their work and present it together as a team.

We are not even aware of the concept of inclusivity. As we speak, inclusivity is possibly the uppermost concept in child protection, the uppermost concept in child-friendly justice. In other words, the child must participate, even in the Juvenile court’s sentencing of the juvenile offender. You must include the minor; the minor should make that decision with you. You can guide them in deciding what the right thing is, but first, you must persuade them or choose the measure that would suit the offender best. You don’t get to decide just because you are the judge, just because you say so, that the sentence should be conciliation or compensation or something else. You will pass the sentence that you will jointly reach with the juvenile offender. The same applies to victims and everything else.

So that is the one thing we lack as professionals, we are incapable of sitting around the same table, or we think we are superior to the doctor or the medical examiner or the police officer. It will not happen unless we understand that interdisciplinarity is essential in caring for minors at any level, both for victims and offenders. You cannot stay holed up in your own bastion….

The Public Prosecutor cannot replace the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist cannot replace the social worker.

And yet we make that mistake. I see well-intentioned colleagues of mine who appear to be sensitised to issues affecting minors, but they meddle in what should be the work of others. And that is a mistake. I cannot draw a conclusion; the child psychiatrist will do that. I should stay within my area of expertise; stick to the area I know. I will not intrude in another’s field; I will respect them.

Let us broach the subject of the legal duties of other professionals. Shouldn’t the state encourage professionals whose work brings them into contact with children to report their suspicions?

When I was Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court responsible for Minors, we held a meeting at the Department of Child Psychiatry of the “Agia Sofia” Children's Hospital. It was attended by child psychiatrists, social workers etc. from other hospitals that have children’s units, such as the Tzaneio Prefecture General Hospital of Piraeus, The Panagiotis & Aglaia Kyriakou Children's Hospital and the General Hospital of Attiki “Seismanoglio”.

These people stayed for a whole morning, and we spoke about many things. About how they, the psychologists, the psychiatrists and the social workers, could be protected. In many instances, they are dragged through the courts, sued for libel, for false accusations etc. because they were obliged to submit a report stating which parent is to blame or if both parents are to blame. They face years of litigation, legal fees, it is terrible.

Following that meeting, I went to the Ministry and asked it to legislate a provision that would grant them immunity. The law was passed, but it only applied to social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and child psychiatrists working in public hospitals, child protection institutions etc.

However, other professionals are involved in this field too.  For example, municipal social workers who carry out investigations following a public prosecutor’s order. Medical-educational centres also carry out investigations and submit reports to the public prosecutor. Then, there are the professionals who carry out psychiatric evaluations. The teachers also came to see us. Then, the Hellenic Association of Social Workers (SKLE) too, came to see us. I was Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court at that time. The social workers visited my office, the Children’s Ombudswoman Mrs Koufonikolaou attended too. We agreed that as we were considering expanding the provision to include teachers, then it might as well be expanded to provide immunity for professionals working for municipalities and social workers etc. working at medical-educational centres. This would mean that no one could bring a lawsuit against them unless they could establish wilful misconduct. If I am acting deceitfully or with malice and it is proven, for example, that I was related with the person initially filing the report or I was the school principal, but I also had something to gain from filing a report, then we have wilful misconduct.

We submitted it to the Ministry, but it has not been passed yet. The government changed too, and at present, the expanded provision has not yet been passed into law.

Mrs Koufonikolaou told us that the Minister, Mr Kalogerou, had made a commitment back then.

Yes, he was on board but did not have enough time. The previous government had also been on board for the initial provision; it got passed into law by Mr Athanasiou, so then it just needed to be extended. Mr Kalogerou did not have enough time to address the matter, so it is now pending. It would act as a safeguard for teachers, a guarantee of legal protection that would make them more open to coming forth. At the moment they are reticent.

They should also receive training.

On Saturday, we held a Conference in Aigio. The conversation that followed went on until two, three am. They could not get enough of the conversation, they had questions, they wanted answers. They want us to return and continue the conversation. It is natural that they have queries. These are things they are hearing for the first time. They had not even heard of the Convention on the Rights of the Child before. Can you imagine that? Aigio is not an isolated spot in the mountains. So imagine what the situation must be like in more distant places… in Orestiada, in the islands.

In 2014, I asked the National School of the Judiciary to introduce a course on the powers and responsibilities of the Public Prosecutor for Minors. That way, upon graduating the School, everyone would have some knowledge on these matters. I taught that course until this July, without remuneration, of course. I refuse to accept payment for anything that I willingly offer our country and our community. I consider it part and parcel of what I do, so although teachers at the school are remunerated and have their travel and accommodation expenses covered and get compensated for teaching, I decline all of that. Moreover, during my final three years there, I taught by inviting other experts in the field as speakers, so that the students could become familiar with other sectors.

This year I invited Mr Nikolaidis, I invited Ms Olga Themeli, I invited Ms Artinopoulou, Mrs Mpeka, the child psychiatrist, from Thessaloniki, Mr Anagnostopoulos from the Department of Child Psychiatry of the “Agia Sofia” Children's Hospital… Over the years, I invited many others, such as Ms Paris Zagoura, to speak.  At least three guest speakers joined me every year to teach the students, to allow them to hear other professionals and to role-play. Seeing how well the information you are trying to impart gets assimilated during role-play is quite something.

So public prosecutors need training, but I had also asked for the same to apply to Judges. When the Judge tries a minor or tries the adult who has abused a minor, he needs to have a broader awareness, otherwise, how can he do it? Should not there be an equivalent course for Judges? Family Law is not enough.

Isn’t there?

No, it is pure, dry Family Law. It is not an education in abuse and delinquency. The Judge needs a different kind of training. If we were to introduce such a course, we would get a different kind of judge, someone who would then pursue some kind of continuing education to enrich their knowledge.

We held so many Conferences across Greece during my three-year tenure as Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court. I visited all our Public Prosecutor’s Offices, both at the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal, covering my own expenses, that goes without saying.

So, I visited them all over Greece. We held training workshops where we did not just invite my people. I invited police officers, port authority officers where available, judges. I trained nearly all the military judges, they were invited to the training, as were judges and public prosecutors of the Court of Appeal and the Court of First instance, everyone I could reach in each location I visited. The aim was to allow them to at least reflect on certain matters; it was not comprehensive training, but you still came away with something. At least you became aware of everything you did not know. You might not have learned a lot, but at least you came to the realisation that you should thoroughly think before you act, that you do not know everything.

Have such initiatives been continued by other prosecutors?

Yes. It touches me when I say it because they are my children, I see them as my children, and I think they see it that way too. They have dedicated books to me, they refer to themselves as my children, all these students of mine who went on to become Deputy Public Prosecutors and Public Prosecutors. Most of my children, whatever post they now find themselves in, can recognise abuse, know how to take steps, find out more, they call me to this day and  ask, “I have this case, this incident, what should I do, how should I proceed?”

I am genuinely moved when I see my children everywhere, in Kavala, Thessaloniki, Heraklion in Crete, Veria, Alexandroupoli, Edessa, Florina, Ioannina, Patras, Piraeus, Kos, Zakynthos, handle juvenile cases which they could not have handled back in my day. Thessaloniki has an incredible Public Prosecutor, Mrs Dimitra Tsiardakli, who is a mother of four herself, so she is not someone who has no other obligations, and still, she made a difference. What did Dimitra do? She gathered all the relevant bodies and services and created a Network. We will now showcase this network abroad too, with Mr Nikolaidis, in a programme Mr Nikolaidis is currently running, about how services can work in tandem across the whole of the EU.

So, we have this Network created by Mrs Tsiardakli, which I brought to Giorgos Nikolaidis’ attention, he had not been aware of it. But I have been following Tsiardakli’s work. In fact, she recently managed to obtain a decision by the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (KEDE) that Municipal Social Services will assist the removal of children into care on a twenty-four-hour basis. Before, they used to tell us, “It’s three am, I am not going to go take the child into care right now, I won’t do this or that.” KEDE issued a decision following Mrs Tsiardakli’s initiative. The hospitals too. No child stays at a hospital for more than twenty-four hours. They are immediately given to families, there is a list of available foster parents.

So it’s not that difficult.

Nothing is difficult.

The Covid-19 lockdown was challenging for everyone. What did it mean, however, for children faced with abuse or neglect? In Greece, where the child protection system is disjointed, understaffed and disorganised, how did the lockdown affect children who were forced to not have contact with anyone else apart from their abusers? How did State services respond during such a trying period? After the lockdown ended, were any measures put in place to assess and alleviate the consequences for vulnerable children? What is the plan, in case an increase in Covid-19 cases forces a new lockdown?

We sought answers to these questions through five interviews with child protection experts that were streamed live on The Manifold Facebook Page.

Interview #1: Theoni Koufonikolakou

Theoni Koufonikolakou is Deputy Ombudswoman for Children's Rights.

Interview 2: Antonis Rellas

Antonis Rellas is a film and stage director and a disabled activist with "Zero Tolerance". (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #3: Giorgos Nikolaidis

Giorgos Nikolaidis is a psychiatrist, director of the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate of the Institute of Child Health, and former chairperson and current member of the Lanzarote Committee. (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #4: Triantafyllia Athanasiou

Triantafyllia Athanasiou is a social worker, chairperson of the Association of Social Workers of Greece.

Interview #5: Stefanos Alevizos

Stefanos Alevizos is a psychologist with The Smile of the Child NGO.

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

In the spring of 2011, the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, was running the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect. As they were processing their results, during the summer, they noticed what seemed like an anomaly. In the results from the Region of Rethymno, in Crete, there appeared an extremely high rate of self-reported sexual victimisation of boys and almost a complete reversal of the boy to girl ratio.

“We could not explain it,” George Nikolaidis, Director of the Department, told us. “We speculated it must be due to a technical error.”

It was not an error. On December 1st, 2011, the police arrested a school basketball coach, Nikos Seiragakis, who also coached the local youth basketball team, AGOR. He was charged with molesting dozens of children.

It was this man’s activity that produced the “anomaly” in the BECAN results.

A methodical police operation

A few days after the coach was arrested, the Rethymno police chief, Manolis Paradoulakis, told the press that this was “a systematic and methodical police operation,” which “happened in the shortest time possible”.((The statement is available (in Greek) via the <em>local</em> TV <strong>Creta</strong> station.))  

The chief’s emphasis on the “shortest time” seemed to anticipate the question that soon emerged, why there had been a thirteen-month interval between the time when two families went to the police with allegations that the coach was abusing their children, and the time of the arrest. 

The chief maintained that there had been “rumors” rather than allegations, despite the fact that the two families of immigrant workers had eponymously denounced the coach to the police. He then explained that the police investigated the “rumors” and “discreetly” gathered evidence, in order to determine whether there was any merit to the case. When they found that there was, they proceeded to build the case in collaboration with the Rethymno prosecutor at the time, Maria Dimitriadou, a process which took more than a year, because they wanted to make sure the evidence was solid. “The arrest,” the chief said, “was made in the shortest possible time, as soon as there was complete corroboration of the case with incontrovertible evidence.”

When, during our visit to the Department for the Protection of Minors in the General Police Directorate of Attica, we discussed police handling of child abuse cases, we were told that from an operational point of view, a coach is one of the “easiest” types of perpetrator to catch. “If he is a coach,” the officers told us, “there are more victims”. When, however, we specifically referred to the Rethymno case, the officers said that they had not personally conducted the operation, so they could not comment in detail. 

The possibility that the authorities attempted to preempt any discussion on the police’s choice of timing is strengthened by the fact that Manolis Othonas, Deputy Minister for Citizen protection and Member of Parliament for Rethymno at the time, was already reassuring reporters that there had been no delays, two days before the police chief officially briefed the press on the operation. He commended the police on turning “whispers” into “a case”, and dismissed allegations that the coach had enjoyed some sort of “protection” due to his supposed standing in Rethymno society.

This was contradicted by the Manager of AGOR at the time, Vassilis Theodoroulakis, who stated in an interview that he had been unofficially informed by a police officer about the allegations against the coach, about three months after they happened. He then informed the team’s Board of Directors, who he says did nothing, in order not to damage the team’s reputation. The Board has denied the accusation.  

What is undisputed, however, is that during the time that elapsed between the allegations of the two migrant families against the coach and his arrest, no child protection official or professional was alerted to protect the interests of the children. The decision to prolong the children’s plight for over a year was made without the intervention of any part of the child protection system.

An esteemed member of local society

When we visited Rethymno, in autumn 2018, the weather was rainy. The wet buildings in the old town, dating from Rethymno’s Venetian period, the castle, the lighthouse hidden in the fog, all painted a highly unusual picture for non-locals who stereotypically associate Crete only with summer tourism. We kept wondering how in this town of 40.000 people, which looked even smaller without the summer crowds, it was possible for someone to systematically abuse dozens of children for years, without anybody ever noticing a thing? 

In the old town, opposite the renowned Rimondi fountain, we met with Chara Vilara, an experienced local journalist, who had followed the case closely.

“It was a chronic situation,” she told us. “Obviously, it wasn’t going on for just one or two years, it went back quite a lot. Some of the children had grown up when it became public. There were many children who knew, who weren’t a part of it, but knew and didn’t speak. It touched many families, both directly and indirectly.”

Everyone we spoke with agreed that coach Nikos Seiragakis was an important member of Rethymno society. He had been one of the organisers of the “Treasure Hunt”, a popular yearly event. He was esteemed in the “old town”, meaning the circles of Rethymno’s aristocratic families, and he was well connected in local politics. His contacts reached into the Greek national basketball team, and even the American NBA. Those who know say that children thought of him as a mentor. He was a good speaker, and when he coached, nobody made a sound.

Under strict discipline, the coach had created a kind of “sect”. He approached his students with the promise of admittance to an inner circle, to which only a select few could belong. He used pseudo-historical references to military training in ancient Greece, in order to convince them that in this way they would form a tighter bond with their teammates and become better athletes. Through a series of “trials”, aimed at wresting a kind of “consent” from the children, a process known as “grooming”, the coach initially encouraged them to sexually engage with each other, and subsequently molested them himself. His influence on them was so strong that some students actually defended his actions.

“The big question,” Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, told us, “is how the perpetrator selects the children, how the grooming actually happens. Which children does he choose? Well, he chooses vulnerable children, ones without strong family bonds. Children with certain disadvantages, foreigners, the disabled, or children who are emotionally neglected. He finds cracks. He comes as a mentor. As a protector. Then comes the second step: trust. Privileges. And then comes submission. This can take a long time. At that point, children gradually realise what is going on. So, there is a stage of transferring responsibility: whoever doesn’t want this, can get up and leave now. That’s the transfer: it is you who wants this. And when there is a collective situation, a sharing within a group, it is even more difficult to break this chain. Children understand they are trapped. They stay at this stage of entrapment for many years. This can happen in any abusive relationship. We call it ‘learned helplessness’. Most children will never tell. Some will tell when they cannot bear it any longer. Or because they may see their younger siblings or other loved ones victimised. Or a random event may trigger it off. And then, after a long time, they will tell. Some will have already become adults.”

Coach Nikos Seiragakis was initially charged with 53 counts of child molestation, and convicted on 36 counts. His sentence of 400 years imprisonment was upheld by the Appeals Court, which heard his appeal in 2016. 

During our visit to Rethymno, we were told by people, who spoke to us on the condition of preserving their anonymity, that the number of victims not included in the charges probably raised the total to over one hundred children. 

Seiragakis was conditionally released, according to the provisions of Greek law, at the end of April 2020, after serving eight years and five months. The conditions of his release stipulate that he cannot live in, or visit Rethymno. A few days later, he was arrested again for breaching the conditions of his release. The decision on whether he will remain free or return to prison is pending.

Inherent resistance

In mid December 2011, a conference on child protection took place in Heraklion, the capital of Crete, as part of the Council of Europe’s “One in Five” campaign. ((“One in Five” was a campaign by the Council of Europe to stop sexual violence against children, which was initiated in 2010 and branched out into national campaigns, which were handled by member-states, in the following years. Its title is based on data, which suggest that about 1 in 5 children in Europe are victims of some form of sexual violence.)) The conference had been planned before the Rethymno child abuse case was made public, but, as George Nikolaidis remembers, when he arrived in Crete, everyone was understandably talking about little else.  

“I went to Rethymno the following day,” Nikolaidis told us, “and because of my occupation, I attended a meeting with the municipality, the region and the local authorities. I was then asked to make a proposal, which I submitted both to the local authorities and the relevant ministries at the end of December 2011. It was a proposal on the actions that needed to be taken, given the scope of the case, whose extent we did not know, but it appeared to be a mass case.”

After a meeting of relevant ministries and authorities, it was decided that the proposal by the Institute of Child Health should be implemented. The lack of resources, exacerbated by the financial crisis, was addressed by allocating European Union NSFR funds to the programme. Still, it took about a year for the intervention to begin.

“This is indicative of how unwieldy the Greek public sector can be, even when it comes to projects it funds and the political will is present,” Nikolaidis said.

In the event, the unit for Comprehensive Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”. ((The unit’s website (in Greek) is still active, despite the programme’s termination.))

“At the same time,” he told us, “we ran a widely accessible health promotion campaign on the subject of child abuse, children’s sexuality, the children’s right to their body, and so on, at all levels of education in the whole of the Region of Rethymno, that is to say, primary and secondary schools, students, parents and teachers. We also trained personnel at various services, we held educational actions for coaches and sportspeople. Because we were immediately visited by the coaches’ association and told, “We don’t dare touch the children, you can’t coach children and be afraid to touch them at the same time.” Therefore, we had to impart all the international know-how about how it is possible to have both child protection processes in place and still function as a sports space.” 

Despite the obvious need for intervention in the consequences of a case that had affected dozens of families, Nikolaidis told us that the programme faced what he terms “inherent resistance”. “I believe,” he said, “that at least some of the local actors preferred to forget this incident had ever happened rather than work to enable the local community to get over it. There was a fairly strong tendency to sweep everything under the rug.”

Chara Vilara shared with us a similar perspective. “After the events came to light,” she said, “many parents punished their children, they beat them up, because they believed it had been the children’s fault. And other families never dealt with it at all. Like it never happened. Some, of course, did try to help their children, but what really made an impression on me was that when the police brought the coach to court, there was no one outside. Nobody went to protest, to vent, even. If it had been someone else, there would have been a crowd outside, there would have been shouting, all hell would have broken loose. This is telling, because these children belonged to the local social elite. These people want to cover up what happened.” 

Although Nikolaidis and his team managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, in the autumn of 2014 resources were exhausted. 

“We were informed by the political leadership,” Nikolaidis told us, “that their decision was to shut down the unit permanently, which was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field. There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health’s Action Plan on Children’s rights, which was published online for public debate during the pre-election period, in November 2014, included an extension of the Rethymno programme, funded through the NSFR 2014-2020. But the January 2015 elections brought a change of government, and any plans to extend the programme were quietly dropped.

Out of the sky

On the hill that overlooks Rethymno harbour stands an austere concrete building, which at the time of our visit temporarily housed the Rethymno Mental Health Centre. We were greeted by its director, psychiatrist, psychodramatist and actor, Antonis Liodakis.

He was of the opinion that the Rethymno programme had been “interjected”, and had “dropped out of the sky”. “In the sense,” he explained, “that these professionals from Athens were coming here to see children, parents, other cases, the whole thing functioned like a medico-paedagogic centre.”

Chara Vilara, on the other hand, points out that the children were under immense pressure, “because other kids knew and made fun of them”. “So, they went to private psychiatrists in Chania and Heraklion, because they were afraid of the stigma.”

George Nikolaidis’s experience seemed to echo Vilara’s observation: “One of the criticisms we received,” he said “was that the personnel employed in our intervention did not come from the local community, did not come from Rethymno. But I believe that was a very intelligent choice if anyone involved in the events back then recalls the mood of the local community at the time.  In every new incident, our personnel, the psychologists, the social workers, the child psychologists who worked with us, were asked by those they saw whether they were from Rethymno. The moment they heard, “No, I’m from elsewhere,” there was a huge wave of relief and then they shared their suffering, which they would probably not have done had the personnel been local. So, let’s just say there was some discontent that we did not support local employment. But we chose to make communication for the beneficiaries easier and more effective.”

Antonis Liodakis, however, pressed his point: “We had already identified the key issues since 2008,” he told us. “We have been asking for the creation of a medico-paedagogic centre with every opportunity.”

Nikolaidis makes no secret of his surprise that the programme was discontinued. “Until the very last minute,” he said “people close to the political leadership of the time, the political actors in Rethymno, were reassuring us that an extension would be granted, as there was evidently no other solution. I cannot know what could have possibly happened overnight to change that decision.” And he added: “All I know is that any efforts made in the immediate aftermath for questions on this matter to be tabled in Parliament by SYRIZA, the main opposition party at the time, ultimately failed. Incidentally, SYRIZA’s health coordinator in opposition was Andreas Xanthos, who subsequently became Minister of Health in the following government, and who is also the local MP for the Region of Rethymno.”

After SYRIZA came to power in January 2015, it took the new government two years to come up with its own “Action Plan” on child protection. The Rethymno programme was not a part of it, and it was never reinstated.

Antonis Liodakis started working in consulting groups in the Ministry of Health and joined Andreas Xanthos in official SYRIZA events on public health. In 2017, Xanthos approved Liodakis’s plans for the medico-pedagogic centre, with himself as director.

Ministry for Citizen Protection

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How did the decision for the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance" to occupy the Lechaina Unit in November 2015 come about?

Zero Tolerance was formed in 2010 with a view to building a disability activist movement, a movement for the emancipation of disabled subjects, alongside the Movement of Disabled Artists. We began implementing actions, publishing articles, occupying premises, staging all kinds of interventions. And then came the time to emancipate ourselves so that we could deal with the grave issue of institutionalised life and deinstitutionalisation. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, unable to advocate for themselves, having no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present. So, we, their fellow disabled, began to advocate for their rights.

A two-day festival was held at the self-managed theatre “Embros” shortly before the occupation, a solidarity festival for the children and adults of Lechaina as well as all the other institutions. There were discussions, documentary screenings, plays. The groundwork for the occupation was laid there.

What was the aim?

To highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living.

What was the plan?

To occupy the premises in question and invite civil society to join us in becoming many. It did not happen. The response was not there. The cameras were there, in that there was widespread media coverage at the time.  All the TV channels, both public broadcaster ERT and private broadcasters, aired reports, each in their own manner. A lot of the coverage took on an anti-government bias. We were not focusing on that aspect at all, at the time. Besides, the SYRIZA-ANEL government had only been in power for two months. Our focus was to highlight what was a chronic situation. Lechaina had not been happening for two months, it had a history of 37 years.((For an in-depth account of the Lechaina Unit, read our case study: Hell as an Institution))

We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad. In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. In other words, we were not doing anything new, something that had never been done before. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, “Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.” We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside.  

Were you afraid?

No, no, no. Not at all. We were in the right, I had nothing to fear. None of us was afraid. We had already occupied the Social Insurance Institute (IKA) in 2011. When Syntagma Square was packed with half a million people, we went and peacefully occupied the IKA headquarters for four days. We stayed in Lechaina for four days, too; apparently that is how long our bodies can withstand being exposed to these conditions…

We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime, a total of nine people, most of us disabled, in four cars. We explained who we were. The Chairman of the Board of the facility said we needed a permit to enter – the police conveyed the management’s request to us. We were prepared, ID cards in our pockets. We told the policeman that the violations taking place here were far greater than any violation our presence might give rise to, that we had no intention of hindering the staff in their work but had no intention of leaving either. We went inside knowing what awaited there, but the reality is always much harsher than anything you could have imagined.

Did you have any run-ins with the authorities after the occupation?

We are the ones who went to the Public Prosecutor. Four of us left the unit and went to the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada and filed a complaint. To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify.((The Prosecutor's office archived the complaint in 2016. See our case study on the Lechaina Unit: Hell as an Institution))

The complaint was filed officially, not anonymously. There are specific liabilities at stake: who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed the medication? Specific criminal liabilities are pending, and, to date, they have not been investigated. Unless we are to accept that the disabled persons at the unit are unworthy of living, in which case no criminal liability arises.

The fact that no one is held accountable for this conduct, the fact that nobody seems to wonder about who is to blame for these people’s torture–it is just not possible that no one is to blame—is indicative of the treatment  of disabled subjects in institutions. Is the psychiatrist responsible? Did she prescribe by fax? Was she contacted at two in the morning and told “so-and-so is hitting themselves,” and did she reply, “I’ll fax you a prescription”? Did she do that? If so, is it allowed? Is it a punishable offence? Are prolonged physical restraint and/or prolonged chemical suppression scientifically accepted practices? Are they torture? The UN says they are. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed.

We met the psychiatrist, too, she came to the premises while we were inside. We wanted to speak to her. She did not.

Ideologically, we stand against doctors. Obviously, we do not refuse the intervention of medical science. At the same time, however, we are aware of the part that the medical field has played in us being disabled. By “disabled” in this instance I mean “oppressed”, I do not refer to the impairment. The initial impairment is a separate matter. But if you study the file of a person who has spent twenty years in an institution, his resulting state bears no relation to the initial impairment. Because the impairment of institutionalisation has been added on top.

Several other attempts had been made prior to your intervention and official complaint…

Are you asking why we left it for so long?

No…

I do wish to answer that, nonetheless. We have critically self-reflected on this, on why we left it for so long. Nine of us went there and did something. Why did we leave it so late, why did we not act sooner? We would have made a difference to more people. We looked away, we did not want to face it, we could not face it.

One in two people will project. One of our fellow disabled members, who has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation in the past. His mother had been told the all-too-frequent “Don’t make it harder on yourself. Send him to an institution so you can focus on raising your daughter”. It was hard. I, with my acquired disability, never felt that. I did not believe at twenty-one that my parents would lock me up in an institution. I was already a director; I was working in television. But for other members of the group, who were born disabled, that was one of the turns their life could have taken. We became wiser…

That is what our group is all about, the emancipation of the disabled. The first to become emancipated are the members themselves through this process. We did not want to face this harsh aspect of reality, this prospect that could have been ours. On the other hand, once we stepped outside this individualised perception of disability, once the personal became social, that is when we began to think about what we could do. Could our small band go inside and do something impactful? Not just take a couple of photos and then leave. Would we be taken seriously? Would there be news coverage? Would the ministry take note? Because frustration also plays a part. When you have experienced frustration so many times, over and over, you think it over and wonder, “Should I get involved or will it lead to yet more frustration?” In the end, we burst in and ultimately, some things were put in motion.

Therefore, in terms of a section of society staging an intervention, it was an action worth taking. At the same time, the self-criticism for the delay still stands. We had to fight against our own taboos. That is no small thing. It was a more painful process for our members who had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation at some point than for us. It was harder for them to cope with it. We used to meet, days later, not out of a need to discuss politics or organisational matters, but to talk. To cry, to drink, to cry again… mainly to be there for those who had found it most painful. If you talk to the fellow disabled member I mentioned, he will tell you this: “No matter where I find myself, a cage stands beside me. I carry it with me.” It was an experience that marked people, and I don’t just mean the members of Zero Tolerance. But we are not enough. For deinstitutionalisation to become a demand, for this monstrosity to stop being socially acceptable and normalised, we need to change the way society thinks of disability. We are not interested in everyone’s personal sensibilities. We are interested in mobilising civil society.

What we say applies to all institutions. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism, in living bereft of human dignity in a difficult part of the country, where people perceive disability in the manner stated by Minister of Agricultural Development Makis Voridis,  namely that there are disabled people who have the capacity for understanding and disabled people who do not.((Minister Voridis, during a TV panel discussion, had quipped that children at sixteen "are not disabled", meaning that at that age they have a capacity of adult communication. Video is available (in Greek) here.)) And as a society, we still hold on to the belief that the people in Lechaina do not have the capacity for understanding.

Lechaina must be shut down, the people there must leave. Four years to the day, however, we are still discussing what must be done.

Why do you think that is the case?

It is rotten from the start. Because when a child is born, the first thing the parents, where available, will hear is the medical opinion. It is rotten from the moment the obstetrician enters the room and tells the new mother, “Your child was born faulty.” He will not tell her, “Look, there are difficulties ahead, but you can do this and that.” He will only tell her about the difficulties. He will not offer comfort but launch into the medical script of “he will not be able to think, to see, to hear” and so on. That this child will be bad for her other children, that this child will ruin her relationship with her husband, so “Do not breastfeed, I will interrupt your milk-flow and we will send it to an institution. Your responsibility ends there, you do not need to concern yourself with the course of this child’s life.” That is the classic scenario.

In this instance, we are not talking about broken families, about offenders who are imprisoned, and whose children end up in institutions. We should note here that only fourteen to fifteen per cent of the institutionalised have absolutely no point of reference, in other words, a parent who could potentially take on some responsibilities. Therefore, we are talking about abandonment; about how a couple imagines the stork bringing a blond, green-eyed “normal baby” and then receives a “faulty baby” and decides to bin it.  In those cases, it is the doctor’s intervention that causes the initial damage. Add the way society espouses those same views and the parents freak out. They suffer too, of course, but that does not change the end result.

We saw this in the case of Maria in Lechaina, when we spoke to her mother. The moment her daughter was born, the doctors began to list everything that could happen, medically speaking. But a person is not a medical diagnosis. They are a person. And the problem arises when you start listing all the medical difficulties that lie ahead instead of how they could be dealt with in an organised society.

Does that organised society exist?

Well, people who, despite all these difficulties, make a choice that goes against the medicalised belief that a person who thinks differently ought to be normalised certainly do exist. People who, for example, do not try to normalise autistic children, who do not have a neurotypical brain but an autistic one, and make them be like us. Because that is the beginning of Nazism.

According to Lev Vygotsky, there is a belief that the disabled are a priori unhappy.((Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist. More info available in Wikipedia.)) It is a racist belief, this belief that our lives are lives of suffering, that sometimes they are lives not worth living.

Adriana, who recently passed away, was nineteen years old. I think Adriana’s original diagnosis was glaucoma, meaning she was blind. When we found Adriana, she did not speak, she did not walk, because she lived in a cage. She was restrained when she was around seven years old, because they had no way of confining her and because they could not “nurse” her. So, they put her in a cage because she was active, and no personnel was available to watch over her. The most common question in there is “What are you doing standing up?”. It’s like a regular barracks. Why must they be lying down all day long? Why must they be confined to their bed? Why can they not be outside on the swings?

The standard reply is that the unit is understaffed. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Why are they understaffed? Why are all the residents in diapers? Why do none of them know how to be self-reliant, to use the toilet on their own, to feed themselves? Because they have lost their skills due to institutionalisation and the complete deprivation of every social right. Therefore, the reason the personnel does not suffice is that all these people have been rendered incapacitated.

Is there some kind of logic in what the staff are claiming? There are two people per floor in each shift.

That’s true. But the conclusion depends on your starting point. Do you begin by examining why this happens, or are you only interested in examining the outcome you are dealing with? Two people per floor in each shift are obviously not enough. But why does that happen? How can it be possible for a person with spastic quadriplegia not to be autonomous? Not to be able to eat, drink, use the toilet on their own? How can the rest of us do all those things? They were never allowed to develop.

Or their abilities were “anaesthetised”. A child enters the institution mobile and within a week stops using the toilet. Then the child gets given a bedpan…

A bedpan, really? They soil themselves and then are cleaned with a wipe. They only rarely shower. If a minister is planning to visit, they’ll be given a bath, so they don’t stink. If anyone makes the mistake of soiling themselves after the diaper change, they must wait for the next round. There is no personalised care for this. That means someone can spend hours in a soiled diaper. That is why you end up with that pervading smell in institutions that they can’t wash away.

Have you seen their bodies? Have you seen how many functional deformities have resulted from the repeated adoption of certain postures? Would you like to hear something strange, which also demonstrates the oppression, the torment they have been subjected to? The persons freed by Nikolaidis’ team, unfettered, still slept at night in the same sleeping position they had been restrained in for years. Do you understand what that means? The most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured. That is why, in the early days, almost no one accepted the intervention. That is why it was such an enormous, difficult task for that team.  

Another scene I will never forget is the two young girls, Ellie and Maria, who were eleven years old at the time. When the intervention team arrived at Lechaina, these two girls, being the youngest, were removed to the Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children (PIKPA) in Voula. We used to go and visit them there. One day, they came to our home for a few hours, accompanied by PIKPA volunteers. I remember Ellie in particular, looking for a place to hide. Under the table… always a sheltered spot, away from people and animals. By the end of the day, they were crying because they did not want to leave. It was our understanding that they had never been in a house before. She lay down on our bed, she wanted us to tuck her in so she could sleep there. She saw a dog for the first time, she had never seen one before. She stared at the dog, watched it as if wondering what that strange creature was. We ate together, they had dessert, we danced… same as one would with any other child.

Except that these children had been deprived of love and care. Real love, not the care that an institution’s staff can give. I do not dispute that some of the staff may form emotional attachments with the disabled there, but the way of life in an institution is the very opposite of nurturing care. You spend your whole life being approached by someone in a laboratory coat. Why? They can’t even grasp the fundamental concept of turning up in your own clothes. The gloves, too. Wearing surgical gloves to feed the residents. Why? What are you going to catch? The whole set up of institutions is medico-centric.

You are not only an activist; you are a director too. You are currently working on a documentary about Lechaina…

The two roles are interconnected in any case.

So you enter the occupied building with a camera…

I was not the one holding it, but yes. Two cameras. We went to record what was happening. That’s how it started.

What was the initial purpose of filming? Did you take the cameras as protection?

On the one hand, it was to protect ourselves against anything that might happen, on the other hand, it was to record that moment. Film it and see what was happening there. What we encountered was beyond our worst nightmares.

Did you also take cameras to the occupation of the IKA headquarters you had previously staged?

Yes, small cameras then too, to record everything. As well as for protection, we use the cameras to film material that we can then upload on Zero Tolerance’s social media.  

After the press conference we held at the Lechaina Child Care Centre (KEPEP) on the third day and our departure on the fourth day, the first thing I did was to edit some early material, which is still available online, to accompany the press conference in Athens, to show the journalists and launch the discussion.

When did you decide that you wanted to turn this into a documentary?

I decided during the occupation. I realised that this was an issue I needed to follow up. So, I returned at various intervals, no longer as an “occupier” but first and foremost as a disabled person. And I kept filming. I stayed inside the unit for three, sometimes four days at a time, left, returned, again and again. These past four years, I have made 34 trips to Lechaina if my memory does not fail me. I keep a diary…

This allowed us…

You use the first-person plural?

Not out of politeness, but because I consider this to be a group project, not my work exclusively.

Anyway, this allowed us to observe how things evolved inside Lechaina because one year later, Nikolaidis’ team arrived to implement the interim intervention. The emergency relief intervention for the residents was introduced, and we began to see how these people changed thanks to it.

How their behaviour changed, how the residents we first met, who were uncommunicative, tied up, inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, eyes unfocused, began to blossom in the year and a half that followed the start of the intervention. We watched them develop their skills, we heard them speak, utter words, we heard others express specific requests, “I want a bedside table”, “I want my own clothes”, “I want a TV set”, “I want a remote control”. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving “the prescribed treatment for their own good”.

We saw them step outside. Leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, and that momentous occasion when they saw the front door, stepped outdoors. We witnessed their fears and inhibitions. They did not want to break their routine. For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps; “bed restraint” or “mechanical restraint” as they call it. Some did indeed refuse to cooperate. But that is perfectly normal. Fear was the cause.

But we also saw people suddenly use a spoon and feed themselves, it was incredible! Because up until then they had been bottle-fed, lying down, gulping down liquidised meals in seconds. They did not know how to use their mouths to eat. That is why the teeth of nearly all the residents are in a terrible state. This change took place inside the institution – we did not go to a new space where things were different. It was inside those premises, that place of torture, that the situation changed.

What I had not anticipated in the making of this documentary was filming the dead. People we had met. Attempts were made to remove them from the institution, but they subsequently passed away. I’m not talking about elderly people, they were young.

Take Panagiotis, for example, the oldest resident at fifty years old. It is a miracle he has managed to survive like this, staring at the ceiling. The people who died were much younger: Christos and Ellie and Adriana and Maria.  Ellie was fifteen. Adriana had just turned nineteen. She was the blind girl.

We imagine you have spoken to the staff during your visits. You must have interviewed some of them…

They did not want to be interviewed. Now that they have found out I’m not filming for the sake of it, that I am creating something specific, they might change their mind. I never film with any formality; I do not shout “action!” I prefer things to be spontaneous, a recording of reality without altering the environment so that the actual circumstances remain unchanged. This means that the set up must be minimal. Small cameras to avoid creating a sense of occasion, no boom mics, no lights, no large crew wearing headphones.

So, I met them as individuals first and foremost, learned about their lives, their stories, how they ended up working at the unit since most of them had no previous background, no connection to this field. That did not surprise us, they are locals who found work. Some of them have been working there since the very first day, so we heard about how they were thrown in at the deep end when the institution opened, without any organisational setup. They brought the residents there without any idea of how to deal with them. The staff told us how they ended up organising themselves and creating these conditions, meaning the beds that they enclosed in bars, turning them into cages.

Which they refer to as cots or playpens among themselves.

 Yes. Of course, the term was coined by the former Minister of Health, Katerina Papakosta. “Playpens” then, and that “strapping them down is for their own good” so that “they cannot harm themselves”. Once again, was it the chicken or the egg? When you are enclosed in a confined space for a prolonged period, without any stimulation, no sensory stimulation, no psycho-emotional stimulation, then you begin to hit yourself, to drink your own urine, to eat your own faeces and all the other things you hear about. But this applies to every human being subjected to these conditions, you do not need to have an impairment to reach that point. The institutionalisation makes you impaired. Of course, all behaviours are attributed to their disabilities, it is the easiest narrative to adopt. They tell you, “Can’t you see what they are like?”.

We imagine you have also wondered how these people accept to subject other human beings to this abuse. Do you have an answer to that?

I know that they struggled at first, at least according to their narratives.

Morally?

Morally, I would say yes, they morally struggled with strapping people down. The system is set up in such a way as to render them responsible for some people. But given that this conversation is constantly rehashed, the issue is not whether we can hire more staff so that the torture can go on, so that there is “better monitoring” and residents can continue to be drugged up to the eyeballs. The issue is that no matter how much personnel you hire, you are still running an institution. And the concept of an institution is not that far removed from the concept of a barracks or a prison. Wake up at set times, eat at set times, sleep at set times.

Were these people convinced by scientists that this is the appropriate approach?

Scientists prescribed both “mechanical restraint” and the drug dosages. With absolutely no supervision. In fact, in some cases, they added a new medication to the mix without discontinuing the previous medication. Without anyone ever checking drug interactions or potential side effects. We saw the end result. Zombies. That’s it.

For years the personnel refused to accept the new state of affairs. They did not want to accept that there is an alternative way to provide care. 

Because it meant stepping outside their comfort zones?

I think they did not want to accept that they might be doing something wrong. The prevailing attitude was “Are you here to tell me that what I have been doing for twenty-five, thirty years is not right? How dare you?”

But you are not just telling them this is wrong, you are saying this is inhuman, this is torture.

 “We love these children very much, but there is no other way to manage them. They are monsters. They are unpredictable. If we don’t restrain them, they’ll be climbing up the walls. They could eat the plaster. They could eat their own faeces. They could swallow a large object, choke and die.” These are all actual words we have heard. That is why our position is that none of these people should continue to work in this environment. I don’t mean that they should lose their jobs. I mean that they should go and work in a different environment, certainly not in an institution.

By talking to them, showing them examples from abroad, we managed to persuade a few of them, too few. We were thinking of organising screenings of foreign documentaries on deinstitutionalisation, where the residents themselves discuss life before and after the closure of their institution once they had lived in society and developed their capabilities. The response was, “You are in the Balkans now, this is all too European. Who will fund all this? They’ll run it for half a year and then back to the same old.”

The truth is that we went there having made the conscious decision not to go down that frequent route. Blaming personnel is the easiest thing in the world. That is not to say there is no personal accountability, but the main responsibility lies with the so-called, in our view non-existent, welfare state. It lies with the politicians, who have kept us trapped in a time warp all these years.

And when the issue was all over the news, they would come out with statements. Like former Health Minister Andreas Loverdos in 2011, who stated that he would grant access to any journalist who wished to visit an institution and report on the conditions. And former Deputy Minister of Health Katerina Papakosta, who visited Lechaina following the BBC report and informed us that the situation was not what had been presented, that the “cots” were used for the children’s own protection and that they were standard practice. Then, former Minister Effie Achtsioglou and Deputy Minister Theano Fotiou announced a deinstitutionalisation scheme, and for the first time in Greece, the word “deinstitutionalisation” was pronounced by someone in power.  

What was the reaction at the Lechaina unit?

Their first reaction when deinstitutionalisation was announced and I visited Lechaina was, “It’s going to be just like ERT. They are going to shut it down and fire us all.” They needed to hear reassurances from the ministry that they would not lose their jobs. Very few said, “OK, I can understand why this needs to happen, this situation cannot continue. What will our part be going forward? How will this thing work? What’s the next step?” I told them, “It would be far better to work in a real home in the city of Lechaina or a place nearby and work in more humane conditions.”

Moreover, the professional foster care scheme had been announced, which would enable some of the workers to foster a resident in their home. Some of them had, indeed, bonded with certain residents, bonded with the “children”, everyone is called a “child” there, even when they are fifty years old, so they could opt for professional fostering and work from home.

The SYRIZA-ANEL former government announced professional foster care but did not take the necessary actions to implement it. How did your interlocutors react to the idea, nonetheless?

I discussed this with a worker who calls one of the residents her “daughter”. I told her, “Why don’t you take your daughter home under the professional foster care scheme then?” She fell silent. She just gaped at me. Being in your workplace and having formed a bond with someone there is very different to transferring that relationship into your own home. I imagine that would require discussions with her husband, her children, her social circle. Even without the implementation of professional foster care, the option to take a resident home for the weekend was still there. All it required was the permission of the Board of Directors. No one ever did that.

Or for the holidays, Christmas…

Every Christmas they host an event for “normal” children who are allowed into the lobby, they do not go further inside, and sing Christmas carols.

There are children who have been inside the unit and decorated the cages...

Yes, from the American Community Schools of Athens (ACS), to brighten up the torture of the people kept inside the cages. Of course, the residents were not physically inside the cages while the students painted them.

Small mercies…

That was one of the most vivid contrasts that struck me as I entered the centre. The dystopian landscape. The stench of excrement, fettered residents moaning and groaning and “I love you” painted on the walls, signed by ACS. I really would like to know what on earth the educator in charge had been thinking.

Returning to the subject of the personnel, I have seen the extent to which they have accepted the work they are asked to carry out and the resulting way of life for the residents. It never ceases to astound me, in all the institutions I have visited, be it Crete, the PIKPA in Voula, Thessaloniki, Komotini, Rhodes… This situation is normalised. It might shock those of us witnessing it for the first time, but that is the reality as far as they are concerned. I was also astounded by the fact that few visiting relatives seemed to be astonished by what they saw. They found it normal too.

We have also witnessed an admission being deterred. A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. The reasoning behind the decision was to save her marriage and spare her other children. She was evidently being pressured by her husband to abandon the disabled child, so they could focus on their “normal” children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears.

Did she take the child with her?

Yes.

So at least one child was spared…

Maybe she split up with her husband. Who knows what kind of pressure she was under? The guilt she carried with her for giving birth to a disabled child. The belief that she was being punished by God for some previous sin… In any case, yes, we were glad that the admission was averted.  But they did admit a new resident recently. Various organisations were mobilised, we opposed the decision publicly, the ministry intervened, and the child was brought to Athens because the public prosecutor would not rescind the order. That is also a big issue. I do not know if a decision to prohibit new admissions at Lechaina has been officially made.

There is a Board of Directors decision to suspend admissions.

Only that. Theano Fotiou, Effie Achtsioglou or the General Secretary for Welfare, I do not think they ever issued a decision to ban new admissions when they decided Lechaina would eventually close. Of course, things are no better elsewhere in Greece. Lechaina differed in the use of those “cots”. But I have seen a resident fettered with ropes in another institution, I have seen those tall “cots” with high bars, allegedly to stop people from falling if they stand up on their beds. All institutions operate along the same lines. Even the smell is the same. They all smell the same.

What did you have in mind when you began working on this documentary?

Look, when you start a documentary, you are not in charge, the reality guides you. Going into Lechaina, I decided to do what the documentary title says: From Asylum to Society. In other words, we decided to take what society rejects by relegating it to an isolated building somewhere far away, record it and bring it before its eyes. I wanted to experience it, to go on this journey that I think is gradually coming to its end. I cannot sit and wait to see how the new government will act.  See if it wants to raze everything that happened before to the ground and do something entirely different. Many rumours are going around, some bordering on science fiction, but there are some others which may find us in agreement. I wanted to record this unbearable situation, which is one hundred per cent legalised and imposed by the state itself. A situation that is connected to the perceptions we all have, including the country’s politicians, about the lives of the disabled who find themselves outside the family circle for some reason, and that is the only protection we afford them.

Unfortunately, a documentary cannot communicate the smells, nor what being there does to someone like you or me. But the conditions… the conditions inside an institution. No matter how good you try to make them, an institution remains a place of torture. Torture that has been normalised using the physical impairments of the those confined there as a pretext.

You must have been hoping for something at the beginning of the documentary, however.

Yes, I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. I did…

Do you feel frustrated?

We are used to frustration… Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that Effie Achtsioglou’s announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the birth family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That they would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.

During the four days of the occupation there was tension, our interactions were formal, information would reach us, Theano Fotiou made a statement, we made a statement. In the end, we decided the pressure group must move from inside Lechaina to headquarters, we announced that we expected to be called to the Ministry to discuss everything we had recorded. At the same time, we sent all the material we had gathered abroad to spark a reaction in Europe, the bodies charged with welfare. We sent it to the UN, and they issued a recommendation that we read out during the press conference we held at Lechaina on the afternoon of the third day, inviting local press. The mayor came, along with various others.

 We broke down on the day of our departure. We broke down because we were saying goodbye to our fellow disabled, and we could not grasp that we were free to leave that place, but they would stay behind. We broke down. We wept. We sobbed. We said goodbye and gathered around a bench outside, by the olive trees and burst into tears. An olive tree is planted every time someone dies. All these people, they enter the institution as children and leave when they are adults… by dying. “Deinstitutionalisation” via movement to the great beyond, if you are a believer. We wept because we knew that we were going home and that from that day forth, we would have to find a way to change the reality we had experienced, no matter what.

I also feel great sadness. Because, for us, the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. They have been ready to leave the institution for a year now. Nikolaidis rightly said from the start that you cannot just take people out of a cage and simply transfer them elsewhere, there needs to be a training and transition process. That process has taken place.

So, I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen. But, sadly, society is not mobilising.  And that is the heart of the matter. The issue of deinstitutionalisation is vast, it concerns a great number of people. In 2014, the Roots Research Centre in Greece estimated that approximately 900 disabled persons are held in institutions. They enter as children and depart as olives. That is the Greek version of deinstitutionalisation. It is a massive issue. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.

What happens when a child showing signs of any type of abuse arrives at the hospital?

If a child has been subjected to abuse that cannot be dealt with, then the child might be brought to the hospital. There, it is up to the attending paediatrician to diagnose whether the child has been abused or not. If abuse is detected, the paediatrician informs us and is obligated to inform the Public Prosecutor for Minors, with whom we are in constant contact. The paediatrician reports their findings to the Public prosecutor and the child is admitted to the hospital. This can even be done over the phone with the public prosecutor giving a verbal order that the child should be admitted. We inform the parent or the uncle or aunt who has brought the child to the hospital, and the admission is made discreetly. In other words, we say that the child has an issue that necessitates a hospital stay for monitoring.

The following day or, if the admission is made in the morning, that same day, they inform the hospital’s social services, and we proceed with the necessary actions. We meet the parents, meet the people accompanying the child, looking after the child, and try to obtain background and records to ascertain what is going on. The child psychiatry clinic is also informed provided a Public Prosecutor’s order has been issued, and then the team of the University Child Psychiatry clinic takes over. They are experts in the field, child psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and other specialists at the hospital such as speech and occupational therapists. These specialized psychologists have the scientific tools to diagnose whether there has been abuse.

What is the legal procedure from that point onwards?

We notify, and the Public Prosecutor decides whether a forensic examination is called for, which is usually the case when there are findings or indications present. If the relative arriving at the hospital is reluctant to report the incident to the police, then there is a problem. We inform the relative that they must go to the police station and notify them, and the relative goes to the police and informs them who inflicted the abuse if it is known. The police Division for Minors of the General Police Directorate of Attica (GADA) arrive immediately and carry out an investigation, in other words, contact the abuser and take them to make a statement about what has happened. If the offence has been committed, the accused is brought before a court within twenty-four hours of the arrest, and then the whole legal procedure begins.

What we want is to prevent the abuser from coming to the hospital and being near the child. That is very difficult because we need to inform the Public Prosecutor and the Public Prosecutor decides whether to issue such a ban. Recently, this has started happening more properly, meaning that public prosecutors often come to the hospital and realize what is going on. You can’t have a child that has been abused and have the offender present and everyone commenting on what a lovely person the abuser is. Because inside the hospital, the abuser will not show any signs of what has been happening. However, as a hospital, our job is not to prosecute. Our job is to help the perpetrator too, to refer them to a unit for adults to deal with their own issues. There have been times when a mother or father who has abused their child goes on to receive treatment once the police have intervened.

Where do the abuse reports you receive originate?

In recent years, abuse generally gets reported through the helpline of The Smile of the Child. Certainly, The Smile of the Child is right to do its job the way it does, but this matter should fall within state services. It is like an epidemic, so to speak, which concerns public health, isn’t it? If I am not well and I am a dangerous mother, should not the state address the issues I am facing? Should not the state have addressed it years before I, before anyone, ends up abusing their child?

Most children arrive here in The Smile of the Child vehicles following a request by the police. The Smile of the Child receives reports from neighbours, siblings, the children themselves and then it notifies the police. The police call for a psychologist or social worker, who goes to the police station and then transports the child to the hospital.  But has the Public Prosecutor been previously notified during this process? On weekends, only the police are involved because none of us can contact the public prosecutor.

So most of your cases come through The Smile of the Child helpline. Do you also get incidents from the National Centre for Social Solidarity (EKKA) 1107 helpline?

Yes, of course, they also refer instances to us. But EKKA is under the radar, it is a state organization, and it does not make announcements on television. The EKKA helpline is not well known, but it is effective and has instant access to family accommodation to protect the child and the parent – the non-abusive parent. Because the other parent rightly or wrongly…

How many incidents do the ‘Paidon’ Children’s Hospital social services handle?

There has been a sharp rise. In 2016, there were 125 public prosecutor orders for abuse or neglect, 178 incidents in 2017 and 221 in the first eleven months of 2018. It’s not a massive increase but, let me tell you, we are becoming more desensitized. In the past, when a child was admitted, it would become the centre of our world. You can’t imagine the lengths we would go to in order to ensure the child recovered, not just physically but psychologically too. What would become of the child? We called relatives, talked to them, looked into who would care for the child… It was a huge deal, in other words. Now seven children are admitted within the same one hour, there’s only so much we can do.

How much staff are employed by the hospital’s social services?

There are eight of us in total. Six from the Child Psychiatry clinic and two here. Currently, we have a third person here, but she is on secondment and will be returning to Thessaloniki. A staff of two is meagre and people come knocking on our door whenever they feel like. They do not threaten us, but when someone comes wanting a solution to their problem, they become aggressive. In the past, it never got to the point where we had to call the police.

What do you attribute this change to?

A lack of time. Working with instances of abuse is a delicate process, you need to have sessions with the child, someone else must see them again, the nurses need to care for them, their feet.  Very often, children are admitted to the hospital having spent several days away from home, they need comprehensive care. When you are dealing with 62 admissions by order of the Public Prosecutor, you tell me, is that possible?

Is it abuse or the number of reported incidents that are on the rise?

My view is that it is both. The state is somewhat more alert, and citizens report incidents more easily too. And there is a staff shortage. For example, the police department or the public prosecutor issues an order for accommodation, medical examination and child psychiatric evaluation. Psychiatric evaluation is not a case of “hello, how are you?” and then you are done. You need to give the children toys during the session and, using the tools, assess where they have been abused, what your prognosis is, whether the child can return home or not. Who will show an interest in looking after the child? They might turn up in a month. To what extent can the staff fulfil that role? What I mean is the child is admitted, needs care, but the staff can’t dedicate all their time to the three children who might be wreaking havoc in the department.

We had a case of a young child with lice on their eyelids, but a different “kind” of lice and it caused great consternation here. In the end, it was not a case of neglect, probably something caught on a bus. The grandparents would look after the children, they would get on the bus with the baby, possibly some people who were not clean had sat there before, the grandfather sat on the seat, went to the house, hugged the child and so on. We counselled them, we met with them, we investigated what was going on at home, the grandparents were kept away. Maybe the grandfather had dementia, maybe he was not to blame, maybe he had an issue; you need to investigate all this, but the investigation cannot be rushed, you need to gain the other person’s trust.

Child protection, however, as a principle, belongs to social workers. We do not make home visits; the public prosecutor of the area where a family resides orders the home visits and an investigation into the child’s living conditions. Because if a child has fractures or something caused by an electric shock or anything else, it could be a result of the conditions they live in. We have had child patients who had spent months living without electricity or running water. That is a form of indirect neglect, isn’t it? The rehabilitation lasted six months, during which these children were accommodated at the hospital. Can you imagine the irritation of the doctors and nurses? To have “healthy” parents and children occupy beds that were needed for the hospitalization of children requiring medical care? Well, at least they recovered. The family are actually doing well, but they were very cooperative, certain circumstances were present that helped. We were pressured by associations, they paid off the electricity bills, cleaned the house, an uncle painted the house, they got pots and pans, the father received treatment because he was an alcoholic, in other words, a number of things came together, and it all went well. But not all incidents work out this way…

Are doctors trained on how to recognize signs of abuse?

Look, the training is a requirement for paediatricians, including those working in the outpatient clinics. They have seen many, many incidents. In the past, we had the institute of child health which dealt with abuse, inside the hospital. It was a programme initiated by Doxiades, the minister who used to be a paediatrician here. As an extension of the institute, he founded a medical-educational centre in Mets to address psychological issues. The institute itself has moved away from the hospital and provides training to all specialists.

A study on abuse was carried out by a nurse at this hospital too. Mr Anagnostopoulos, who is the director and the first child psychiatry professor at the hospital, was one of the first to address child abuse along with Ms Xeni Dimitriou, who is at the Supreme Court now. There is a hospital protocol drafted by the Child Psychiatry clinic, but it deals with child psychiatry procedure as well as several things similar to what I previously mentioned. For example, the child is admitted to a paediatric clinic. The paediatrician present, the nurse, must care for the child, the paediatrician must examine the child and make a diagnosis. If a forensic medical exam is needed, we notify the public prosecutor, and they request the examination. All hospital personnel may have access to this protocol.

Have they read it?

That is a different matter. Moreover, abuse is a shocking situation, you can’t keep calm. Will you remember everything you must do on the spot? Of course, there is a chain of supervision for each shift, X supervises Y and Z. So if you are Z, you will ask X what you should do. Things do not get missed. They just have a great many children to attend to and with a father yelling, needing help and the other parent outside shouting “what are you doing in there?” and causing havoc, threatening to alert the press, to do this and that, it’s not an easy job. There should be another kind of record-keeping at the community level. The municipalities should know their citizens, where they move to, when they move. To have preventive care. If a woman is an addict and falls pregnant, who cares for her? Is she receiving treatment for her addiction (which is also a huge issue as you know)? Does the mother suffer a from mental disability, is she vulnerable, does she have enough money to get by? Does she not? Has she been checked?

Babies arrive at the hospital without any previous checks, and you don’t know where to start. Moreover, the financial crisis has affected the Greek population to such an extent that comprehensive prenatal testing is absent, as well as other things possibly. For the first time since 2011, we have parents arriving here and saying, “I cannot look after my child, I would like the state to assume responsibility for it”.

Do you receive incidents from all over Greece?

The whole of Greece. If Patras decides to send an abuse case here, the child arrives here. When there is a Public Prosecutor’s order, you cannot decline, it is prohibited.

Do the children who are hospitalized long-term have atypical development?

They are mostly children with some developmental issues whose families in the past would not have said: “I will leave them in a child protection unit”. There would have been a grandmother or a grandfather to care for those children. Children arrive here in various ways. They could even arrive from a private maternity clinic. The child may have stayed there, had surgeries, treatment and whatever else is needed, and the parents see they cannot cope, and they leave the child at the “Paidon” Children’s Hospital. The child enters an intensive care unit, the parents say they cannot look after the child on a 24-hour basis, and they leave. That raises another issue: we are not equipped with interim care units for those children.

How do you deal with that issue?

The “With Family” programme allowing foster care has been running for the past two years. Before that, the children would be sent to the “Mitera” Hospital, and they would arrange for foster care. We usually prefer kinship foster care where a relation cares for the child. We had a case of a woman with substance withdrawal syndrome, the father had other issues, and we tracked down her sister. She came to the hospital, we persuaded her, and the child was placed in kinship foster care with her, which was the best possible outcome. The child did not go to “Mitera”, the Public Prosecutor of her region assigned the placement, and she now comes for follow-ups. That was a good outcome, but the child stayed at this hospital for eight months. The child was admitted as a newborn and left aged eight to nine months.

Recently, a social media post that went viral claimed that there is a child at the hospital who has lived here for three years.

A child who has been living at the hospital for thirteen years is about to leave. That is a great achievement. This child has done very well. The child lived with the father until the age of six, in and out of this hospital, but spending most of the time here. The child had a serious metabolic problem, which is now a simple issue, it has been addressed, you adjust the diet, and it resolves the issue. The mother got tired, had another family, other children. The father was disgruntled and used to cause conflict with the nursing staff and the doctors; he now lives abroad. When the child was six, parental responsibility was terminated by Public Prosecutor’s order, and the child has been living here during the seven years that followed.

What are the repercussions of this kind of long-term hospitalisation?

The children do not want to leave and cannot easily adjust elsewhere. The hospital is a protected environment, a nurse is always around, someone to talk to. The nurses love the children, but a child could take your injections, endanger medical care… You can’t always stay calm, faced with such incidents you might snap “go away”. The child cannot handle hearing that. Then the nurse supervisor will reprimand you, “What did you do? Why is this medicine bottle broken? I can’t order it from the pharmacy now.” So, the stay of some children is not an easy matter, children whose abuse has caused a disorder and have to be good inside a hospital twenty-four hours a day. We have teachers, we have a school, teachers come to give lessons, in other words, this is a well-organized hospital, it is not disorganized. But a hospital is not suited to deal with every kind of issue. It is not supposed to be.

Do you know of any instances where the child was immediately placed in foster care?

Well, foster care has only just started. In the past, the child had to go to another body which would then handle foster care, to Mitera, to Agios Andreas, within the framework of state services. On the island of Rhodes, foster care runs very smoothly, but we must note that the municipality there is efficient and wealthy, so things happen more easily. Have children come back after their army service and told us how nice the institution that they stayed in was? I will never forget a boy at the Hatzikonsta Foundation (a neglect incident), who had come there and then found a job and was very happy. It does not always go wrong.

Do the municipalities refer incidents to you?

Yes. If the abuse and or neglect is verified by civil servants, it makes matters easier. The incident is brought directly here, and there have been instances of children arriving accompanied by the social workers of their area, and the admission is made with documentation provided by a public prosecutor. They come to visit the child the following day, and the days after that, they tell us about the family, they have a good idea of what is happening. So you allow whoever is close to the child to be with the child, it could be a grandmother, it could be an aunt who has been prepared, that is why I maintain that it is good for municipalities to know their citizens.

So they should become more involved, with more personnel, more training…

Yes, and not come here. Let me give you an example: a homeless pregnant woman and her child suffering from scabies. We gave them a room to deal with the illness. They used to sleep outside a school, so she picked a mattress from the trash and contracted scabies. At this hospital, we also assisted the adult mother. She had never been to a gynaecologist. It was not easy to make the appointments, call the hospital, make the appointments and ask her to go but keep the child here because the mother was afraid that we might take the child away, that we were doing it on purpose. In the end, she went to “Mitera”, to the space allocated to parturient women, because our Municipality had told us that there was a programme providing flats, which would have been perfect. But the programme was not running yet, and she would have gone into labour here. Ultimately, she did give birth here and was transported to the “Alexandra” Hospital by ambulance. Then we allocated “exclusive” nurses to the child… the manager now places “exclusive” nurses to care for difficult children.

How many incidents of abuse are recorded in Leros every year?

Incidents per year are few. We do not keep statistics, but it is possibly two to three incidents every year. Other than that, every incident has its own particularities, no two incidents are the same. A professional saying that the same method could be applied to a subsequent incident would be wrong. There are particularities pertinent to the persons involved, the type of abuse and the environment. Usually, the abuse is physical, beatings. The evidence could be overt signs of abuse, or in other instances, only indications. We are talking about repeated limb fractures, overt signs in the sense of bruises, while, at the same time, the investigation can uncover evidence from the family and social environment, which manifest a low standard of living, education, cognition or intellectual development.

How do you come across cases of abuse?

Through the office of the Public Prosecutor. Through someone making a report at social services or the police. A citizen could have reported an incident to the Public Prosecutor’s office on the island of Kos, and the Public Prosecutor is obligated to order a social investigation. The Kalikratis law stipulates that mental health professionals may be used in the absence of municipal social services, the same way that psychiatrists are appointed when there is a need for an expert report.

On the island, I am the only one who can carry out such an investigation, as only the State Hospital has a professional. The same probably goes for most islands. There are no social workers on Patmos, for example. But I do not go to Patmos because I can decline the Public Prosecutor’s order as it is a different municipality. I do not even get paid for the orders I execute within the municipality of Leros, neither by the municipality nor the office of the Public Prosecutor. And yet, the State Hospital bears a certain cost as a result, given that some of my time is spent elsewhere to the Hospital’s detriment.

What is the procedure?

The order of the Public Prosecutor stipulates that a social investigation should take place, and a social report should be submitted to the prosecutor in writing. The investigation is both formal and informal and involves everyone: the family, the social circle, the extended family environment, services, bodies and institutions. I am not subject to any constraints other than the stipulations of family law, which state that I can present myself at their home at any time, day or night, but if they do not wish to let me inside, I cannot force their hand. If that happens, I leave and simply notify the public prosecutor.

What are Leros’ deficiencies in the field of prevention?

A great many deficiencies. There is cooperation with the schools because, in small communities, schools are the most fundamental institution. We work together in a very friendly and informal manner. As you can understand, when cooperation with schools is good, particularly with primary schools, you can notice everything – and prevent many things.

But even there, I believe that teachers operate restrictively. In the past, teachers could enter the family home more freely, talk to the parents more openly; that is no longer the case. I think they are just afraid. For example, they can see that a child needs special education, but they will rarely inform the parents from the outset. There is this fear of “how can I tell the mother; she won’t accept it”. I have discussed this with teachers countless times. Once the situation becomes unmanageable and the child stops making any progress, then they are forced to say, “you should take your child to the “Paidon” Hospital to check if something else is going on.” I think this has more to do with the family rather than a teacher’s competence.

It used to be the opposite.

We have become a little alienated, that is the root of the problem in my view. I have watched new faces join the schools these past five years at least. What I notice is that the warmth is lost, the teacher of old who stood by the child, who was also a protector and an advisor. Nowadays, it is rare. The teacher is more distant, that is my observation. Of course, I do not mean to imply that they are not competent teachers.

Nevertheless, cooperation with schools is very good. School principals have sought our assistance numerous times. Often, our assistance is sought informally; we are asked to give talks on different topics or to talk to a family or to see a family that they refer to the hospital without taking further formal steps because that would mean involving the Public Prosecutor. They call the social worker, the psychologist or whoever is needed to talk to the child and the parents informally. They hope that the family will see sense and things will change or they want to see whether the family will accept therapeutic intervention if the mental health professionals deem it necessary.

That is how teachers approach things, they try to see how they can help because you know, “Office of the Public Prosecutor” sounds a little scary (laughs).

So, in essence, you have personalised cooperation that is not governed by any protocols. You are under no obligation to act if you do not want to.  

That is so, but we always act. Personally, that is always my starting point. Regardless of the course events will take and how the case will develop, my first thought is what the appropriate therapeutic intervention is. Unless it is very clear from the start, in which case you know what needs to be done. When things are not clear, that is your starting point until you find out more. Things may change in due course, naturally. You could start by filing a social report “requesting that parents attend counselling sessions with a psychologist, that the child be supervised every week, that the school keep me informed” etc. and everything could change in the course of a weekend; the child could be at the “Paidon” Hospital for psychiatric evaluation, the parents at the Office of the Public Prosecutor, and everything could be different. You cannot know this in advance. People can hide things from you during the first and second social investigations if they wish to do so. You are not a detective, let’s not kid ourselves.

How would you describe the job of a social worker in this kind of cases?

It’s a multifaceted job. Part of it is outside the office, in other words, there is the administrative work, drafting reports, cooperating with various bodies and services, but there is also the investigative aspect where you are acting as a detective.  For example, you receive some information, unofficially. You will not pass judgement, but you will visit the bar or the coffee shop or people at another house, the neighbourhood, the recreational space and gather information. Then you record all the information that you have gathered because it is impossible to retain the details of everything you hear over a couple of days. Only then do you compile the report, because you need to provide an objective picture in the eyes of the Public Prosecutor.

In terms of institutions and services, what have you found lacking when dealing with incidents?

We are missing a child psychiatrist, who is the be-all and end-all. The region has never had one, nor has the island of Rhodes. They are only available at the “Paidon” Children’s hospital and, despite its failings, “Paidon” is still the only hospital to cover the whole of Greece. I cannot fault them, I excuse them even if they make mistakes, even if those mistakes affect lives. They are not Gods. Doctors are human beings too. Faced with so many incidents, it is only to be expected…

Let me share a complaint I have about all child care institutions in general. Whenever we try to find a place for a minor, no institution has availabilities.  It is impossible, because we are subjected to interrogation about the condition of each child, each minor, and children who are not psychologically, intellectually and cognitively “perfect” are rejected. What is the point of having these institutions? The reply I have been given in recent years is that “our personnel cannot support a child at these institutions”. Why are you even in operation then?

What were those cases?

They usually involved minors with behavioural disorders, discipline issues, who usually came from family environments where the parents had mental health issues, were usually divorced, one parent would be absent, and the wider family environment was also not stable. So we were forced to remove the child from the family. Had there been at least a grandmother or a grandfather who were “well” they could have supported the mother facing mental health issues. But these issues are also somewhat hereditary, someone raised that mother, and as no one has intervened to assist the mother in handling her issues, she will also raise children with mental health issues.

Once that happens, however, it is not easy to keep a safe distance in a small community…

There is no safe distance. Someone could come outside and scream and shout at the child you have just removed. We are a community where 16km separate us at most. Usually, we are talking about distances of two to four kilometres. In that case, there is no safe distance. Even if someone takes out a restraining order; restraining orders do not work. Yes, legally there has been a prohibition, but if the other person comes to attack you, the police will not have enough time to save you. By the time you call the police, and they get there, the other person will have battered you. So, what restraint do these measures provide? They do not have the power that they ought to have.

I think it is best if the children leave. In any case, even if a child with a disorder is placed with a foster family, which is the lightest consequence of psychological damage inflicted by the parents or the wider environment on a minor, the child cannot be supported by the foster family alone. Even in foster care, there should be specialists attending to the child and advising the parents.

When I come across such a child, I consider that I am not equipped to handle the case and should not be responsible for it.  I cannot know what will come up in due course or what the child’s reaction will be. Such cases should be addressed by interdisciplinary teams, not single professionals. Like in the past, following the mental health reforms, when we had inter-disciplinary teams comprising a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a nurse, a social worker, all of the health professionals in general, an occupational therapist, a speech therapist and the appropriate referrals would be made according to the needs of the case. Our job in such instances is to carry out an interview, identify where the problem lies and make a referral to a psychologist, a child psychologist, or whoever is best suited.

Do you think that the island of Leros has certain particularities as far as abuse is concerned?

No, nothing that is particular to Leros as far as abuse goes. I think you can encounter the same things everywhere. If it has become notorious, it is because things become intensified in a small community. In Athens, dozens of similar incidents could be occurring and not make the same impact. In a small community, even divorce will stigmatise a child, despite this being 2018. If the father is unknown, the child is stigmatized. Do you know how often school children will say, “so and so has no dad”? They say it even if the father has passed away, this has actually happened.

There is an introversion in small communities. There is also concealment, an attitude of only showing the family’s good face outside the home. There is also unsociability. For a start, professionals in the field are not easily accepted, even today. In a high-conflict divorce, I received an order to carry out an investigation. When I asked the mother to come see me, she nearly fainted. She was a young woman who had no reason to be afraid, as my subsequent investigation led me to believe. And yet, when she heard she had to see a social worker, she nearly fainted, she started crying, asking me “What have I done wrong? Why do you want to take my child away?”

The first time I went to Athens to sign up at the School, I shared a cabin with a mother from Patmos and her young child. She asked me what the purpose of my trip was. I explained and then the child asked, “What will the lady graduate? Like Lilo and Stitch?” In the animated film, Lilo’s parents are dead, and she is looked after by her sister, who struggles with it. Every now and then a tall man turns up at their house, saying he has come to take Lilo away. I had watched the film with my children, we used to quote “Family means nobody gets left behind”. So I could fully grasp what the child meant; it was rather discomfiting.

Have you ever felt any hostility from the people on Leros?

I try to think that it is just my impression. I have good relations with people, I just know how to set boundaries. In other words, other than the friends I choose, I will not foster contact outside of my working hours. And if I do, I will be polite and set boundaries in my own way. If the other person displays behaviour which I consider inappropriate, well, they are the ones who should be ashamed of it at the end of the day, and not me. I am just doing my job.

Sometimes I might feel bad, think that “I have to be the bad guy again”, but there is no other option. The good thing is that I can express it. Then, there are the physical dangers. All I try to do is train my children well so that they can protect themselves because there have been many instances of drug addicts showing aggression. The police are there for me, we have cooperated many times, and they advise me, but I could not pull back just because I am afraid, I would not do that. Worst case scenario, it would be very easy to torch my car, and I would lose my car. And suffer a financial cost.

Is there a framework for the protection for social workers?

No, there is no framework for our protection, none. But I always have a back-up plan. In such incidents, say the father is an alcoholic… a father has actually pulled up beside my car in the street and started swearing at me. I know how to act; I will leave quietly and distance myself. I do not give off any signals that could provoke someone, but I always have a plan and take precautions.

I left and went to the police department, I reported the incident, they recorded it in their incident log, and the father did indeed require hospitalization at the psychiatric clinic and received treatment. He then calmed down. I try to learn what the legal framework is, but in practical terms, I am aware of how to protect myself and my children. They have learned not to answer the door to anyone because I deal with drug addicts, alcoholics who would come knocking on my door at any time. I would never leave my son alone in an area where they know who we are, and there are such incidents.

But I do not think we are dealing with dangerous people. The incidents I have been describing, alcoholics or drug addicts, they usually display cowardice. They might be screaming at you on the spot, but they will not take any further steps. They usually have low self-esteem, so if you manage to project that you are not afraid and that you will gain the upper hand if you want to, they think twice. I believe that they fear me because they know that I collaborate with the Public Prosecutor. My leverage is that I will request the Prosecutor’s intervention, and when they hear that they fall in line.

Is it not a problem that there is a new Public Prosecutor every year?

It's a good thing because sometimes the Public Prosecutor is not what we would like them to be. Some Public Prosecutors, in my view, simply do not do their jobs as they should. There are exceptional public prosecutors. But some show indifference, I don’t know why. I don’t know whether it is indifference or something else, which they cannot handle and manifests itself as indifference. However, whenever I have needed a Public Prosecutor for a minor, the collaboration has mostly been excellent.  

When I say the collaboration has been excellent, I mean that whenever we have needed personal advice or guidance in a case, the prosecutor has been available. We often need to contact the public prosecutor for personal legal issues, because there is no legal counsel at the service. We seek advice on whether we can take such and such step or on how exposed to a parent’s lawsuit we might be.

If I, as social services, submit a formal request that I need a legal counsellor and my request is approved, then a legal counsellor is assigned here but then stops. In other circumstances, other professionals also need to make a similar request. In most cases, we work with our own legal advisors. I just happen to have some cousins who are lawyers and every once in a while… (laughs) Of course, I think that when our administration needs a legal counsellor, they can find one, but that legal counsellor cannot address our issues, they are here for specialized matters that concern our administration.

How have the police been?

We have had no problems with the police. Whenever I have needed them to protect me or accompany me, they have been impeccable. Other times, they will ask for assistance themselves. In other words, they will call me if it is the weekend or when an incident has gone straight to the police without admission to the hospital having been made. They will call and ask if I can go help them. I will go and be informed about the case in person and then talk with the public prosecutor, who will have already spoken to the police. They also work more informally if they want to diffuse a situation on the spot because it is a small community.

How likely is the child protection situation in Greece to change in your view?

I believe that some things in Greece can't change because Greece is not just Athens and Thessaloniki. Greece is made up of villages and islands, and that is where the bulk of the problem lies. We have not managed to resolve basic issues. An order of the Public Prosecutor is issued, we go, we ask for the child to be removed, all public services close at 3 p.m., and the only thing we can do is ask the office of the public prosecutor to send a fax to the police station, and then the policeman has to come find me to formally deliver the document. We do not even have a fax machine.  

Let me tell you something even more basic: the equipment you see here does not work. Next door, there is a printer and a scanner that I brought to the office so I could do my job. If this equipment breaks down, I cannot do anything. I had a PC, but management took it away because they consider that the administration department is much busier with admin work than I am, and they left me with this one, which does not work. Which is more than I had before because I worked on my own laptop until 2013.

So you can understand that things are not easy. Then, let’s assume you get the Public Prosecutor’s order. How will the professional accompany the minor to the “Paidon” Children’s Hospital? I have ended up arguing with the mayor over things that should be a given. The funding issue was ultimately resolved by the public prosecutor, a quick-witted prosecutor who took it upon herself to secure the funds through the archdiocese. Just great.

Why did you argue with the mayor?

I called the mayor to tell him to fund the tickets. Where else would the money come from, is the Leros Hospital to assume those expenses too? The Leros Hospital could make a decision and go to the commissioner, but the commissioner will say that they cannot justify the expenses. When we call Blue Star Ferries, they tell us “I don’t care, you find a way to pay for the tickets.” We are talking about instances that fall within social welfare.

If I accepted every single time, this would happen in every single instance. We are talking about minors. So, in most cases, if we have a minor who is only going for child psychiatric evaluation, they travel to the clinic accompanied by the parents, because the father has not been deemed unfit so why should he not accompany the child? Besides, for as long as the biological parent has custody, no one else is allowed to accompany the child. However, when we proceed to the immediate and somewhat abrupt removal of the child, and we remove the minor from the family because the child can be with neither parent, then the child must be accompanied by a social worker and the police, by law.

Are there inherent legal risks?

There are legal risks in the sense that you are responsible for a minor for that time, with everything that that entails. For everything the child does during transportation, be it their behaviour or illness or running away or hurting themselves, something as simple as that.

Mrs Kafasari spoke to us about the journey during which you both accompanied children. What became of them?

You know, when we leave, we lose touch. And that is a principle I adhere to; I will never call and find out what became of them for purely emotional reasons. It is also to protect myself emotionally. When children enter a social welfare framework, no one is allowed to contact them at first, so that they are given a period of adjustment. A person from their past could trigger a regression. To this, one could say that I could always call the professional charged with the child. As I told you, this is purely for my sake. I tell myself that it is a case and it must be forgotten, must be left there.

The Covid-19 lockdown was challenging for everyone. What did it mean, however, for children faced with abuse or neglect? In Greece, where the child protection system is disjointed, understaffed and disorganised, how did the lockdown affect children who were forced to not have contact with anyone else apart from their abusers? How did State services respond during such a trying period? After the lockdown ended, were any measures put in place to assess and alleviate the consequences for vulnerable children? What is the plan, in case an increase in Covid-19 cases forces a new lockdown?

We sought answers to these questions through five interviews with child protection experts that were streamed live on The Manifold Facebook Page.

Interview #1: Theoni Koufonikolakou

Theoni Koufonikolakou is Deputy Ombudswoman for Children's Rights.

Interview 2: Antonis Rellas

Antonis Rellas is a film and stage director and a disabled activist with "Zero Tolerance". (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #3: Giorgos Nikolaidis

Giorgos Nikolaidis is a psychiatrist, director of the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate of the Institute of Child Health, and former chairperson and current member of the Lanzarote Committee. (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #4: Triantafyllia Athanasiou

Triantafyllia Athanasiou is a social worker, chairperson of the Association of Social Workers of Greece.

Interview #5: Stefanos Alevizos

Stefanos Alevizos is a psychologist with The Smile of the Child NGO.

The Unit stands at the exit from the town of Lechaina in the direction of the village of Myrsini, facing the substation pylons of the Greek public power corporation. The building, which belongs to the episcopal see of Elis, is a four-storied, cross-shaped construction crowned by a dome. Its design could hardly be described as suitable for its intended use.

Perhaps that was the reason it was deemed necessary to restrain the seven-year-old blind girl who had been admitted to the institution at the age of three. Fully mobile yet blind, brimming with the energy of childhood, she would have needed someone to watch over her constantly. Lechaina has always been understaffed. “For her own good”, then, someone decided that she should be locked up in a cage. By the time she was sixteen, she could not even articulate her own name.

The Lechaina Unit was founded in 1987 as a "Child Care Centre", or KEPEP, and began operating two years later, with the mandate of caring for disabled children between the ages of six and eighteen. In its initial conception, it was intended for the children of the Region of Elis and the wider Peloponnese. Progressively, disabled children from all over Greece were brought in, either following a request by their parents or a State Prosecutor's order. Formerly an independent institution, since 2013 it is one of the annexes of the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, which is supervised by the Welfare General Secretariat of the Ministry of Labour. As a rule, the care workers at the Unit are unskilled and their numbers insufficient: five healthcare workers, seven assistants and five auxiliary contract staff for 44 residents, at present. The carpenter who fashioned the cages is also considered institution personnel.

Frozen in Time

In the Lechaina Unit, disabled children were strapped to their beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. These practices were hardly a secret.

In 2008, a group of European volunteers who spent some time at the Lechaina Centre, shocked by the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children, drafted a report which they distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations.

In September 2009, a delegation from the Children’s Ombudsman's office, comprised of the Ombudsman himself, Giorgos Moschos, the Ombudswoman for Health and Social Protection, two scientific experts and May Papoulia, a psychologist and wife of the then President of the Republic, visited the institution for the first time. In March 2011, the Ombudsman issued a damning report on the Unit’s inhuman conditions.

Shortly before the publication of the delegation’s findings, in February 2011, the cameras of ERT, the Greek public broadcaster, entered the institution. The news story aired in the main evening news and Andreas Loverdos, the Minister of Health at the time, intervened on air.

After lauding the work of the manager of Lechaina, the minister announced his intention to allow journalists inside all of the country’s institutions to report on the living conditions. When the newscaster observed that journalists should shed light on issues, but it was the Minister's job to solve them, Loverdos promised that five more healthcare staff and an additional three workers would be hired by the end of the year, attributing the torture brought to light by the news report to understaffing. He also promised that new premises would be secured, so that minors could be separated from adults.

Three years later, pictures from Lechaina spread across the world, when the BBC published an article headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. A few days later, Katerina Papakosta, who by then had become Deputy Minister for Health in a new government formed by New Democracy, visited the institution in a move that seemed rather forced, after the outcry that followed the article’s publication.

In her statements to the media, she claimed that the Unit did not fall within her mandate but that of the Ministry of Welfare and stated: “I came here on my own initiative to examine (the situation), because I have been informed by scientific experts that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

Having normalised cages as “cots", Papakosta, too, promised the recruitment of qualified personnel.

It should be noted that the widespread use of chemical suppression through medication, the practice of restraining children to their beds using straps, the use of cages and electronic surveillance, were already condemned in the 2011 report of Children’s Ombudsman as “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions.”

As to the reassurances given to the Deputy Minister by "experts", it should be noted that in the course of the Ombudsman's investigation, which led to the aforementioned report, the Unit’s psychiatrist at the time, Dionysios Tsangos, was asked to submit a written reply. In it, he stated: “I clearly acknowledge that restraining a patient with straps largely violates individual human rights, but they are superseded by the right of life itself. Given the severity of the patients’ mental disability, it is absolutely necessary to restrain them with straps to avert any self-harming acts which the patient will naturally not become aware of due to their condition. The straps will continue to exist for as long as such severe, high-risk level cases continue to exist. As to the matter of the wooden enclosures, a proposal was submitted by the scientific team in April 2008 and a report by child psychologist Mrs Lolou will follow. Certainly, patient accommodation can be improved with the use of more suitable beds, successfully combining the goals of development and security.”

The Ombudsman's report noted that the Unit's psychiatrist had responded without submitting “any medical opinions on specific patient cases, nor any scientific evidence supporting the need for restraint”. It also pointed out that “the Recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture under The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment do not appear to justify physical restraint, with the exception of psychiatric units for adult patients and only under certain conditions. Confinement to beds/enclosures in particular, is considered an unsuitable psychiatric practice and constitutes degrading treatment.” As to the decision to “use means of ‘mechanical restraint’, such as straps, its appropriateness is decided on a case-by-case, mutatis mutandis basis and is used rarely and only when prescribed by a doctor (or following a doctor’s immediate notification and receipt of approval). Recourse to it should be made exceptionally, as a last resort and for the minimum duration necessary, while its long-term use has no therapeutic properties and is considered misuse in therapeutic terms. This practice cannot be excused by staff shortages, as every instance of restraint demands that a member of staff provide immediate personal assistance and constant supervision, while electronic surveillance cannot substitute the constant physical presence needed. At the same time, every such instance should be recorded in a special register and in the patient’s personal medical file with specific details, such as the start and end time of restraint, the doctor’s name etc. Staff must receive ongoing training in alternative, gentler methods of patient control and be educated in the effects the practice of physical restraint has on the patient.  The Authority believes that the practices chosen clearly fall outside the scope of legality and gravely contravene the duty to respect and protect the human rights of residents with serious mental disabilities.”

The situation in the Lechaina Unit, therefore, was not only fairly widely known, but also officially documented, by March 2011.

“From Asylum to Society”

Approximately a year after Deputy Minister Papakosta’s visit, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Mideniki Anohi” ("Zero Tolerance") occupied the Lechaina premises. The occupation, a protest against the abuse of disabled children taking place in the Unit, began on November 4, 2015, and lasted for four days.

We met with Antonis Rellas, a film director, disabled activist, and member of Zero Tolerance, in his apartment. He let us in himself and led us to his studio.

“We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad," he told us. "In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, ‘Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.’ We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, those who are unable to advocate for themselves, have no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present.”

A video can be found on Zero Tolerance’s youtube channel, entitled From Asylum to Society. Rellas put the footage together immediately after the occupation, to be screened for journalists during the press conference Zero Tolerance held upon its return to Athens.

“We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime," he said, "nine people in four cars, with two cameras. We wanted to record what was happening and highlight those that society rejects by relegating them to an isolated building somewhere far away, turning a blind eye to these images. We wanted to highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living. For us disabled activists, there is no such thing as a good institution. Even if Lechaina were the Hilton, it would remain a secure-type institution that violates every notion of human dignity. I have seen people restrained with ropes in other institutions too, not just Lechaina. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism. No matter how prepared we were, the reality exceeded our worst nightmares…”

During the occupation, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the State Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the human rights violations against the disabled children and youths kept at the institution.

“To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify," Rellas told us. In fact, the Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

"There are specific liabilities at stake," Rellas said. "Who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed prolonged chemical suppression?  Not holding anyone accountable is like asking us to accept that the disabled residents are not worthy of living and therefore, no criminal liabilities arise. The UN, who saw the material we gathered during the occupation, says this is torture. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed."

On November 5, 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee publicised its concluding observations after examining Greece’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Regarding the situation at Lechaina, the Committee stated that “the State party should take immediate measures to abolish the use of enclosed restraint beds and systematic sedation in psychiatric and related institutions. The State party should also establish an independent monitoring and reporting system and ensure that abuses are effectively investigated, those responsible are prosecuted, and redress is provided to the victims and their families.” Similar recommendations had been made three years earlier, with specific reference to the institution at Lechaina.

On November 13, 2015, a few days after the occupation staged by Zero Tolerance, the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO human rights watchdog, filed a complaint at the State Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court of Greece. “In view of the fact," the complaint stated, "that the long-term torture of children took place with the knowledge of all authorities, from the Ministry down to the local prosecutor’s office, while the report of the Ministry’s Committee confirms that this is standard practice in psychiatric units across the country, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court is asked to order the judicial investigation of the claims made here, instructing a public prosecutor in Athens to this end, and demanding that the Ministry of Labour immediately cease using these inhumane methods that amount to torture.”

None of this was enough to mobilise justice to pursue those responsible for the fact that disabled children and young people were being kept in confinement, physically restrained in cages of two by two by one metres, not being let outside even for an hour, medicated for psychiatric and other illnesses — despite the fact that, according to the study carried out by the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, out of the 78 people that have resided in the Lechaina unit over the years, only five had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for psychiatric disorders. 

“In Greece today," Giorgos Nikolaidis, Director of the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, told us, "no court has the legal capacity to impose such a sentence on anyone. How is it possible to tolerate that a person be subjected to this confinement and not ask who ordered it and why? Which ministers, general secretaries, which of my colleagues gave instructions that these people be restrained? Who imposed this deprivation of their rights?”

Breaking the Cages

Shortly after the occupation by Zero Tolerance, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by Harry Potter writer J. K. Rowling to promote and advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises.

At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention, with an initial duration of six months. The intervention team would release the patients from their restraints, re-examine the use of medication, and prepare them through appropriate training, so that they could either return to their families, where possible, or otherwise move to smaller hostels, where the effects of institutionalisation would be alleviated. Meanwhile, the government was supposed to form a plan to radically restructure institutions, with the ultimate aim of deinstitutionalisation.

The emergency intervention was launched in July 2016, under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. It was to last six months, because, according to Nikolaidis, "rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?"

"Unfortunately," he said "the fact of the matter is that, after a lot of pressure, they simply gave an approval so that an initiative taken by other people and institutions, with the funding of others, could be implemented. A programme that enjoyed no jurisdictional backing vis-à-vis the unit in question, its personnel, the way it functions. The political leadership just said, ‘Great, you can go to the Unit and do what you think is best’.”

Two summers later, we visited the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health for the first time. Giorgos Nikolaidis had just entered his office and was in the process of transferring a video from his phone to his PC. He invited us to view some of the material.

The first video was shot as the carpenter of the Lechaina Unit dismantled the wooden cage of a twenty-year-old man, who had been confined to it for years. The man's initial disbelief subsides, as joy and relief burst forth in almost ecstatic laughter. The camera turns back to the carpenter and switches off.

In the second video, someone else is holding the psychiatrist’s phone. The scene takes place in the sea. Nikolaidis is holding a pool noodle, the buoyant foam tube used to teach very young children how to swim. He has passed the tube under the waist of another Lechaina resident, stretched him out on his back, and sways him gently from side to side. Another outburst of joy is heard, as a long-suffering body finds relief in the water.

Antonis Rellas decided to follow the course of events from Zero Tolerance’s occupation to the promised closure of the institution not just as an activist, but as the director of a documentary about Lechaina. Having visited the Unit over thirty times these past years, he explained: “I had the chance to watch how behaviours changed. How the residents I first met, who were uncommunicative, eyes vacant as they lay strapped to beds or locked inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, began to blossom. To watch them leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, to develop their skills. We heard them speak, utter words. Some began to express specific requests, ‘I want a bedside table’, ‘I want a remote control’, ‘I want my own clothes’. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving ‘the prescribed treatment for their own good’.”

“I witnessed their fears and inhibitions," he went on. "For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps. Even after the intervention team removed their restraints, do you know how they slept at night? In the sleeping position that they had been kept for years. For them, the most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured.”

One of the many paradoxes of this story is that, despite the admission by the political leadership that institutionalisation must end, and more specifically that the Lechaina Unit must be shut down, a decision to prohibit new admissions to the institution was never officially made.

Rellas recalled such an incident: “A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. She was evidently being pressured to abandon the disabled child and focus on her ‘normal’ children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears. She took her child and left.”

 “That was not the only incident where admission was averted,” explained Nikolaidis. “We had asked for admissions to be prohibited, everyone agreed, but that agreement never translated into a legal act. I used to arrive at Lechaina and be told that the Board of Directors had admitted a new child. Every time we had to rush to right things after the fact. I would meet the parents, explain the implications of such an admission, try to understand why the family was asking for this. Usually, there was a lot of hidden pain, the decision to leave their child at an institution was not sudden.  Therefore, we created the after-school clubs for many of them, activity clubs to occupy their children after special school. The aim was to offer families some respite so that the children did not end up in an institution.”

Most of the stories shared common ground. “These were children," Nikolaidis told us, "with mental disabilities that the family had kept until their preadolescence- adolescence and then found harder to manage. They usually had other children with typical development too and struggled to look after them all. We set up this service at Lechaina and Patras so that the child could stay at a space with qualified personnel who would occupy them, train them, and then be able to return home at night.”

Resistance

The emergency intervention that was intended to last six months ended up lasting for almost three years, after repeated extensions. Experts have pointed out that reintroducing people who had been subjected to extreme and prolonged abuse into humane conditions was always going to be difficult, but their task was continually complicated by the resistance that they met.

During one of our visits to the Lechaina Unit, we met Patty Sotiropoulou, special needs educator and member of the emergency intervention team. As introductions were made, we witnessed the following incident: one of the centre’s residents had undergone surgery following self-injury to his eye. The surgeon had recommended forty-five days of bed restraint to protect the wound. Our arrival at the centre coincided with the end of his confinement and the intervention team was asking staff to transfer him to a bed. The staff resisted this move, claiming that it could be dangerous because the resident had chewed on his mattress… ten years ago!

 “One day, members of the team took a girl outside for a walk in the courtyard," an exasperated Sotiropoulou told us. "The girl fell down and needed two stitches on her chin. Not only did the staff overreact due to their reigning fear of accountability, but the doctor who put in the stitches also instructed that she be kept inside a cage for ten days. Ten days confinement for two stitches! And when you point out the absurdity, you just get told: ‘doctor’s orders’.

Sotiropoulou said she had been exhausted by the constant battle over matters that should be self-evident. "No culture has been fostered," she said, "that it is unacceptable to keep children inside cages in an institution. If we had seen a child with typical development inside a cage in those news reports, the reaction would have been different. In the case of disabled children, both the system itself and, unfortunately, a large section of society accepts all too willingly that ‘there is no alternative’, that ‘the specialists say they need to be physically restrained so they must be right’, and ‘thank goodness there is an institution to house them’.”

The battle over matters that should be self-evident, as Sotiropoulou put it, rages at the Lechaina Unit even when the proposed changes are also intended to benefit the workers themselves. 

“During the intervention," Sotiropoulou told us, "we trained staff in the use of a small crane to lift people from the bed. It is essential that the residents change positions. It might not sound like that big of a deal, but there is a world of difference between spending twenty-four hours a day confined to a bed and getting up, both physically and in terms of receiving some stimulation. At the end of the day, only our team and the volunteers use the crane."

"It's a small example of the resistance here," she said. "You have a goal, to get people out of bed. And it can’t be achieved. You give them a tool that can help the carers, too. And I say this being fully aware that just changing the sheets and diapers of so many people is extremely taxing physically. And yet, they will not use it. So, on the one hand, you see a resistance to change, even when the change is beneficial to them, and on the other hand, you realise that they cannot appreciate the importance of people being out of bed.”

The deinstitutionalisation that never was

In December 2017, the Greek Government announced that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Unit and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future, setting out the transition process, the facilities to be developed, the timetable, etc.

 “Incidentally," Nikolaidis told us, "I should mention that we had already drafted such a detailed plan and submitted it to the government, as well as the board of directors of the Centre of Social Welfare, and the relevant services of the Commission and other bodies both within Greece and abroad. We had also discussed it with the permanent personnel of the Unit. I’m not saying that this was the best plan and should be adopted as the final detailed plan. I’m just saying that the commitment made by the government to form such a plan never materialised. The most disheartening aspect is that this time the funds are there, so that’s not the impediment.”

The emergency intervention ended in February 2019. When we asked Nikolaidis why the Institute of Child Health did not continue with the intervention, as well as why the collaboration between the Institute and Lumos was not renewed, he replied: “Because in February 2019, the representatives of Lumos visiting Greece met with the Minister for Social Solidarity Theano Fotiou and were informed that for as long as they cooperated with us, any cooperation with the Greek government was out of the question. So Lumos interrupted its cooperation with us and began working with NGO SOS Children's Villages, which was recommended to them.”

We went on ask why in Nikolaidis’s opinion the government, through its minister, would do this. 

“I think,” Nikolaidis told us, “it was because we kept raising the need to close down the unit, and for a number of real actions, not PR, leading to the residents’ psychosocial rehabilitation and deinstitutionalisation to be taken. Ms Fotiou had probably decided that she wanted to adopt ostensible rather than true actions. The timing also coincided with the completion of a phase of our actions in Lechaina, with the gradual and progressive transfer of all the residents out of confinement, be it cages, or straps or any of the other inventive methods used by the institution. Our task had been to provide interim emergency relief geared towards the abolition of confinement, pending the implementation of a deinstitutionalisation scheme. Having completed that work, having drawn up a plan for deinstitutionalisation and secured a budget for that purpose, and seeing that no steps were being taken in that direction, we had no intention of remaining at Lechaina to window-dress the perpetuation of institutionalisation.”

Former Minister Fotiou did not comment on these statements by Nikolaidis, despite our repeated requests. Lumos likewise did not reply to our request for comment. SOS Children’s Villages, which signed a cooperation agreement with Lumos in May 2019, replied that “after a request by Lumos and the Ministry, we agreed to become the organisation responsible for dispensing salaries to personnel that was hired for three months, without participating in any way in the scientific work, or observing its implementation on location”. 

In the event, personnel to staff the action team that would implement a three-year deinstitutionalisation programme was hired in June 2019 on twelve-month contracts. Selected by competition, team members have no work experience in matters of deinstitutionalisation. This move provoked the strong reaction of the institution’s staff, who once again reiterated their longstanding request for the recruitment of permanent personnel.

While time was again grinding to a halt in Lechaina, the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity came under increasing pressure to submit a long overdue general deinstitutionalisation strategy proposal, which was an obligation under the terms of 2014-2020 NSRF funding, and should in fact have been submitted since 2014. The Ministry asked for technical assistance from the European Commission and the Structural Reform Support Services (SRSS). A Brussels-based NGO, the European Association for People with Disabilities (EASPD), was awarded a 200.000 contract by SRSS to draw up a deinstitutionalisation plan for Greece.

In July 2019, national elections were called, SYRIZA lost power, and New Democracy found itself in government. Domna Michailidou became the new Minister. 

EASPD presented a draft paper on a national deinstitutionalisation strategy to the Ministry, as well as several experts, in January 2020. Presumably, somewhere at the end of this process, the promise made to the Lechaina residents through the emergency intervention, that they may have a chance to leave institutionalised living behind, might eventually be fulfilled. For the time being, though, they have to wait and endure - again.

When asked about the feelings their experiences at Lechaina have left them with, everyone we spoke to gave the same reply: frustration. Antonis Rellas’ response, when asked about his hopes at the start of filming the documentary, was riveting: “I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that the announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the biological family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That someone would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.”

Frustration, then, and sadness. “For us," Rellas said, "the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen and sadly, it is not mobilising.  That is the heart of the matter. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.”

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Modern Greek history has seen its fair share of brutalities, but few among them have been as little discussed as the ways in which children have been mistreated, abused, neglected and institutionalised by the State. From the late 19th century, when a prototype welfare system was first put in place under the Greek Royal Family, all the way to the nationalisation of welfare from the 1970s onwards, one constant has been that children have concerned the State as props in the political game or as potential perpetrators of crime — usually both. This chronic undermining of children’s rights affected most aspects of the public sector; and its traces are still visible today.

A recent video of a policeman beating up an eleven-year-old child in the outskirts of Athens, that surfaced on social media, raised the question of what ideas police and other authorities continue to have regarding the treatment of minors — whether suspected offenders or not. ((The video is available (in Greek) here, from ERT, the Greek Public Broadcaster.)) The Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, took to Twitter to condemn the incident, stating that “whoever hits minors does not have a place anywhere”. ((Tweet is available (in Greek) here.)) The speed of the Minister’s reflexes can perhaps be explained by the fact that the memory of the 2008 murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, shot by a police officer in downtown Athens, is still fresh. 

The consequences of Grigoropoulos’s murder were staggering: Athens, and other Greek cities, burned during spontaneous riots that lasted for weeks. But the mistreatment of children by officials has also been documented in many other, less explosive, instances: some research has shown that children victims of abuse have been made to recount their ordeal to authorities up to fourteen times, in what cleary amounts to secondary abuse in the hands of the State; children who have been removed from their families are kept in hospitals, despite not being in need of hospitalisation, sometimes for years; and at least one institution has been strapping disabled children to their beds and locking them in cages. ((See our detailed report on the Lechaina unit for children with disabilities: "Hell as an Institution".)) Authorities have described such practices as unavoidable, necessary, or “for the good of the children”.

It is impossible to explain the persistence of such practices, at least in part, without considering the way that historical events have shaped Greek authorities’ attitudes toward minors. 

In the Hands of the Lord

Institutionalisation of children had been introduced very soon after the foundation of the Greek State, with the City of Athens already operating an Orphanage for Abandoned Infants in 1838. However, a quasi-system of fostering also existed, with foster families often paid a meagre fee to host abandoned children, and institutionalisation was in part seen as a solution to abuse and neglect within this unregulated framework. 

The Athens Municipal Nursery was founded by the city’s Mayor in 1859, and brought under the auspices of the Royal Family in the 1870s. According to its own data, between its foundation and the mid 1960s, it hosted over 50.000 children. During its peak, it hosted about 600 at one time. As Maria Athanassopoulou and Marianna Drakopoulou write in their Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece, it was within the Municipal Nursery that the first attempts were made to systematically document child ailments and statistically study infant mortality. ((See Maria Athanasopoulou, Mariana Drakopoulou, A Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece (Istoriki anadromi gia ta ektheta vrefi stin Ellada), To Vima tou Asklipiou, tome 9, issue 1, Jan-March 2010, available online (in Greek) here.)) 

As was common in many countries — and remains today — the Municipal Nursery also introduced a vrefodohos, or baby hatch, where mothers could abandon their babies anonymously. On the outside, there was an inscription from Psalm 27: “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.” 

Also on the initiative of the Royal family, the Patriotic Foundation for Social Welfare and Perception, or PIKPA, was founded in 1914, initially as the “Patriotic Association of Greek Women”. Although its initial mandate was to cater for the families of soldiers fighting in the war, after the 1920s it gradually shifted to the sheltering of orphaned and displaced children. 

By the end of the 1930s, even the few progressive ideas about government and lawmaking that had emerged in Greece during the interwar period had been snuffed out — first by dictatorship, then by war and occupation. Civil war followed, then two decades of “feeble democracy” and a military junta, until a tumultuous return to democratic politics finally led to stability and the relative strengthening of public institutions. Only then, near the end of a seventy year period, did a political consensus appear that the State should provide a safety net for children, who had either broken the law or been neglected or abused. 

The Youth Problem

Dictator Ioannis Metaxas ruled Greece from 1936 to 1941, a period known as the 4th of August Regime. Although his legacy of oppression has been somewhat tempered by the fact that he denied fascist Italy’s demand to allow Italian troops to occupy Greek territory, his regime was totalitarian and he was an admirer of fascism. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had reciprocated Metaxas’s admiration in his official visit to Greece in 1936. Although the 4th of August Regime was not in the strictest sense fascist, and Metaxas personally was more influenced by Portugese dictator António Salazar, it did have common traits with fascism and nazism, including the targeting of youth for indoctrination. In 1936, Metaxas created the National Union of Youth, or EON, the Greek version of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio and the Hitlerjugend, which sought to shape minors into future supporters — if not functionaries — of the regime.

As was the case with every other fascist government in Europe, Metaxas’s policy choices often attempted to counter the voices pushing for progressive reforms, inspired by European Social Democracy that had bloomed in the beginning of the century. In her 2013 book “Youth in Peril: Supervision, Reformation and Justice for Minors after the War” ((«Νέοι εν κινδύνω»: Επιτήρηση, αναμόρφωση και δικαιοσύνη ανηλίκων μετά τον πόλεμο», Polis publications, 2013)), Efi Avdela, a Professor of Modern History in the University of Crete, has written about a number of progressive sociologists, legal theorists, feminists and socialists in the interwar era, who advocated among other things in favour of introducing welfare instead of penalisation for minors. According to Avdela’s account, the “criminalisation vs. welfare” debate would go on for decades after the war, although the scales would always tip heavily towards the former.

Two laws by the Metaxas government would cement the idea that children in peril should be treated as criminals (with all the implications that this word entailed at the time) to be reformed, instead of more progressive approaches to welfare. In December 1939, a law introduced Judges and Prosecutors for Minors. A year later, after Greece had entered the war against the Axis, a concise plan on operating reforming institutions was made into law, introducing two new entities subject to the State Prosecutor: the State Prefect for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors. They were both mainly tasked with guiding minors through the justice system, whether that meant carrying out social research on a minor’s background, or providing support for the minor that went through the system. They were mostly staffed by volunteers.

A month after passing the 1940 law, with Greece on the brink of Axis occupation, Metaxas died. But conservative conceptions of juvenile delinquency were crystallised in his laws, and the newly founded entities began working on minors, although their practices were modified to also address the humanitarian crisis caused by the occupation. According to Avdela’s findings, 4.600 minors went through the justice system in 1941 alone, but most of the volunteers’ work was focused on gathering and distributing food and clothing.

From 1947 onwards, some Societies for the Protection of Minors began operating their own institutions, which provided an interim shelter for rehabilitation between the time a minor was released from a reformation centre and the time they went free back to society. Until the fall of the Military Junta, in 1974, when Greek state institutions would gradually become more “liberalised”, the Prefects for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors would deal with all sorts of “moral panics” that focused on youth cultures: “teddy-boyism”, rock ‘n’ roll, sexual liberation and leftism — all filed under “anti-social behaviour”.

War, Children

During the Greek Civil War, the issue of child protection took a darker turn for both competing sides, and the particulars of what actually happened are subject to debate until today. In 1947, the United States of America began providing military, technical and financial assistance to the Greek government and its National Army against the Democratic Army of Greece, formed by the Greek Communist Party and former resistance guerrillas. The scale of U.S. military assistance meant that the government could now launch air attacks against guerrilla strongholds, which included the first documented use of napalm bombs. 

From 1948, when the war scales started tipping in favour of the government, the guerillas began transferring children away from the conflict zones of northern Greece that were being bombed, to countries of the Eastern Bloc. Pro-government voices named this paidomazoma (literally, “child-gathering”), after the much older practice of Devshirme, or “child levy”, in which Ottoman authorities abducted children from among their Balkan Christian subjects, converted them to Islam and trained them for military or civil service. Pro-Democratic Army voices, in turn, countered by calling the practice paidososimo (“child-saving”) or sotiria (“salvation”). Up to this day, left-wing and progressive historians have been debating with conservatives, as well as the far-right, on whether this was a humanitarian operation or recruitment.

A year earlier, Paul I had ascended the throne of the Kingdom of Greece and his wife, Frederica of Hanover, had become Queen. More than any of her predecessors or successors, Frederica was actively involved in politics and was often in the public spotlight.

Τhe Royal Family of Greece had patronised all sorts of high-society philanthropic societies since the 19th century, among which several devoted to children, with a special focus on juvenile delinquency. Frederica combined the Royal Family’s tradition of philanthropy with her own penchant for politics, and began an operation parallel to the guerrillas’ paidomazoma, thereby removing children from conflict zones and placing them in special institutions that she founded, called Paidopoleis (“Child cities”). 

This operation, introduced by Royal Decree in 1947, was named the “Charity Drive ‘Welfare for the Northern Provinces of Greece’ Under the High Authority of Her Majesty, the Queen”, although everyone would refer to it simply as Charity Drive (Eranos in Greek), or after 1955 as Royal Welfare. It was carried out by the National Army. Fifty-two such Paidopoleis were opened all over Greece, all working under a similar model: a strict upbringing, and a daily military-style regimen that would inscribe “proper values” to children.

During her youth in Hanover, Frederica had been a member of the Hitler Youth, and in Greece she was considered sympathetic towards the Nazi regime (as well as the United States). In his book on the children of the civil war ((Λουκιανός Χασιώτης, Τα Παιδιά του Εμφυλίου, Βιβλιοπωλείο της Εστίας, 2013)), historian Loukianos Hasiotis claims that the Charity Drive was at least partially modelled after the Franco regime’s Auxilio Social, which employed similar messages. 

Since the Greek Civil War is now widely accepted as the first episode of the Cold War, it should come as no surprise that the conflict over children was also played out on an international level. The Greek government branded the removal of children from conflict zones by the guerrillas as a “genocide”, a position accepted by the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) in its 1948 report. The idea was also promoted by officials with prominent positions on the international stage, like the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul. The United Nations Committee was tasked with investigating what the guerrillas were doing — but, naturally, not what was happening in the Paidopoleis. 

Thus, until historical research caught up, what is known about the Paidopoleis of the era mostly came from oral narratives of the children that grew up in them. In 2007, when a popular historical programme on Greek television, The Time Machine, aired two episodes about the children of the Civil War, the testimonies of people that had lived in the Paidopoleis during their childhood were divergent even within the same episode. This disagreement in testimonies of the children, now in their old age, persists in the popular press to this day.((See, for expample, Marina Karpozilou, “Growing up in Frederica’s Pedopoleis: The ‘Guerrilla-striken children of the ‘Big Mother’” (in Greek: “Μεγαλώνοντας στις παιδουπόλεις της Φρειδερίκης: Τα 'ανταρτόπληκτα' παιδιά της 'Μεγάλης Μητέρας'”), News247.gr, 9/1/2016)) Some reminisce about their time in the Pedopoleis with nostalgia and others with a more critical view, even sparking literary debates: in his 2009 book, The Blurry Deep ((Γιάννης Ατζακάς, Ο Θολός Βυθός, Άγρα)), author Yiannis Atzakas recalls his time in a Paidopoli as trauma haunting him well into his middle age, while Antonis Venetis, in his 2014 book Letters ((Αντώνης Ν. Βενέτης, Επιστολές, Αρμός)) considers Frederica’s Drive beneficial to children and states his belief that “the ‘blurry deep’ can only be found in fixations, prejudices and obsessions”.

Under Frederica, the PIKPA became the second pillar of childcare, a sort of supplement to the Paidopoleis, housing children that had been orphaned in the war. PIKPA structures followed a similar regiment of strict, military-style upbringing and carried out adoptions, as well as absorbed some of the prominent figures of Frederica’s Charity Drive. Lina Tsaldari, the widow of former Prime Minister Panagis Tsaldaris, was one of the aristocratic “Appointed Ladies” who actively participated in the Charity Drive. Ιn 1950 she became the President of PIKPA.

The third pillar of Frederica’s childcare initiatives was the “Houses of the Child”. These were small daycare centers in the villages of rural Greece (mainly in the north) that after 1950 started taking in children while their parents were working. Without a public education system in place, especially in these remote areas, the Houses of the Child, 140 in total, acted as a nursery or elementary school — with a twist. In them, children would be taught farming and technical skills, while also being indoctrinated with “religious and patriotic values”.

The Eranos might have been Frederica's personal project, but its funding was very much public. Royal Welfare was funded by special import taxes, tariffs on cigarettes (two cigarettes in every pack), percentages of cinema tickets, a part of workers’ wages, and other measures. Researchers have calculated that between 1949 and 1956, the Royal Welfare Foundation took in more than 186 million drachmas — and a lot more after that.((More information on relevant activities by the Greek Royal Family is available (in Greek) in research by the Ios journalistic outfit.))

For the majority of children that were taken to Eastern Bloc countries, it wasn’t until the 1980s and the campaign of the centre-left PASOK government for the right-of-return of political refugees that they would see Greece again.

Leftists and progressives have been claiming for decades that the Charity Drive was the real paidomazoma. In any case, after the Democratic Army’s defeat and the end of the Civil War, only 14 of the paidopoleis continued to operate. Nowadays, four of them are still working as institutions for children without families.

Searching for Roots

Mary Theodoropoulou runs “Roots”, an NGO, from a small apartment in Kesariani. Historically known as the place where in 1944 the Nazis executed 200 communist political prisoners that had like many others been handed over to them by the collaborationist authorities, Kaisariani is a working class neighborhood in Athens, where the Communist Party still gets one of its highest percentages. 

Abandoned as a newborn in the Athens Municipal Nursery baby hatch, Theodoropoulou has often appeared in the media talking about her quest to find her biological parents, after she discovered in her twenties that she had been adopted. Her efforts to date have not been successful. She and seven others, all of whom had also stayed at the Municipal Nursery as children, founded the NGO in the late 1990s, to help people search for their biological parents.

Theodoropoulou has done extensive work on institutions. Not only did Rizes produce the only comprehensive study that looked into the state of Greek institutions for children in 2015, but her work on tracing the roots of adopted children means she has heard a massive amount of personal stories about what has been happening inside these institutions.

After World War II, according to Theodoropoulou, there was a further, major shift towards institutionalisation. “The practice of trofoi, foster mothers that were paid to breast-feed and take care of babies, had been in place since the late nineteenth century,” she said. “A shortage of milk and absolute poverty meant that babies would die otherwise”. State institutions mostly acted as halfway houses that would assign a newborn to a trofos after a short stay. Later, after the War, the trofoi acted as a means to relieve the institutions from the strain caused by the huge numbers of children.

Theodoropoulou told us how, after the war was over, the trofoi framework was expanded. PIKPA, which took care of many of the orphaned or abandoned children, would now hand them over to families, some of whom took in numerous children. “But there was no framework,” she said. “There were no rules on hygiene, no supervision and the remuneration of foster parents was low and infrequent. A trofos would bring back the body of a baby she had taken in and say to the Nursery staff that ‘this is frozen’ — meaning dead. In other cases, foster families abandoned children all over again. There were also cases of abuse, even rape. All these things undermined foster care and institutions gained ground.”

The suffering of children that went through the foster care system unsupervised could be prolonged even after they were out of it. Theodoropoulou told us the story of a boy who tried to report that his foster parents had sexually abused him. He was deemed mentally ill and forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution. In other cases, disabled children, and children with mental illness or developmental problems, would end up in the PIKPA of Leros, founded in 1963 to take in children from the Public Pediatric Neuropsychiatric Hospital “Daou Pentelis”, as part of the overall project of transferring — and isolating — the mentally ill from all over the country to Leros. The PIKPA of Leros formed part of the so-called “Psychopath Colony”, established on the island in 1957, and now known as the infamous kolastirio (“hellhole”). Many of those committed to the kolastirio would not leave until an international deinstitutionalisation initiative in the 1990s, funded by the EU, after a series of stories in the international press and a documentary had revealed the horrible conditions to which patients had been subjected. ((Deinstitutionalization in Leros has been documented in various sources. Psychiatrists who participated in the process like Ιοannis Loukas, Ιοannis Tsiantis, Theodoros Megalooikonomou and Felix Guattari, among others, have all written their own accounts and commentaries on it.))

Since 1939, when it came under the authority of the Ministry of Health, PIKPA has gone through a great number of changes in administrative structure and oversight, but by the 1950s and 1960s, it expanded almost to the size of a full healthcare and welfare system for minors. At its peak, its services included everything from schools for medical personnel and mobile medical units to clinics, hospitals and nursery schools. Since 1925, it had also been operating summer camps from June to the end of September for quality time and healing for children suffering from tuberculosis. The “exoches”, as they were called, stopped during the war, but began operating again after 1945. In 1948, their mandate was expanded to accept impoverished children with problems in development, or any chronic disease, and in 1951 to include working children, and all children monitored by doctors. In 1956, PIKPA put together its first structure for disabled children in Voula. Gradually, it would end up running most of the institutions for disabled children in Greece. 

Institutionalisation in the Paidopoleis, the orphanages and the nurseries gave rise to a different problem that haunts families until today: illegal adoptions. In her memoirs, Frederica had claimed that communist women had been abandoning their children and even that she witnessed a woman literally throwing her baby away, which was supposedly picked up by an army officer and handed over to her. After the military junta of 1967-1974 fell, communist guerrillas that had been exiled in camps in the islands reported that their children were abducted from there. In fact, the children were taken to the Paidopoleis or the PIKPA, and were then sold to foster parents in the United States, often assisted by officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, as well as Greek-American Organisations ((The Greek-American Organization AHEPA was found to have been involved in a trafficking ring for children - see, for example: The adopted Greek children of the Cold War, Margarita Pournara | Kathimerini)). Although the Greek press had published stories on the issue since the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1996 when U.S. media would start digging into the story and get to the bottom of it, that the full extent of what had happened would be revealed.

Discovering the Victim

After King Constantine’s failed counter-coup attempt against the Military Junta, in December 1967, the Royal Family was forced to flee the country. So, in a strange twist of fate, it was the dictators who brought welfare, including child protection, under the purview of the State. With a Law Decree, in 1970, all the Royal Foundations and Charities — along with their funding provisions — were absorbed into the National Welfare Organisation. Their role did not change significantly for the next decade, although Greece’s evolution into a more advanced economy, after the long and tumultuous process of post-war reconstruction, meant that the numbers of children in peril would gradually start to decrease.

It wasn’t until 1981, when centre-left PASOK came to power, that the welfare system would advance into the next phase. One of PASOK’s most important and enduring achievements was the creation of the National Healthcare System, or ESY, in 1983, which put in place a concise framework for healthcare that also included aspects of welfare. The Ministry overseeing it was now renamed the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The first eight years of PASOK in power, from 1981 to 1989, included many decisive progressive reforms in worker’s rights, civil rights and education, but welfare was still mostly understood as benefits, and were lagging behind the drastic changes overtaking Greek society. Not only did the National Welfare Organisation go through no significant change in the 1970s and 1980s, but especially with regard to child protection, the idea of preventing victimisation and abuse, although gaining traction in Europe, was not present in any sector of the Greek state.

Xeni Dimitriou, the former Chief Prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court, has served three tenures as a State Prosecutor for Minors over three different decades. She has gone through thousands of pages of legal theory on children, attended hundreds of conferences and exchanged opinions with dozens of other prosecutors all over the world. When we met her, shortly after her recent retirement, she spoke to us about her firsthand experience of what Greece’s long refusal to acknowledge the victimisation of children had led to. In her early days as Prosecutor for Minors in the 1980s — ”an unprivileged position, almost a punishment back then” — she witnessed time and again policemen marching into her office with arrested children that had been severely beaten. One boy came in with massively swollen ears. He told her that they had put clothespins in his ears to interrogate him and had hanged him upside down from the precinct’s balcony to scare him into confessing. In other cases, following the letter of the law, she was forced to put six and seven-year-old kids on trial, or send underage lawbreakers away in institutions that were practically prisons.

Dimitriou referred to Kalliopi Spinelli, a well-known criminologist as her “teacher, the teacher of all of us”. Spinelli is credited, among many things, with proposing the replacement of the term “juvenile criminals” with “juvenile offenders”, and with advocating for a pedagogical instead of a penal approach to justice for the underage. A few other prominent legal theorists and professionals gradually began to advocate for a different relation between the children and the State.

Modern international ideas on children’s rights speak only of “victims,” Dimitriou insisted. “We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking,” she said. “Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who took that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world. The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold aspect. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold aspect. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim. Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.”

In a conference speech Dimitriou gave in 1991, in-between her tenures as Prosecutor for Minors, she said that a bill for “Units of Care for Minors” had been drafted since 1984. The purpose of the plan was to set up a structure so that “juvenile offenders until 12 years of age would not be involved in any way with suppression mechanisms such as the police, the Prosecutor and the Court for Minors, but would be taken care by welfare services instead”. She then went on to describe best practices found in existing institutions — stopping at one point to wonder whether “it’s time to legislate that juvenile delinquents could be placed into foster families. The society responds positively. Why delay any more?”

Dimitriou’s 1991 speech echoed the ideas that would start to shape new concepts of child welfare. In 1985 and 1990, the UN had published guidelines on handing justice to juvenile delinquents and the prevention of delinquency in minors respectively. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was also signed at the time.

Things were changing, but in the case of Greece, the pace was and remains slow. The Greek governments of the 1990s made a few attempts to modernise the welfare system, or rather to establish one, since throughout their evolution the various services had operated independently. In 1992, a law practically dissolved the National Welfare Organisation and the PIKPA, in an attempt to create a unified system that was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. 

Another law, in the same year, introduced legal procedures for foster care and was amended in 1996, by adding a stricter framework for the role of social investigations in adoption and foster parenting procedures. That law also took an important step by changing Metaxas’s laws to introduce social services in the courts and the State Prosecutor offices, although their mandate remained to handle the delinquency of minors. 

Probably the most important step at the time was taken in 1998 by another PASOK government, this time under Prime Minister Kostas Simitis, when the creation of a National System of Social Care was attempted. In the following years, the former PIKPA units were successively centralised, then decentralised again. Generally under the oversight of regional administration, these units followed divergent courses. One post-PIKPA incarnation, the Lechaina unit for disabled children, achieved world-wide notoriety for its horrific conditions.

The new system gave explicit roles to regional governments, but also cleared up the terms under which private NGO’s could carry out welfare programmes. Thus, the 1990s was also the decade when NGOs would increasingly start to step in and cover for the shortcomings in child protection. The Greek branch of SOS Children’s Villages had been active since 1975, but now non-government care for children would diversify. The Smile of the Child was created in 1995 and The Ark of the World would follow in 1998. All three of these organisations would grow in the years that followed and actively supplement state welfare. 

The decade ended with a presidential decree in 1999 that attempted to contain illegal adoptions by also giving all oversight responsibilities to regional welfare services — Regional institutions and Directorates of Social Care. With an amendment in 2003, even more welfare responsibilities would be directed to the Regional Health Services that had been created a year earlier. According to the explanatory report that came with the draft of the bill, this would allow for “better coordination, monitoring and evaluation” of social welfare services. The UN Committee overseeing the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child noted this attempt, but still found it fell short of a coherent Child Protection System. Some of the problems highlighted by the Committee included the lack of a clear mandate between authorities and a central body that would coordinate all services, problems that are still partially present to this day.

Xeni Dimitriou’s 1991 speech ended by saying that “maybe it is time for juvenile law to grow up”. It marked the beginning of a period of intense pressure by child protection professionals for a proper children’s welfare system to be designed and implemented. But in the 1990s, a welfare system that would address problems that could not be solved with benefits was still a challenge. Also, the word deinstitutionalization had just been popularised for the first time after the attempts to change conditions in Leros, but that programme, which continued for the best part of the decade, would suffer setbacks. Voices of experts speaking about the need to address different vulnerabilities or how institutionalised child welfare could actually be harmful, were only just beginning to be heard.

As it happens, the regressive character of children’s welfare was officially, albeit mostly symbolically, challenged in 2010, by an amendment to a law of the Metaxas regime, mandating the Societies for the Protection of Minors to not only deal with “delinquency”, but also the “victimisation” of minors.

However, just as the need to shift the focus of the child protection system was becoming obvious to policy-makers, Greece found itself in the throes of a terrible financial crisis. Successive governments have since then introduced a variety of “plans” for children’s welfare, which have one thing in common: almost none of their provisions have been implemented.

In the spring of 2011, the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, was running the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect. As they were processing their results, during the summer, they noticed what seemed like an anomaly. In the results from the Region of Rethymno, in Crete, there appeared an extremely high rate of self-reported sexual victimisation of boys and almost a complete reversal of the boy to girl ratio.

“We could not explain it,” George Nikolaidis, Director of the Department, told us. “We speculated it must be due to a technical error.”

It was not an error. On December 1st, 2011, the police arrested a school basketball coach, Nikos Seiragakis, who also coached the local youth basketball team, AGOR. He was charged with molesting dozens of children.

It was this man’s activity that produced the “anomaly” in the BECAN results.

A methodical police operation

A few days after the coach was arrested, the Rethymno police chief, Manolis Paradoulakis, told the press that this was “a systematic and methodical police operation,” which “happened in the shortest time possible”.((The statement is available (in Greek) via the <em>local</em> TV <strong>Creta</strong> station.))  

The chief’s emphasis on the “shortest time” seemed to anticipate the question that soon emerged, why there had been a thirteen-month interval between the time when two families went to the police with allegations that the coach was abusing their children, and the time of the arrest. 

The chief maintained that there had been “rumors” rather than allegations, despite the fact that the two families of immigrant workers had eponymously denounced the coach to the police. He then explained that the police investigated the “rumors” and “discreetly” gathered evidence, in order to determine whether there was any merit to the case. When they found that there was, they proceeded to build the case in collaboration with the Rethymno prosecutor at the time, Maria Dimitriadou, a process which took more than a year, because they wanted to make sure the evidence was solid. “The arrest,” the chief said, “was made in the shortest possible time, as soon as there was complete corroboration of the case with incontrovertible evidence.”

When, during our visit to the Department for the Protection of Minors in the General Police Directorate of Attica, we discussed police handling of child abuse cases, we were told that from an operational point of view, a coach is one of the “easiest” types of perpetrator to catch. “If he is a coach,” the officers told us, “there are more victims”. When, however, we specifically referred to the Rethymno case, the officers said that they had not personally conducted the operation, so they could not comment in detail. 

The possibility that the authorities attempted to preempt any discussion on the police’s choice of timing is strengthened by the fact that Manolis Othonas, Deputy Minister for Citizen protection and Member of Parliament for Rethymno at the time, was already reassuring reporters that there had been no delays, two days before the police chief officially briefed the press on the operation. He commended the police on turning “whispers” into “a case”, and dismissed allegations that the coach had enjoyed some sort of “protection” due to his supposed standing in Rethymno society.

This was contradicted by the Manager of AGOR at the time, Vassilis Theodoroulakis, who stated in an interview that he had been unofficially informed by a police officer about the allegations against the coach, about three months after they happened. He then informed the team’s Board of Directors, who he says did nothing, in order not to damage the team’s reputation. The Board has denied the accusation.  

What is undisputed, however, is that during the time that elapsed between the allegations of the two migrant families against the coach and his arrest, no child protection official or professional was alerted to protect the interests of the children. The decision to prolong the children’s plight for over a year was made without the intervention of any part of the child protection system.

An esteemed member of local society

When we visited Rethymno, in autumn 2018, the weather was rainy. The wet buildings in the old town, dating from Rethymno’s Venetian period, the castle, the lighthouse hidden in the fog, all painted a highly unusual picture for non-locals who stereotypically associate Crete only with summer tourism. We kept wondering how in this town of 40.000 people, which looked even smaller without the summer crowds, it was possible for someone to systematically abuse dozens of children for years, without anybody ever noticing a thing? 

In the old town, opposite the renowned Rimondi fountain, we met with Chara Vilara, an experienced local journalist, who had followed the case closely.

“It was a chronic situation,” she told us. “Obviously, it wasn’t going on for just one or two years, it went back quite a lot. Some of the children had grown up when it became public. There were many children who knew, who weren’t a part of it, but knew and didn’t speak. It touched many families, both directly and indirectly.”

Everyone we spoke with agreed that coach Nikos Seiragakis was an important member of Rethymno society. He had been one of the organisers of the “Treasure Hunt”, a popular yearly event. He was esteemed in the “old town”, meaning the circles of Rethymno’s aristocratic families, and he was well connected in local politics. His contacts reached into the Greek national basketball team, and even the American NBA. Those who know say that children thought of him as a mentor. He was a good speaker, and when he coached, nobody made a sound.

Under strict discipline, the coach had created a kind of “sect”. He approached his students with the promise of admittance to an inner circle, to which only a select few could belong. He used pseudo-historical references to military training in ancient Greece, in order to convince them that in this way they would form a tighter bond with their teammates and become better athletes. Through a series of “trials”, aimed at wresting a kind of “consent” from the children, a process known as “grooming”, the coach initially encouraged them to sexually engage with each other, and subsequently molested them himself. His influence on them was so strong that some students actually defended his actions.

“The big question,” Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, told us, “is how the perpetrator selects the children, how the grooming actually happens. Which children does he choose? Well, he chooses vulnerable children, ones without strong family bonds. Children with certain disadvantages, foreigners, the disabled, or children who are emotionally neglected. He finds cracks. He comes as a mentor. As a protector. Then comes the second step: trust. Privileges. And then comes submission. This can take a long time. At that point, children gradually realise what is going on. So, there is a stage of transferring responsibility: whoever doesn’t want this, can get up and leave now. That’s the transfer: it is you who wants this. And when there is a collective situation, a sharing within a group, it is even more difficult to break this chain. Children understand they are trapped. They stay at this stage of entrapment for many years. This can happen in any abusive relationship. We call it ‘learned helplessness’. Most children will never tell. Some will tell when they cannot bear it any longer. Or because they may see their younger siblings or other loved ones victimised. Or a random event may trigger it off. And then, after a long time, they will tell. Some will have already become adults.”

Coach Nikos Seiragakis was initially charged with 53 counts of child molestation, and convicted on 36 counts. His sentence of 400 years imprisonment was upheld by the Appeals Court, which heard his appeal in 2016. 

During our visit to Rethymno, we were told by people, who spoke to us on the condition of preserving their anonymity, that the number of victims not included in the charges probably raised the total to over one hundred children. 

Seiragakis was conditionally released, according to the provisions of Greek law, at the end of April 2020, after serving eight years and five months. The conditions of his release stipulate that he cannot live in, or visit Rethymno. A few days later, he was arrested again for breaching the conditions of his release. The decision on whether he will remain free or return to prison is pending.

Inherent resistance

In mid December 2011, a conference on child protection took place in Heraklion, the capital of Crete, as part of the Council of Europe’s “One in Five” campaign. ((“One in Five” was a campaign by the Council of Europe to stop sexual violence against children, which was initiated in 2010 and branched out into national campaigns, which were handled by member-states, in the following years. Its title is based on data, which suggest that about 1 in 5 children in Europe are victims of some form of sexual violence.)) The conference had been planned before the Rethymno child abuse case was made public, but, as George Nikolaidis remembers, when he arrived in Crete, everyone was understandably talking about little else.  

“I went to Rethymno the following day,” Nikolaidis told us, “and because of my occupation, I attended a meeting with the municipality, the region and the local authorities. I was then asked to make a proposal, which I submitted both to the local authorities and the relevant ministries at the end of December 2011. It was a proposal on the actions that needed to be taken, given the scope of the case, whose extent we did not know, but it appeared to be a mass case.”

After a meeting of relevant ministries and authorities, it was decided that the proposal by the Institute of Child Health should be implemented. The lack of resources, exacerbated by the financial crisis, was addressed by allocating European Union NSFR funds to the programme. Still, it took about a year for the intervention to begin.

“This is indicative of how unwieldy the Greek public sector can be, even when it comes to projects it funds and the political will is present,” Nikolaidis said.

In the event, the unit for Comprehensive Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”. ((The unit’s website (in Greek) is still active, despite the programme’s termination.))

“At the same time,” he told us, “we ran a widely accessible health promotion campaign on the subject of child abuse, children’s sexuality, the children’s right to their body, and so on, at all levels of education in the whole of the Region of Rethymno, that is to say, primary and secondary schools, students, parents and teachers. We also trained personnel at various services, we held educational actions for coaches and sportspeople. Because we were immediately visited by the coaches’ association and told, “We don’t dare touch the children, you can’t coach children and be afraid to touch them at the same time.” Therefore, we had to impart all the international know-how about how it is possible to have both child protection processes in place and still function as a sports space.” 

Despite the obvious need for intervention in the consequences of a case that had affected dozens of families, Nikolaidis told us that the programme faced what he terms “inherent resistance”. “I believe,” he said, “that at least some of the local actors preferred to forget this incident had ever happened rather than work to enable the local community to get over it. There was a fairly strong tendency to sweep everything under the rug.”

Chara Vilara shared with us a similar perspective. “After the events came to light,” she said, “many parents punished their children, they beat them up, because they believed it had been the children’s fault. And other families never dealt with it at all. Like it never happened. Some, of course, did try to help their children, but what really made an impression on me was that when the police brought the coach to court, there was no one outside. Nobody went to protest, to vent, even. If it had been someone else, there would have been a crowd outside, there would have been shouting, all hell would have broken loose. This is telling, because these children belonged to the local social elite. These people want to cover up what happened.” 

Although Nikolaidis and his team managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, in the autumn of 2014 resources were exhausted. 

“We were informed by the political leadership,” Nikolaidis told us, “that their decision was to shut down the unit permanently, which was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field. There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health’s Action Plan on Children’s rights, which was published online for public debate during the pre-election period, in November 2014, included an extension of the Rethymno programme, funded through the NSFR 2014-2020. But the January 2015 elections brought a change of government, and any plans to extend the programme were quietly dropped.

Out of the sky

On the hill that overlooks Rethymno harbour stands an austere concrete building, which at the time of our visit temporarily housed the Rethymno Mental Health Centre. We were greeted by its director, psychiatrist, psychodramatist and actor, Antonis Liodakis.

He was of the opinion that the Rethymno programme had been “interjected”, and had “dropped out of the sky”. “In the sense,” he explained, “that these professionals from Athens were coming here to see children, parents, other cases, the whole thing functioned like a medico-paedagogic centre.”

Chara Vilara, on the other hand, points out that the children were under immense pressure, “because other kids knew and made fun of them”. “So, they went to private psychiatrists in Chania and Heraklion, because they were afraid of the stigma.”

George Nikolaidis’s experience seemed to echo Vilara’s observation: “One of the criticisms we received,” he said “was that the personnel employed in our intervention did not come from the local community, did not come from Rethymno. But I believe that was a very intelligent choice if anyone involved in the events back then recalls the mood of the local community at the time.  In every new incident, our personnel, the psychologists, the social workers, the child psychologists who worked with us, were asked by those they saw whether they were from Rethymno. The moment they heard, “No, I’m from elsewhere,” there was a huge wave of relief and then they shared their suffering, which they would probably not have done had the personnel been local. So, let’s just say there was some discontent that we did not support local employment. But we chose to make communication for the beneficiaries easier and more effective.”

Antonis Liodakis, however, pressed his point: “We had already identified the key issues since 2008,” he told us. “We have been asking for the creation of a medico-paedagogic centre with every opportunity.”

Nikolaidis makes no secret of his surprise that the programme was discontinued. “Until the very last minute,” he said “people close to the political leadership of the time, the political actors in Rethymno, were reassuring us that an extension would be granted, as there was evidently no other solution. I cannot know what could have possibly happened overnight to change that decision.” And he added: “All I know is that any efforts made in the immediate aftermath for questions on this matter to be tabled in Parliament by SYRIZA, the main opposition party at the time, ultimately failed. Incidentally, SYRIZA’s health coordinator in opposition was Andreas Xanthos, who subsequently became Minister of Health in the following government, and who is also the local MP for the Region of Rethymno.”

After SYRIZA came to power in January 2015, it took the new government two years to come up with its own “Action Plan” on child protection. The Rethymno programme was not a part of it, and it was never reinstated.

Antonis Liodakis started working in consulting groups in the Ministry of Health and joined Andreas Xanthos in official SYRIZA events on public health. In 2017, Xanthos approved Liodakis’s plans for the medico-pedagogic centre, with himself as director.

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How did you start work at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors?

The Greek Code of Criminal Procedure provided for the existence of Public Prosecutors for Minors, and they were already in place in Athens, Patras, Thessaloniki and Piraeus, but they were not functioning as an office. In the summer of 1983, when I was a young Deputy Public Prosecutor, having joined the public prosecution service in 1978, I ran into my supervisor, Mr Toumpanos, in Omonia. He told me, “Xeni, would you like to join the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors in September?” I knew what the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors was, but I had no idea of what it entailed, no relation to the various bodies and services, nothing other than the articles of the Penal Code pertaining to juvenile offenders. But I did not hesitate to accept. My agreement was driven by my love for children. I was already a mother of two and at an age where I was becoming more sensitised to issues affecting minors, in part due to motherhood.

At the time, the Public Prosecutor’s Office was housed in the Ambassadeur Hotel, an old hotel next to the IKA on Socratous Street, pending our move to the Evelpidon court complex. We were waiting for the construction of Evelpidon to be completed and office space to become available, so the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors was located there in the meantime. An office with a single secretary, who used to send summons and subpoenas to juvenile offenders. The incumbent Public Prosecutor for Minors would study the case briefs and then go try the cases at the Minor's Court, which was located on Feidiou Street at the time.

As soon as I received the proposal, I began my research. Whenever I am faced with a challenge in life, I want to get a firm grasp on the situation, to know what the new job entails. During my career, I have been called to serve at other posts too, and you don’t just turn up. You must look into things, research the field or the object of the post you have been called to serve. I did the same in anti-terrorism, where I worked for ten years. I tried to do the same when I was informed that I would be joining the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors.

Was there material available for research at the time?

I visited the Institute of Greek and Foreign Law because there was no internet at the time, or at least we did not have the skills for that kind of research. I went to the Institute and asked them to give me the international literature on the subject. They even had to order some of the books. Also, when I was officially appointed in September, someone else was appointed as my supervisor at the same time. I was a Deputy Prosecutor, so a Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance had to be appointed Supervisor, and I would be second in command. The Public Prosecutor appointed resigned. He did not want to be involved in such mundane matters, he wanted something more high-profile, he was not interested. Another prosecutor was appointed then, and our collaboration was excellent.

So, when I was appointed Deputy to the Public Prosecutor for Minors as a Deputy Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance, I went to the office to get a feel for the situation. There, I met the secretary I mentioned, who is now retired and lives in Thiva. She was very aware of the issues involved; a lot of things had registered on her radar during her time there…

Let me tell you the first thing she told me. I asked her, “What does the Public Prosecutor for Minors do here?” She said, “That is two separate questions. One question is, what does the Prosecutor do? The other question is, what can the prosecutor do?” I asked her to explain. She said, “This is what he does: here are the case briefs, theft, rape, juvenile homicide and the trial court dates for Minors' Court. But a Prosecutor can do a great many things here, Mrs Dimitriou, if they are so inclined.” A light bulb went off inside my head as I listened. In fact, while we were talking, a child entered carrying a suitcase, like a duffle bag. He had been sent to the Public Prosecutor for Minors. He walks in, the secretary asks him what he wants, and the child says, “I’ve left home, I’m not going back there, the police told me to come to tell you.” I do not remember the exact reason; he was beaten by his father or had a dispute with his father. He was a young child around twelve years old. The secretary then turned to me and said, “There you go.”

So, the secretary planted the idea of how active a role a Public Prosecutor could play for victims.

Not quite. I was cognizant of it thanks to the international literature on the subject. We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking. Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who taken that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world.

The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold mission. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold mission. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim.  Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.

Addressing the juvenile exclusively as an offender dominated at the time?

Yes. Child abuse began to be viewed as a syndrome in 1962. “Syndrome” means a condition; it now means a pathological condition with multiple repercussions. It is not a one-off event that ends with the act, its consequences extend into the future. This is what I had in mind at the time: Janus with his two faces. They are the two sides of the same coin, perpetrator and victim, and my subsequent experience showed me that such was the reality. No juvenile offender, even a juvenile traffic offender, has not previously been victimised in some way by family, friends, school, classmates etc. No one goes suddenly from being a "good kid" and so on to become an offender. They have previously been the victim of certain circumstances themselves.

You mentioned that the Public Prosecutor for Minors used to try cases in an office on Feidiou Street at the time. Why was that the case? Was it to protect minors, to avoid exposing them in a courtroom?

That was part of the thinking behind it, which persists in many provincial towns to this day. Minors' Courts inside office premises, meaning that the juvenile defendant is physically on the same level as the judges, there is no judge’s bench. That is what we saw at the time, Minors' Court Judge Maria Vasilakis and me. She was a Judge at the Court of First instance and is also a friend; we have always had a good understanding on these matters that so passionately concern us. We agreed that we did not like those premises; that it was better if the child understood that they were in a space which, while being friendly, was also a special kind of space, that they were an offender. We often tried homicide cases, children who had robbed elderly ladies or killed them, we tried murders. You cannot have the offenders in an office, the lawyers in an office, everyone sitting around a table casually, it needs to look like a courtroom.

So we made sure to move the Minors' Court to Omonia, to the building that housed the District Civil Court. The District Criminal Court and the District Civil Court, before its move to the Court of First Instance, were housed there. We requested the use of a floor and succeeded in getting it. We remodelled a room, installed a low judge’s bench, unlike other courtrooms where the judge and the prosecutor and the secretary look down on everyone. Then we moved the whole service from 8, Feidiou Street to that floor. Staff found offices where they could interview the children whose case briefs they were preparing for court or supervise them afterwards, and a more concrete service came into being. The Minors' Court became more respected and more concrete.

The courtroom, then, had a low judge’s bench, had places for the juvenile offenders, seats for the parents and the Prefects for Minors, the juvenile probation officers who assisted the minor during the trial.

We also tried to implement what the literature had taught us, namely, to have a female Public Prosecutor - male Judge on the bench and vice versa. In other words, not to bring the child before an all-male or all-female bench, to have both sexes present, because we were often dealing with a child that had a very bad relationship with their father or mother, and the child would react negatively by judging you. The child would personalise the relationships of the people judging it there and then.

Or fear on the other hand, if the parent had been abusive…

Indeed, often the parent had been abusive. We had a mother who used to beat her children mercilessly. If the child saw a female judge, they would have a terrible reaction, so we always ensured that the ratio was present. Also, after we set up the new offices in late 1985, we managed to set up a Juvenile Police Service, as we used to call it. Ultimately, it was a Subdivision in Athens with two units. There were two units in Thessaloniki and Crete respectively too, one for juvenile victims and one for juvenile offenders. In Athens, the Subdivision eventually became a Division.

So we did not confine ourselves to the Minors' Court. We were fully aware of the need to open up to other bodies and services, that a Public Prosecutor or a Judge cannot deal with delinquency or victimisation on their own. We were aware of our weaknesses and the fact that we were insufficient to handle these incidents, that we needed the assistance of people from other sectors.

In this context, we also visited the General Secretariat for Youth many times, asking it to allocate us programmes that our children from the Minors' Court could be enrolled in. 

There we met General Secretary Anna Diamantopoulou. When the opportunity for an exchange with Germany on juvenile matters arose, she called us and asked us if we wanted to participate. Of course, we wanted to go, no question about it.  She would also provide us with an interpreter because we did not speak German. The interpreter was always with us. There were five of us altogether: two of us from the judiciary corps and the rest from the General Secretariat for Youth.

That trip was a turning point. We began with a visit to the Ministry of Justice of Land Nordrhein-Westfalen and then toured all the facilities for minors in the Land. We stayed there for several days. We visited juvenile prisons and saw how they operated. We attended juvenile courts, visited “reformatories”, other detention facilities. First, we met with professionals active in the field. We saw the training they received, particularly judicial and non-judicial personnel—social workers, psychologists and child psychologists naturally, but also correctional officers, workers inside the institutions. Anyone who came into contact with the minors. Because you cannot have one service building something up and another service tearing it down. Everyone must have the same training about behaviour towards juvenile offenders. They must understand what it means to be a minor, to understand the minor’s profile, to show self-restraint.

I remember one of the workers would teach a group of children house painting. For the Germans, that is a science. There was another team learning meat cutting, the Germans see that as science too. You don’t just go to a butcher and learn to cut meat there, you have to learn the theory first, what kinds of meat there are, what beef is, the parts of the animal, how to carve it, what products you can manufacture. So, there is a science to it.

All these people had been trained in how to treat the children in question. They could be interacting with volatile children, who came from families with no boundaries, so they had to be tolerant, to be educated on juvenile issues.

To know how to set boundaries in a healthy manner?

Of course. The same applied to the correctional facility staff we met at a juvenile prison we visited. They had all received training for the specific demands of their job, it was not just a case of "you’re hired, get on with it". It was done for the juveniles concerned.

Another eye-opening experience, for me at least, was that we used to believe that this was a matter for us State bodies to deal with and no one else. There, we learned that there is room for other actors in this field, for NGOs, for private entities and individuals that can do the job well and are certified. That there is room for other bodies that can help you in the matters that arise during the handling of cases, whether they concern victims or perpetrators.  

I remember arriving in Frankfurt during the evening and being driven to Cologne. We arrive at night, and we have our first working dinner. We meet at the hotel where our German colleagues from Cologne are already waiting. We have a light dinner and the Germans instantly set to work. We almost had no time to eat, there was an agenda stating that matters were scheduled to be discussed that evening. At the hotel, as we dined, I hear them announce the schedule for our visit and find out that we will be visiting an organisation working with juvenile offenders, offenders who have committed serious acts at that. They tell us what services the organisation provides. What was that organisation? Today you would probably call it an NGO, they were called something different back then. Actually, it was a private organisation that had been set up by a former Prosecutor upon retirement.

Then they tell us that we will visit a Catholic institution that cares for victims and provides such and such things. I was in shock from the start. I used to think these were matters for the State, and I suddenly saw that they did not have to be, that we needed to open up more. And we did, my colleague and me when we returned to Greece. We said, “that’s it, we are reaching out.” We contacted universities, hospitals, private individuals and entities, institutions; we began to expand the reach of protection and come into contact with other professionals.

Up until that time, the child would come into contact with just the police officer or the judicial or correctional officer...

The correctional officer, the Prefect for Minors. Anyone who fell within the public sector would either be sent to a state institution — a place would be found if they needed protection — or to the educational institutions which existed at the time. They were akin to detention centres, one step below a detention centre if you will. There were many at the time and later they were shut down, again following our initiative.

The detention centres were the juvenile prisons, the equivalent to the current special juvenile detention establishments. At the time, there was the Korydallos Correctional Centre, and there were the reformatories. They used to be called educational institutions, and they were intended for younger children and juveniles committing minor offences. There was one for minors over sixteen at Korydallos; one for minors under twelve, situated in a building that has now been taken over by the Municipality of Korydallos. There was another educational institution, as we used to call them, for children under twelve at Kaminia. There was also the Educational Institution of Papagou for girls and the Volos Educational Institution for Minors for boys.  The Volos institution is the only one still open today, although its philosophy and the age of its inmates have changed.

How is it called today?

It is still called an Educational Institution, back then it was called the Volos Elementary Education Institution because children below the age of twelve were detained there, elementary school children. Now its orientation has changed. I visited it in 2015 because the situation was at breaking point, and I found youths up to the age of twenty-one there. The ages spanned from twelve to twenty-one. The Paraskevopoulos law rectified that.((The so-called "Paraskevopoulos law" is Law 4322 of 2015, introduced by the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Nikos Paraskevopoulos. The law provided for, among other things, changes in the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure regarding minors (Article 7). It was also controversial, because of Article 12, which provided for the "decongestion of detention facilities" through the release of prisoners who had served portions of their sentences. The latter provision was a major point of contention between the SYRIZA-led government and the major opposition at the time, New Democracy, as well as their respective friendly media. Conflict over the provision persisted until the July 2019 national elections, which were won by New Democracy.))

Consider the age-gap, imagine the sexual and all kinds of abuse taking place there. Most importantly, some of the children were held there because the investigating magistrate had imposed their stay at the institution as a restrictive condition.  This means that the magistrate had imposed a restrictive condition on youths under twenty-one, the obligation to stay there. In other words, it had been turned into a prison. A closed prison at that, nothing like I had known it in the old days when it was open to the community, just a simple institution for children under the age of twelve.   It was nothing like it, the conflicts inside were nonstop.

By then it housed 110, 120 inmates, an inconceivable number if you are talking about providing any care, no one could provide anything for them. At the time I was Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court and Mrs Koutzamani had made me responsible for minors, so with great effort and repeated visits and meetings and talks and so on, we changed the law.

For a start, no investigating magistrate can now place such a restrictive condition, it is prohibited. All the restrictive conditions placed on children detained at Volos were revoked, and the children left, except for a few cases aged 16-18 that concerned very specific offences. So an end was put to this situation, which had become a breeding ground for violence.

Were these children orphans?

They are children without a family, without a real family. They are not orphans in the sense of parental death, they are children with an inadequate parental environment. I found two brothers who had been there since the age of eight because the age range for juvenile offenders was six and a day to twenty-one years old, up until 2003, I believe. Then it became six and a day to eighteen. I tried children aged six and a day when I was the Public Prosecutor for Minors between 1983 and 1990, my first tenure at the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. I tried first and second graders because one had blinded the other with a pen or hit them. You cannot imagine what ensued, it was a real battle to change this. My belief, which I fought for, is that ten should be the lower age limit; ten to eighteen. Anyway, there was a vehement reaction, so the minimum age was raised to eight. As we speak, the age range is eight to eighteen. For those aged eight to fifteen, only reformative sentences are passed, which exclude sentences to the Volos Educational Institution for Minors. Thankfully we have shut down the other educational institutions.

What you have just described is the recurring issue: the penal management of minors. Following your return from Cologne, where the way forward became somewhat more evident, who did you start speaking to about this issue?

We addressed the ministries, the Ministry of Justice; they grew tired of seeing us all the time. We brought it to everyone’s notice, including our Supervisors. Let me give you an example. The Public Prosecutor’s Offices were moving to Building 16 of the Evelpidon court complex, where they are still housed. I campaigned for a coveted slice of the new offices to be given to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. They are the Offices of the Public Prosecutors for Minors to this day, three rooms which used to fit us all back then, I don’t think they fit everyone now. I don’t know if you have seen the premises, but to secure three rooms in such a coveted part of the building was no small feat. When the Prosecutor in charge of allocating office space to the various services managed to give me those premises, I grabbed a mop and bucket, so happy was I. At last, we would be housed in a respectable environment, we could set it up so that it was accessible to children, we could have it decorated in a way that made it accessible to the ages that would reach out to us.  That was probably one of the best moments of my life.

I remember saying, “No one touch this! I’ll clean it.” I’m not renowned for my housekeeping skills, I might ignore my own house, but I cleaned the office bathrooms, I scrubbed the windows until they sparkled, before our staff moved in. I was also given staff. Before 1990, we had grown to four Public Prosecutors for Minors, two of whom worked in juvenile justice full time. There was no such thing until then.

The other step we took was to start keeping social case files, using index cards. There was no computerisation at the time. The first approach to computerisation then was using index cards, to keep your case files referenced, as in the old movies.  The police must also keep the cases similarly filed and then, once the data can be processed, you have a computerised system. We, at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors, were the first prosecution service to implement this system. The other Public Prosecutor’s Offices, the other Departments, would not do it. We were the first to implement this kind of record-keeping, and we began to keep social case files.

What are social case files? Social case files are briefs that have nothing to do with juvenile offenders or juvenile victims. They are usually files of children in danger of either becoming offenders or being victimised by families facing problems. Children that are brought to our attention via anonymous or identified reports to various helplines, or sometimes identified reports made by neighbours, relatives or one of the parents, where the conditions at home are such that the child is led to one or the other direction.

I have to say that it was us, in Athens, who hesitatingly began to terminate parental responsibility and take children into care. Up until then, parental responsibility was never terminated. The children continued to reside with the abusers, various welfare interventions would then take place, and that was all. Parental responsibility termination by a court was implemented by us for the first time. Now it is widespread, and all the Public Prosecutor’s Offices in the country do it. They might not be experienced in these cases, but they will call Athens or Thessaloniki and ask, acquire templates, find out how this or that is done.

This happened with great difficulty over the years. To terminate parental responsibility was unthinkable at the time. The home was considered sacrosanct, the mentality was “I will do as I please in my own home, I lay down the law in my home, my child belongs to me and is not subject to rights, I will do as I please with it, I will discipline it as I please.” Let us not kid ourselves, discipline meant and still means bodily harm and demeaning conduct towards the child, verbal violence, emotional and psychological violence. Even as we speak the best families, not the families that first come to mind when you think about child maltreatment, do not know how to behave towards children.

So, you gradually start to reach out to other services.

I had done that even before 1990, before my initial seven-year tenure at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors ended. I had reached out. It was a huge step toward openness. My colleague Mrs Vasilakis and I used to visit the Korydallos Correctional Centre every week. On Wednesday or Sunday afternoons, we would go to Korydallos, without our families even knowing. We used to joke that if anything happened to us along the way, they would wonder, “How did they end up in Korydallos?” Once a week without fail, we would go to the Correctional Centre and talk with the juvenile detainees who were aged between twelve and twenty-one at the time. In fact, the talks would take place without the presence of correctional officers.

The Korydallos Correctional Centre was one of the wings of the Korydallos prison. It had a large room where the children gathered to eat all together, unlike the Avlona Special Juvenile Detention Establishment today, where every child eats in their cell, where the food is delivered to the cells. There was just a single dining space. Other than that, it was a correctional facility with terrible conditions, which we used to observe and of course, advocate for changes. We kept going to the ministry and changes were indeed made at the time. I remember the cells had a toilet in full view, there was not even a curtain to hide it. One child could be using the toilet while another child was in their bed or sitting at the table, the conditions were appalling. We could not believe it and, after a lot of pressure on our part, they placed screens at first and then doors, so that at least the children could enjoy some privacy.

We also used to visit the Correctional Centre of Kassaveteia and Volos too; mostly Kassaveteia. There, we were really disheartened, disappointed. By some stroke of luck, Kassaveteia had been operating on the German model. In other words, there were cells, each cell housing one or two children. Suddenly, during one of our visits, we saw them demolish cells to convert them into dormitories. Just when we were saying that we have at least one correctional facility that is tolerable – because being in a room with eight to ten people and being in a room alone or with another child makes a big difference to the children—we saw that that facility had deteriorated. That institution, too, had failed.

During our visits then, we used to talk with the children, some of whom we might have sentenced that very morning or most of whom we had possibly sent there. They never harmed or bothered us. Not only were they welcoming, not only were they hugging us, children who are now grey-haired, middle-aged adults, parents themselves, still come see us. I think our visits were a boost, a spark of hope. We gave them hope: “do this, enrol in that program.” There were a few programmes run by the Regional Committees for People’s Education (NELE), who ran various actions in prisons. There were no schools in prisons like there are in juvenile and youth prisons today.

We had also continued the education of police officers for several years and that, too, was a very important step.

How did the juvenile police units come into being?

Around 1983, 1984, we had instances of abused minors coming to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors from the police stations. I will never forget one child, a young boy named Fotis. When Fotis came, I looked at him and noticed his ear lobes were swollen, like red spheres. I took a closer look; the child looked like an alien. I asked him, “Fotis, what happened?” The police had brought him in for theft, detention in flagrante delicto. For a small child. I asked him, “What happened to you?” “The police,” he said. I asked him what the police did to him. He told me the officer had pinned his ears with clothespins to make him confess to other thefts. Then, he said, they grabbed him by the feet and suspended him from the balcony. I listened to what they had done, the slaps and the suchlike, and I could feel my rage mounting.

The memory of that boy has never left me. There was another juvenile, too, whom I will always remember. He was a minor who had appeared often before the Juvenile Court in the past. We used to let him go because you do not incarcerate a minor for a first offence, you help them find their way through the Supervisor of Minors. You don’t immediately send them to juvenile prison.

So he arrives, accompanied by the police, and a part of his body is wrapped in bandages. I ask him what happened. He would not speak before the police officers. I take him aside, we were in our Evelpidon offices, just the two of us, and I ask him again what happened. He tells me he has been shot, that the bullet came out the other side but did not harm any organs, but he was injured. I sent him to a forensic physician, and he did indeed have a bullet wound because the police had chased him for thefts, you can imagine the kind of theft we are talking about, nothing significant. It’s just that the child was a repeat offender.

When you become a witness to such incidents, you realise something must be done, that the police force must also be sensitised. It’s not enough to raise the awareness of judges or prosecutors. So, in the summer of 1985, we began to visit the Ministry of Public Order. We met with the Minister at first, then he referred us to the General Secretary, Mr Morphopos, who was ex-military. I will never forget his name because he was the one who agreed to our proposal for a police corps for minors made up of trained policemen. He agreed despite the objections of the police as a whole, the Chief of Police and his deputy chiefs who believed it was an impossible objective, that it would never materialise, that it was unnecessary.

At a meeting with Juvenile Court Judge Mrs Maria Vasilaki, who is currently with the Supreme Court, Mr Morphopos sat us down and said, “I am not asking you whether a juvenile police service will be set up. We are gathered here to figure out how it will be set up.” He had already made the decision, in other words. The meetings we had previously held had convinced him, and this great step forward was taken. Initially, a ministry circular was sent to all Police Departments and Services in Greece for the first time. It advised police officers how juvenile offenders should be treated, following our input too. After that, the space that would house the Division for Minors, which was a Subdivision back then, was chosen. At the time, we demanded that it contain two units, one for juvenile offenders and an equally important one for juvenile victims, who also required a specialised approach.

Back then, it was not a given that victims needed special treatment too and that you needed specialised training to avoid revictimisation through the procedure and secondary abuse during the collection of evidence. Two units were also set up in Thessaloniki and in Heraklion in Crete respectively. These still exist today, and special training was provided following the request of the police officers who wished to join those units.

Was that also your proposal?

Our proposal was that the officers should not be chosen by the police force. That the hierarchy should not appoint the officers, but that the officers themselves should express interest in joining those units first. Then, a selection could be made if the number expressing interest was greater than the number of posts.

Also, we trained police officers from all over Greece on matters pertaining to minors in the three to four years that followed. We held week-long training workshops. We used to go and teach them—myself, Mrs Vasilaki, Supervisors of Minors, psychologists and Mrs Spinelli, Professor of Criminology at the University of Athens, who is our teacher to this day. She was not only highly sensitised to issues affecting minors, but extremely knowledgeable too.  

You said that the juvenile police units were founded in 1986. That leaves another four years until the end of your first tenure at the Office of the Public Prosecutor for Minors in 1990. During those four years, then, an autonomous Police Service for minors came into being. Did you see any progress?

Yes, of course. First and foremost, the abuse of juvenile offenders stopped. Juvenile offenders used to come to us having been slapped, punched; they had black eyes. It was a noticeable change because up until then, anything involving minors, offenders or victims, in Attica, used to end up at the General Police Directorate of Attica (GADA). Nowadays, minors still get taken there– of course, there has been an increase in the number of incidents too – but they only send the most serious offences to GADA.

However, both during my first tenure until 1990 and during my second tenure between 1995 and 1998, I handled juvenile victims, particularly sexual abuse victims, myself. I did not send them to the police. I used the police as my assistants, to remove the children from the abusive environment where needed, to visit them in institutions that would subsequently accommodate them or at Children’s Hospitals where they would often be temporarily accommodated. The police would help us with all that. But, particularly in cases involving the sexual abuse of minors, I would take their statements following the example of the Germans. The international literature on the subject also informed us that that was the procedure followed in the USA too.

The only thing we did not, and should not, follow was the Code of Penal Procedure, which stated that when you question a juvenile witness – the victim is also considered a witness by the Code – you should ask a question and get an answer, ask a question and get an answer and so on. But that is not appropriate in cases of child sexual abuse. You must allow the child to narrate. Closed-ended questions are prohibitive. Questions must be open-ended, or you should allow the child to narrate and only interrupt in a very specific manner if you need to ensure that you have understood what is being said correctly. “You are telling me such and such, did I understand correctly, is that what you are telling me?”

When did you first encounter the idea of the House of the Child?

By 1989, I had received the whole text of the “Procédure MELANIE” which a colleague from the island of Réunion had forwarded. By late 1998, early 1999, I had completed my second tenure as Public Prosecutor for Minors and was Deputy Public Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal of Patras. Around that time,  I attended a conference for professionals in the field which was co-organised at a very high level – suffice it to say that the meetings were held at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the session was opened by the Prime Minister himself. The participants were Greece, France and Italy, and it was a conference on child abuse. I spoke about Greek Law and how it approached and dealt with abuse.

Talking of that conference, I just remembered something that shook me. They had drawn up a comparative table for the three countries. There, the legal provisions concerning violations of children were listed to allow a comparison between the laws of the three countries. Mostly violation of their bodies, their life, neglect, but also other provisions, such as labour law, administrative law and civil law provisions in each country’s codes and statutes. My turn to complete the comparative table comes; France and Italy had already completed it. It was my turn to complete whatever provisions the Greek law made. That was when I realised the poverty of our system in legislating to protect children.

I saw that most of our rules and laws applied to both children and adults. Be it bodily harm or rape or anything of that nature, whatever provisions applied to adult victims applied to juvenile victims too.

The child did not exist as a legal subject.

No, nowhere. I still have that table somewhere. I was so ashamed for my country when I saw it. The undisputed fact is that if you do not come out of your national shell, you cannot see your weaknesses, you cannot become aware of the steps that others have made. You think everything is fine and what goes on here is happening everywhere.

That was when I saw the deficiencies of our system. Labour law? I had no idea what to write in that box. If you see the table, I filled the box with “same as provisions applying to adults”, when the other countries had already incorporated provisions that we eventually passed in 2006, as part of the law on domestic violence.

What had changed in your absence, between your departure in 1990 and the beginning of your second tenure in 1995. When you left in 1990 the foundations had been laid, something was beginning to materialise.

When I left there was juvenile police, a public prosecution with its own offices, the social case files I mentioned ready to be computerised, we were the first service to be computerised. All of that was working, those that came after me moved things forward. We held hearings for minors every day. Currently, that is not the case. Now they have diminished; the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors has declined. It has suffered a decline.

I will tell you what changed then, what we did during my second tenure. Actually, let me go back to 1990 because it illustrates a point. In 1990, I left the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors because I was promoted to Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance and posted to Chalkida. At the time, Chalkida was an industrial zone, full of factories, poultry plants, and so on, cement plants, shipyards, anything you can imagine. It was a difficult post and I would also be the Supervisor as I was the Public Prosecutor at the Court of First Instance. At the time, the Office there had a Public Prosecutor at the Court of First Instance, and the rest were Deputy Prosecutors and an Associate Judge. It was a large service that dealt with two felonies a week, usually sent by Athens. The trials had to be attended by the Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance, no one else can attend these trials. The same applies today.  So, the post was very demanding.

As a result, I dreaded it a little. I wondered how I would cope. Well, let me tell you that compared to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors, my work in Chalkida felt so light. For the first time, I realised the pressure I had been under at my previous post, the psychological damage I had suffered. I did not feel it while I was there, I was unaware of it, but once I left, I understood what the Germans had told us, that professionals in this field, dealing with these matters, can end up being burned out.

Remaining a good professional and mentally healthy in this field to avoid burnout is a delicate balancing act. I was supervising the whole of Euboea, dealing with two serious felonies a week, I often slept on a couch at the office rather than return to Athens, I was commuting, arriving at the crack of dawn and being the last to leave, literally locking up the Chalkida Public Prosecutor’s office and still, it all felt easier than my time at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors.

The incidents I had been seeing there, especially the sexual abuse cases which I had opted to deal with on my own. The Germans had warned us, “You need to look after yourselves. In this field, it is essential to have outlets, to do things for yourself, to have a hobby, a sport, something that takes you outside the job, that clears your head.”

They had taken us to a room where Public Prosecutors for Minors, Supervisors of Minors, Juvenile Judges had group therapy every month. I remember they all sat in a circle, and everyone aired their grievances about the other: In such and such case I told you to do this, but instead, you did what you wanted to do or in this or that instance you were wrong. Everyone aired everything they had bottled up inside.  We had also joined the circle, all five of us and our interpreter, and watched the session. At the end of the group therapy session, they picked up pillows and flung them at each other. They had a pillow fight to vent their anger and be more effective afterwards.

What did you do after you saw these examples?

When I returned from Germany, I did the following. I made a deal with the Institute of Child Health, which was headed by Eleni Agathonos at the time and is now headed by Giorgos Nikolaidis. I made a deal, like a memorandum of cooperation.  I told them, “Whenever I get a sexual abuse case, one of you, a social worker or a psychologist or a psychiatrist, whoever is available at the time, will come to my office before I initiate proceedings and talk with the child. That way, I will learn something, and the procedure will be easier for the child.”

So I used to notify the Institute, because I had child abuse cases, involving victims of both sexes. I would notify the Institute and keep the child there, give it a glass of juice, sit it down to draw or do something suited to their age. Also, if the child was accompanied by the mother, I would allow them to sit together in my office. In other words, I would give children time to become familiar with the environment they found themselves in. These were approaches used by the Americans and the Germans, which I was trying to implement on my own in Greece.

But we know that Greece is not just Athens – that’s what used to bother me the most. If something is not institutionally enshrined, it is pointless. People come and go; you can’t rely on individual actions. Of course, things depend on people too, but that is not the point. There have to be laws and institutions that both oblige you and train you how to act.

So, the people from the Institute would come and talk with the child and so on, and this way I would get a first impression. Then, my examination would follow. I always used the same secretary, who was very aware and very intelligent. She now works in Piraeus. We used to carry out the examinations together, in the presence of the people from the Institute. By then, I would have a rough idea of whether what was said was true or not. Usually, children do not lie, but there is a small percentage that might. I have had instances of Munchausen syndrome, of lying, but there was an explanation for the lying too. You need to find that reason; you must identify that, too.

We have heard professionals speak of “service chauvinism”, i.e. that the services are so confident that what they are doing is right that they are incapable of listening to criticism. Systemic abuse, however, is occurring to this day.

That is the case, unfortunately. It still occurs because we have not decided who does what, we have not acknowledged that some professionals think we are better than others. Even public prosecutors have an attitude that they are superior to the child psychiatrist, superior to the social worker. We are overweening, Judges too.

The other reason is that we have not learned to cooperate from a young age. We are not taught how to cooperate in school. Everyone gets tested individually, does homework on their own, reads out their assignment, does this and that on their own. They have not been taught to cooperate the way it is done abroad.  I experience Germany through my grandchildren, who are in German schools, and I see what they are taught once they are enrolled in the schooling system. The first thing they learn is how to cooperate. Group projects, group activities. One person looks this up, another person looks up something else, they pool their work and present it together as a team.

We are not even aware of the concept of inclusivity. As we speak, inclusivity is possibly the uppermost concept in child protection, the uppermost concept in child-friendly justice. In other words, the child must participate, even in the Juvenile court’s sentencing of the juvenile offender. You must include the minor; the minor should make that decision with you. You can guide them in deciding what the right thing is, but first, you must persuade them or choose the measure that would suit the offender best. You don’t get to decide just because you are the judge, just because you say so, that the sentence should be conciliation or compensation or something else. You will pass the sentence that you will jointly reach with the juvenile offender. The same applies to victims and everything else.

So that is the one thing we lack as professionals, we are incapable of sitting around the same table, or we think we are superior to the doctor or the medical examiner or the police officer. It will not happen unless we understand that interdisciplinarity is essential in caring for minors at any level, both for victims and offenders. You cannot stay holed up in your own bastion….

The Public Prosecutor cannot replace the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist cannot replace the social worker.

And yet we make that mistake. I see well-intentioned colleagues of mine who appear to be sensitised to issues affecting minors, but they meddle in what should be the work of others. And that is a mistake. I cannot draw a conclusion; the child psychiatrist will do that. I should stay within my area of expertise; stick to the area I know. I will not intrude in another’s field; I will respect them.

Let us broach the subject of the legal duties of other professionals. Shouldn’t the state encourage professionals whose work brings them into contact with children to report their suspicions?

When I was Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court responsible for Minors, we held a meeting at the Department of Child Psychiatry of the “Agia Sofia” Children's Hospital. It was attended by child psychiatrists, social workers etc. from other hospitals that have children’s units, such as the Tzaneio Prefecture General Hospital of Piraeus, The Panagiotis & Aglaia Kyriakou Children's Hospital and the General Hospital of Attiki “Seismanoglio”.

These people stayed for a whole morning, and we spoke about many things. About how they, the psychologists, the psychiatrists and the social workers, could be protected. In many instances, they are dragged through the courts, sued for libel, for false accusations etc. because they were obliged to submit a report stating which parent is to blame or if both parents are to blame. They face years of litigation, legal fees, it is terrible.

Following that meeting, I went to the Ministry and asked it to legislate a provision that would grant them immunity. The law was passed, but it only applied to social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and child psychiatrists working in public hospitals, child protection institutions etc.

However, other professionals are involved in this field too.  For example, municipal social workers who carry out investigations following a public prosecutor’s order. Medical-educational centres also carry out investigations and submit reports to the public prosecutor. Then, there are the professionals who carry out psychiatric evaluations. The teachers also came to see us. Then, the Hellenic Association of Social Workers (SKLE) too, came to see us. I was Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court at that time. The social workers visited my office, the Children’s Ombudswoman Mrs Koufonikolaou attended too. We agreed that as we were considering expanding the provision to include teachers, then it might as well be expanded to provide immunity for professionals working for municipalities and social workers etc. working at medical-educational centres. This would mean that no one could bring a lawsuit against them unless they could establish wilful misconduct. If I am acting deceitfully or with malice and it is proven, for example, that I was related with the person initially filing the report or I was the school principal, but I also had something to gain from filing a report, then we have wilful misconduct.

We submitted it to the Ministry, but it has not been passed yet. The government changed too, and at present, the expanded provision has not yet been passed into law.

Mrs Koufonikolaou told us that the Minister, Mr Kalogerou, had made a commitment back then.

Yes, he was on board but did not have enough time. The previous government had also been on board for the initial provision; it got passed into law by Mr Athanasiou, so then it just needed to be extended. Mr Kalogerou did not have enough time to address the matter, so it is now pending. It would act as a safeguard for teachers, a guarantee of legal protection that would make them more open to coming forth. At the moment they are reticent.

They should also receive training.

On Saturday, we held a Conference in Aigio. The conversation that followed went on until two, three am. They could not get enough of the conversation, they had questions, they wanted answers. They want us to return and continue the conversation. It is natural that they have queries. These are things they are hearing for the first time. They had not even heard of the Convention on the Rights of the Child before. Can you imagine that? Aigio is not an isolated spot in the mountains. So imagine what the situation must be like in more distant places… in Orestiada, in the islands.

In 2014, I asked the National School of the Judiciary to introduce a course on the powers and responsibilities of the Public Prosecutor for Minors. That way, upon graduating the School, everyone would have some knowledge on these matters. I taught that course until this July, without remuneration, of course. I refuse to accept payment for anything that I willingly offer our country and our community. I consider it part and parcel of what I do, so although teachers at the school are remunerated and have their travel and accommodation expenses covered and get compensated for teaching, I decline all of that. Moreover, during my final three years there, I taught by inviting other experts in the field as speakers, so that the students could become familiar with other sectors.

This year I invited Mr Nikolaidis, I invited Ms Olga Themeli, I invited Ms Artinopoulou, Mrs Mpeka, the child psychiatrist, from Thessaloniki, Mr Anagnostopoulos from the Department of Child Psychiatry of the “Agia Sofia” Children's Hospital… Over the years, I invited many others, such as Ms Paris Zagoura, to speak.  At least three guest speakers joined me every year to teach the students, to allow them to hear other professionals and to role-play. Seeing how well the information you are trying to impart gets assimilated during role-play is quite something.

So public prosecutors need training, but I had also asked for the same to apply to Judges. When the Judge tries a minor or tries the adult who has abused a minor, he needs to have a broader awareness, otherwise, how can he do it? Should not there be an equivalent course for Judges? Family Law is not enough.

Isn’t there?

No, it is pure, dry Family Law. It is not an education in abuse and delinquency. The Judge needs a different kind of training. If we were to introduce such a course, we would get a different kind of judge, someone who would then pursue some kind of continuing education to enrich their knowledge.

We held so many Conferences across Greece during my three-year tenure as Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court. I visited all our Public Prosecutor’s Offices, both at the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal, covering my own expenses, that goes without saying.

So, I visited them all over Greece. We held training workshops where we did not just invite my people. I invited police officers, port authority officers where available, judges. I trained nearly all the military judges, they were invited to the training, as were judges and public prosecutors of the Court of Appeal and the Court of First instance, everyone I could reach in each location I visited. The aim was to allow them to at least reflect on certain matters; it was not comprehensive training, but you still came away with something. At least you became aware of everything you did not know. You might not have learned a lot, but at least you came to the realisation that you should thoroughly think before you act, that you do not know everything.

Have such initiatives been continued by other prosecutors?

Yes. It touches me when I say it because they are my children, I see them as my children, and I think they see it that way too. They have dedicated books to me, they refer to themselves as my children, all these students of mine who went on to become Deputy Public Prosecutors and Public Prosecutors. Most of my children, whatever post they now find themselves in, can recognise abuse, know how to take steps, find out more, they call me to this day and  ask, “I have this case, this incident, what should I do, how should I proceed?”

I am genuinely moved when I see my children everywhere, in Kavala, Thessaloniki, Heraklion in Crete, Veria, Alexandroupoli, Edessa, Florina, Ioannina, Patras, Piraeus, Kos, Zakynthos, handle juvenile cases which they could not have handled back in my day. Thessaloniki has an incredible Public Prosecutor, Mrs Dimitra Tsiardakli, who is a mother of four herself, so she is not someone who has no other obligations, and still, she made a difference. What did Dimitra do? She gathered all the relevant bodies and services and created a Network. We will now showcase this network abroad too, with Mr Nikolaidis, in a programme Mr Nikolaidis is currently running, about how services can work in tandem across the whole of the EU.

So, we have this Network created by Mrs Tsiardakli, which I brought to Giorgos Nikolaidis’ attention, he had not been aware of it. But I have been following Tsiardakli’s work. In fact, she recently managed to obtain a decision by the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (KEDE) that Municipal Social Services will assist the removal of children into care on a twenty-four-hour basis. Before, they used to tell us, “It’s three am, I am not going to go take the child into care right now, I won’t do this or that.” KEDE issued a decision following Mrs Tsiardakli’s initiative. The hospitals too. No child stays at a hospital for more than twenty-four hours. They are immediately given to families, there is a list of available foster parents.

So it’s not that difficult.

Nothing is difficult.

The Covid-19 lockdown was challenging for everyone. What did it mean, however, for children faced with abuse or neglect? In Greece, where the child protection system is disjointed, understaffed and disorganised, how did the lockdown affect children who were forced to not have contact with anyone else apart from their abusers? How did State services respond during such a trying period? After the lockdown ended, were any measures put in place to assess and alleviate the consequences for vulnerable children? What is the plan, in case an increase in Covid-19 cases forces a new lockdown?

We sought answers to these questions through five interviews with child protection experts that were streamed live on The Manifold Facebook Page.

Interview #1: Theoni Koufonikolakou

Theoni Koufonikolakou is Deputy Ombudswoman for Children's Rights.

Interview 2: Antonis Rellas

Antonis Rellas is a film and stage director and a disabled activist with "Zero Tolerance". (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #3: Giorgos Nikolaidis

Giorgos Nikolaidis is a psychiatrist, director of the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate of the Institute of Child Health, and former chairperson and current member of the Lanzarote Committee. (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #4: Triantafyllia Athanasiou

Triantafyllia Athanasiou is a social worker, chairperson of the Association of Social Workers of Greece.

Interview #5: Stefanos Alevizos

Stefanos Alevizos is a psychologist with The Smile of the Child NGO.

Over a year ago, an unprecedented advertising campaign appeared in the streets of Athens: part of it was authorless and guerrilla-like, graffiti or banners hanging on road bridges and overpasses with slogans such as “joint custody” and “dads are not visitors, they are parents”; and part of it had the hallmarks of high-powered lobbying, with posters calling for “equal time with both parents” and “alternating homes” covering advertising spaces in bus stops all over the city.

The bus stop posters, sponsored by Politis Group, a major street advertising company, bore the logo of an organisation named “Active Dads for Children’s Rights”. Other organisations, such as the “Joint Custody Association”, and the Association GON.IS., also became more vocal in the press and in social media in advocating for the overhaul of child custody laws. 

A few months previously, the minister of Justice, Kostas Tsiaras, had appointed a legislative committee tasked with drafting a bill that would reform Greek family law. Konstantinos Bogdanos, a member of Parliament for New Democracy, whose candidacy and parliamentary tenure have been as controversial as his preceding journalistic career, boasted in a social media post that it was thanks to his own efforts that the protection of "dads' rights", to be achieved through the new bill, came to the attention of the minister. Bogdanos claimed he had been alerted to the issue by Nikos Tsilipounidakis, a journalist connected with the Joint Custody Association. Bogdanos called him a "dynamic dad".

The street campaign turned the pressure up. As the Joint Custody Association was quick to point out to its followers, there was no guarantee that the committee would move in a direction favourable to the association’s demands. 

These demands targeted what the Joint Custody Association and the other groups considered unjust privileges accorded by the courts to mothers after a divorce, such as exclusive custody over the children. Their proposed solution was for the government to legislate that children after a divorce would by default spend equal time with both parents, within a regime of “shared parenting”, meaning that a child would live half the time with one parent and half with the other. 

Through the efforts of such groups, similar legislative measures, concisely known as “joint custody”, had been pursued by some sympathetic — or misled — politicians over the years, but they never went beyond the stage of an informal meeting, a proposed amendment or at most a draft bill that never left a minister’s desk drawer.  

The danger that the same would happen in this case, according to the Joint Custody Association, lay in the fact that Ioannis Tentes, an emeritus chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court and chairman of the Society of Family Law, was appointed to head the legislative committee. Members of the Society of Family Law, a scientific association of legal scholars, lawyers and judges, some of whom are also former politicians, had previously taken a public position against “joint custody”.

According to official sources, 70% of divorces during 2017 in Greece were consensual. Members of Parliament both for the government and the opposition cited additional evidence during parliamentary discussions on the new bill, which brings the number of consensual divorces up to 86%. Of the remaining 14%, only about half proceed to a full lawsuit and of those only 3% reach an appellate court. It is therefore evident that even if the grievances proponents of “joint custody” have against court decisions are justified, they only concern a very small proportion of divorces that are highly acrimonious.

The start 

While officially they appeared to advocate for the benefits of both parents participating in child rearing, some media appearances and a multitude of social media posts began to reveal that the groups pushing for “joint custody” formed a burgeoning “men’s rights” lobby, representing divorced fathers who believed that the courts had wronged them in awarding custody of the children to their former spouses. 

The Association GON.IS., which was approved as a “primary social care” institution by ministerial decision in 2015 and claims that it supports “both parents”, was founded by former members of an older organisation, named SYGAPA that tellingly translates as “Association for Male and Paternal Dignity”. 

Nikos Tsilipounidakis, the journalist who Bogdanos said had enlightened him about "dads' rights", famously quipped during a TV interview: “There are many dads who pay too much rent for nine months of pregnancy.”

Increasingly after the summer of 2020, the lobby succeeded in placing more interviews by its representatives in mainstream media, and enjoyed favourable coverage of its positions in articles not only by journalists, but also by psychologists and legal scholars. This was accompanied by increased activity in social media.

Despite the Joint Custody Association’s professed worries about the composition of the legislative committee, two prominent figures of the lobby, Marios Andrikopoulos and Patrina Paparigopoulou, were also appointed as members. Andrikopoulos is a legal director for a major energy company who runs a popular Facebook page, “Act against Parental Alienation". Paparigopoulou is a law professor and sister of Ioannis Paparigopoulos, frontman of Joint Custody Association, board member of the International Council on Shared Parenting, former member of “Male Dignity” and co-founder of GON.IS.

The legislative committee presented its draft and report to the Ministry of Justice in November 2020. Unbeknownst to the wider public, the majority of the committee’s members had rejected some of the more radical provisions advocated by the men’s rights lobby. (As the minister is not legally obligated to publish the legislative committee’s draft, this only became evident much later — when the minister was compelled to disclose it after the opposition had filed an official request.)  

This led to disagreements within the lobby on whether the proposed bill, which was soon leaked to the press, was worthy of their support. In the event, the Joint Custody Association published its own draft bill in December 2020 and sent it to the ministry, which rejected it.

During an online panel discussion organised by the Joint Custody Association in February 2021, Marios Andrikopoulos claimed that the majority of the committee was intent on “letting the proposal rot away”, and that he and Patrina Paparigopoulou “put up a great fight”.

Ioannis Paparigopoulos, who is apparently regarded as the éminence grise of the lobby and had expressed doubts about the leaked bill, retorted that “if the bill that you [Andrikopoulos] prepared is voted in, you still won’t see your children”.

Nikos Tsilipounidakis challenged Paparigopoulos by claiming that they should all support the minister of Justice. “Last Monday,” he said, “I personally called Mr Paparigopoulos and told him that Mr Tsiaras wanted to see him. When I called him, I was in Mr Tsiaras’s office.”

He went on to say that Tsiaras has been facing heavy opposition within his own party, New Democracy, but he was the first minister of Justice in recent years that had agreed to meet with “their group”.

Tsilipounidakis identified the Society of Family Law as the scourge of the new bill, and claimed that “they” (presumably the society) enlisted the help of Giorgos Gerapetritis, the minister of State, to plant doubts about the bill in the Prime Minister’s mind. He claimed that he knew this because he was “virtually present” at a teleconference between Tsiaras, Gerapetritis and Mitsotakis, where the minister of Justice defended his bill.  

Andrikopoulos argued that the spirit of the new law was in the right direction, particularly in providing that the two parents exercise their parental function after the dissolution of marriage “in common and equally”. “You have won,” he said to Paparigopoulos.

Tsilipounidakis also argued that the bill was “a start” and that they should now “organise their attack” during the public consultation process.  

The attack

When the draft was presented for public consultation on March 18, some members of the Legislative Committee protested that it exhibited important deviations from their recommendations. Some of the provisions advocated by the men’s rights lobby had found their way back into the draft, despite the committee not including them. Although legislative committees’ reports are not binding, deviating from them widely when a draft law is reviewed by a ministry is not only less than transparent in terms of who influences the final draft, but also entails the risk of technical mistakes, such as vague or unenforceable provisions, which was one of the issues some committee members protested about. 

Close to 15.000 comments were posted in all articles of the draft bill, the public consultation platform. The Active Dads Association announced, in its memorandum to the Parliamentary Committee, where the bill landed after public consultation was concluded on April 1, that “out of 15.230 comments submitted, 12.289 were IN FAVOUR of joint custody”. And they concluded that “the consultation has spoken loudly and given a popular mandate for a self-evident change”.

The same argument was employed by Kostas Tsiaras, both in an interview and during discussion in Parliament, where he said that a “record breaking number of comments” signalled a “favourable reception” of the bill. 

However, Aggeliki Adamopoulou, an MP for Mera25, disputed the minister’s claim and said that according to an analysis conducted by her staff, one supportive comment had been copied and pasted over 1200 times, while 6 supportive sentences appeared in identical form up to 1400 times. 

“Is this what overwhelming support means?” Ms Adamopoulou said. “Out of 15000 comments, 9200 at a minimum, that is 61%, are copied and pasted again!”

We decided to check the accuracy of these claims by conducting an analysis of the comments on the public consultation platform. The result supports neither the minister’s claim nor that of the Active Dads Association, being much closer to the numbers cited by Adamopoulou, but it also raises significant questions about the vulnerability of the public consultation process. 

After scraping the comments on the 23 articles of the draft bill (14.814 in total), we trained a machine learning model in order to categorise comments according to whether they were in support or in opposition to the bill. According to our model, within a +-3% margin of error, it does initially appear that out of 14.814 comments, το 77% (approximately 11.500) indeed is supportive, whereas 23% (approximately 3.400) is in opposition. However, out of the 14.814 total comments, only 47% (6.920) are original, whereas 53% (7.894) are copies of other comments. The picture therefore changes considerably if we only take into account original comments and not copies. In that case, the percentage of comments that support the bill falls to 60% and the percentage of those that oppose it rises to 40%. 

Out of approximately 11.500 comments that we estimate to be in support of the bill, 63% (more than 7.200) are copies of other comments, and only 37% (more than 4.100) are original. 

The 7.200 comments in support of the bill that have been copied essentially correspond to only 658 original comments that have been pasted multiple times. For example, just one of the 658 original comments has been copied and pasted 343 times, while two variations on it have been pasted 358 times (for a total of 701 copies).  

Conversely, out of approximately 3.400 comments that we estimate to be in opposition to the bill, 80% (more than 2.700) are original and 20% (about 670) are copies. The 670 copies correspond to 225 original comments.

Our analysis therefore shows that not only the numbers of supportive and opposing comments are more balanced that the minister and the supporters of the bill claimed, but also that:

Firstly, over half of the comments in the public consultation are misleading, being simply repeated up to hundreds of times each.

Secondly, the majority of these misleading comments are in support of the bill.

Thirdly, there appears to have been a major intervention in the consultation, as the volume of the supportive comments that were copied and repeated (over 7.200 or 63%) is enormous.

The criticism

During public consultation, as well as during discussion in the Parliamentary Committee and in the media, the draft bill was heavily criticised by a wide range of experts, organisations, institutions, feminist groups and NGOs, including the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls and the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; the Hellenic Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; the Family Law Society; the gender equality organization Diotima; the Lawyers Committee on Legal Issues of Co-Custody; and Bar Associations across the country.

The overarching issue for those opposing the new law was that it departed from the child-centered approach of previous legislation, prioritising instead the rights of parents. This was particularly evident in its definition of “the best interest of the child” as equal co-custody between parents, as opposed to a provision that it needs to be defined on a case-by-case basis, as required by international law. 

Another major point of contention was that the bill did not limit visitation/communication rights, even if a parent was accused of child abuse, unless there was an irrevocable conviction for the act. This seemed to reflect a view, espoused by men’s rights groups but also shared by some child protection professionals, that many allegations of child abuse are false and are employed by mothers against fathers in order to alienate them from their children. The Active Dads Association highlighted data from a child abuse hotline run by The Smile of the Child, a prominent child protection NGO, that appeared to show that most abuse allegations are made against mothers. And Maria Kaperoni, a clinical psychologist with Ippokrateio General Hospital in Thessaloniki, who supported the new bill in the media and has been cited by men’s rights groups, has said that she has been asked to provide mothers with reports stating that their children are being sexually abused by their father. “Very often,” she claimed, “the accusations are false.”  

Giorgos Nikolaidis, a psychiatrist who heads the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate at the Institute of Child Health, and an internationally acknowledged expert on the psychosocial support of child abuse survivors, told us that in Greece there is no unified system for recording reported incidents of child abuse and neglect, and therefore partial data and statistics published by individual services or institutions bear little relation to the characteristics of the totality of incidents in society, as they emerge from studies in random segments of the general population. He went on to say that “using such ‘evidence’ to create a certain impression just before a new family law reform is to be enacted, is plainly a communication game, and has no value for designing social policy for families”.  

Critics of the new bill further noted that in Greece, where court delays are a persistent problem, a provision requiring an irrevocable conviction would mean that a potential abuser could remain in unsupervised contact with their victim for a period of up to ten years. 

This was the only part of the bill that was partially amended in the face of expert criticism. After the changes, the visitation/communication provisions made no mention of the issue of child abuse, while the provision about the loss of “parental responsibility” called for a “first instance conviction”.

Further criticism of the new bill focused on both substantial and technical matters, the most important of which were:

• Τhe bill provides that after separation parents continue to exercise their parental function “in common” and “equally”. The meaning of “equally” (whether, for example, it refers to “equal time”) is vague, which according to opponents of the bill will lead to confusion in the courts. The same provision extends to children whose parents have not married or entered into a cohabitation contract, and were not living together after the recognition of the child by the father. Opponents of the bill pointed out that this essentially awards “equal” custody to a parent — usually the father — who never provided care for the child, without any obligation to prove their suitability or interest.  
• The bill provides that if the child after separation is living with one parent, then the other parent is by default entitled to visitation/communication amounting to ⅓ of the “total time of the child”. Opponents of the bill pointed out that the term “total time” is vague, as it can be interpreted to mean 8 hours per day, 10 days per month, 4 months per year, or even calculated based on weekends, holidays, and spare time, thus leading to the so-called “⅔ parent” assuming full responsibility for care and the “⅓ parent” becoming a “holiday parent” without responsibilities. Opponents also pointed out that the bill allows the ⅓ parent to actually request less time, leading therefore to a situation where visitation/communication is determined by the needs of the parents instead of the children, contravening international law.   
• The bill obliges the parent who lives with the child — the ⅔ parent — to inform the other parent — the ⅓ parent — about every decision relating to the care of the child, prior to acting upon it. Opponents of the bill pointed out that this constitutes a violation of the ⅔ parent’s private life, and can be used as a means of harassment or revenge in cases of particularly strained or hostile relations between former partners. 
• The bill provides that parents have an obligation to “maintain and strengthen  the relationship of the child with the family of the other parent”. Opponents pointed out that this broadens the obligations of the parents towards the child to an unlimited number of other persons, while leaving no room for appreciation of the best interest of the child in relation to its contact with the extended family members of the other parent.
• The bill makes mediation mandatory, a violation, opponents say, of the Istanbul Convention to which Greece is a party. 
• The law relies on the “parental alienation syndrome” theory for the determination of the best interest of the child, the description of child care, and the regulation of communication and visitation. Opponents of the bill pointed out that the theory is disputed.

The support

Even before the draft of the new law was revealed, it was evident that the “parental alienation syndrome” theory was employed by the men’s rights lobby as a scientific argument in support of the reform. According to the theory, the “syndrome” occurs when a child becomes alienated from a parent as a result of the psychological manipulation of another parent, particularly in the context of conflictual family separation. Interestingly, during discussions in the Parliamentary Committee, the “syndrome” was not only defended, but presented as the prevailing academic consensus, by Marieta Papadatou-Pastou, a professor of psychology representing the Hellenic Psychology Society. 

When asked to cite her sources, Ms Pastou pointed to what she calls “the Warshak report”, meaning a 2014 paper by psychologist Richard Warshak, titled Social science and parenting plans for young children: A consensus report. The conclusion of the paper was that equal time spent between parents was beneficial to the child. The “consensus” part of the title was based on the fact that the paper was accompanied by a list of 110 scientists that endorsed its findings. As the paper itself admits, this is “a rare occurrence in social science”. Both for the author of the paper and Ms. Pastou in the Greek Parliament seven years later, this was an advantage of the paper that allowed it to support its claim of offering a “consensus”. In truth, it did not make Warshak’s view any less controversial.

Richard Warshak has picked up the mantle of child psychologist Richard Gardner, who proposed the “syndrome” in 1985. He is considered his scientific successor, so much so that after Gardner’s passing, Warshak inherited his unpublished instructional video and audio tapes from his family. Warshak is the author of a best-selling book titled Divorce Poison and more importantly, he has inspired a business as an applied version of his ideas called Family Bridges, where he holds a role as scientific advisor.

Family Bridges are often called by their opponents “reunification camps”. They are workshops that aim to heal “parental alienation” and repair the relationship with both parents. In reality, according to a series of stories told by outlets such as The Atlantic, NBC and Reveal, multiple testimonies of children that have been through these camps tell a different story, accusing the programme of manipulating them and traumatising their relation with the parent who had custody. An expert was quoted in The Atlantic calling them “torture camps for children”. And since these workshops are quite expensive and mandated by judicial orders, a lawyer involved in a legal battle against Family Bridges told the Washington Post in 2017 that “the programs are basically shams. It was clear to me what they were doing was reaping massive fees by selling a custody change”.

According to psychiatrist Giorgos Nikolaidis, the claim that the existence of the syndrome in question is widely accepted is false. “This so-called syndrome,” he told us, “is a communication tool, systematically promoted by various organisations of divorced men. It has never been recognised as an actual clinical entity by prestigious international or national scientific institutions. Recently, in order to clarify the issue and avoid misinterpretation, the World Health Organisation decided to omit any mention of deprivation of contact with a parent in its most recent revision of the International Classification of Disorders.”

Another source of support for reforming family law in the direction espoused by the Ministry of Justice was the Greek Ombudsman, or Citizen’s Advocate, an independent authority, headed by lawyer and law professor Andreas Pottakis. As early as August 2020, Pottakis addressed a letter to the minister, where he argued for the benefits of “joint custody” and “shared parenting”, citing Council of Europe resolutions of 2013 and 2015 that urged member-states to legislate providing an "option for common custody in case of separation" and introduce "the principle of alternating habitation".

In May 2021, when the draft bill was being discussed in the Parliamentary Committee, the Ombudsman addressed another letter, this time to the chairman of the committee, Maximos Charakopoulos, where he reiterated his approval of the ministry's efforts to reform family law, but criticised it for not going far enough in legislating "alternating habitation".

Yiota Masouridou, a lawyer who also serves as the general secretary of European Democratic Lawyers and a vocal critic of the bill, told us that "the Council of Europe’s recommendations are non legally binding policy agreements which constitute soft law. They are often used for political pressure on governments to act or regulate an issue according to a specific guidance."

"Lobbies supporting changes on family law, as well as institutions such as the Ombudsman," said Masouridou, "recall specific extracts from selected CoE’s recommendations, causing, deliberately, confusion over the scope and the context of Greece’s obligations deriving from international law. It should be clarified at all levels that the protection of victims of domestic violence is absolute and does not allow for any measure that protects or covers the perpetrators at the detriment of the rights of the victims."

According to Nikolaidis, who is also a member and former chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, the Council of Europe body responsible for monitoring the Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse,  there is now a tendency in various European countries to revise “shared parenting” or “alternating habitation” measures, as they are proving “non viable”. 

“The same is true,” Nikolaidis told us, “for international institutions such as the Council of Europe and its various committees: in a recent discussion of the committee for the protection of the rights of children who are deprived of parental care due to divorce or other causes, any mention of such measures was omitted to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations.”  

“There is a confusion,” he said, “between the widely accepted benefits for a child of continued contact with both parents and the dubious promotion of the spurious ‘alienation syndrome’ or ‘alternating habitation’ as a general rule. It is one thing to observe that children of separated couples can benefit from quality contact with both parents. But this is achieved primarily by former couples that find a way to communicate for the benefit of their children. To apply findings based on this observation to cases of separated parents in conflictual divorces and legal battles, and to use them to support legal and administrative measures, such as those we saw in Greece, is a leap of logic and a methodological sleight of hand.”

“It is a shame,” Nikolaidis concluded, “that even respected academics, but also institutions like the Greek Ombudsman, have had such a lapse of judgement.”

The split 

In the days leading up to the Parliament Plenary Session debate, the disagreements over the bill that had been brewing within the governing party became public. Two New Democracy MPs, former ministers Marieta Giannakou and Olga Kefalogianni, publicly expressed their objections to the bill, reiterating the main points of criticism that had emerged during public consultation.

Τhe minister of Justice retorted in an interview that the two MPs’ objections were rooted in their “personal experiences,” which was “no way to legislate”. Giannakou countered with the question if the minister would have said as much if the objections had been raised by men. 

The two MPs then went on to file a proposal for ten amendments to the bill, tackling the most problematic points. It was the first instance of such determined opposition to government policy during New Democracy’s two years in office. The ministry rejected the amendments.

During discussion in the Parliamentary Committee, Giannakou criticised the ministry for not meeting with established women’s organisations and excluding them from the dialogue on family law reform. “By contrast,” she said, “we saw improbable organisations, such as GON.IS., Joint Custody, Active Dads, tremendous adverts in support of the bill, which means a lot of money, and an identical letter emailed to us with various names but no actual identification. All these people love their children so much that they can’t write a letter about this issue? Or is it a company, which has the money to send all this with false names? I believe it is the second.” 

At the Plenary Session debate, on May 20-21, the opposition vigorously opposed the bill. There were some differentiations: Andreas Loverdos, former minister and MP for KINAL (Movement for Change) voiced his support for shared parenting. And Elliniki Lysi (Greek Solution), a far-right party, opposed the bill on homophobic grounds, as in their opinion it does not safeguard the traditional family. Although a few more New Democracy MPs expressed reservations about it, notably former minister of Justice Charalambos Athanassiou, most defended it strenuously — some a little too strenuously, as evidenced by one parliamentarian’s opinion that “a woman may hate her ex husband, who cheated on her, beat her and abused her, but still the child has the right to grow up with both parents”.

In an unusual turn of events, at least for parliamentary norms, when the minister of Justice was confronted by criticism that the civil code does not include a provision to the effect that parents exercise their parental function “equally” during marriage, and therefore the bill’s provision that they are to “continue” doing so when divorced is nonsensical, he decided to amend the civil code on the spot, and add “equally” to the relevant article.

It was also revealed during the debate that the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls and the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, had addressed a letter to the Prime Minister on May 17, which was highly critical of the bill and recommended “review and reconsideration of those provisions in the Bill taking into account Greece’s international human rights obligations”. It also requested that its contents “be shared with the Parliament at the earliest”. The government had not disclosed the letter to Parliament, and when confronted with it by the opposition, the Minister of Justice denied knowledge of it. 

The bill was finally enacted on May 21, with opposition parties either abstaining or voting against it. No corrections were made, despite the extensive criticism. The new legislation is the first to radically change provisions regarding the custody of children after a divorce, since the modernisation of family law that took place in 1983.

Barely a few minutes after the voting was concluded, Act Against Parental Alienation, the facebook page run by Marios Andrikopoulos, shared a curious post: a photograph of Grigoris Dimitriadis, General Secretary to the Prime Minister. No explanation was offered.

Other social media accounts associated with the lobby celebrated their victory in more overt ways: 

“The battle was triumphantly won, gentlemen,” one post read. “We move ahead according to the basic plan, without a STEP back. We turn our heavy artillery against the judiciary, we load, we lock and we WAIT! Let the members of this group who leak things tell the Union of Judges and Prosecutors that we have them in our sights.”

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Modern Greek history has seen its fair share of brutalities, but few among them have been as little discussed as the ways in which children have been mistreated, abused, neglected and institutionalised by the State. From the late 19th century, when a prototype welfare system was first put in place under the Greek Royal Family, all the way to the nationalisation of welfare from the 1970s onwards, one constant has been that children have concerned the State as props in the political game or as potential perpetrators of crime — usually both. This chronic undermining of children’s rights affected most aspects of the public sector; and its traces are still visible today.

A recent video of a policeman beating up an eleven-year-old child in the outskirts of Athens, that surfaced on social media, raised the question of what ideas police and other authorities continue to have regarding the treatment of minors — whether suspected offenders or not. ((The video is available (in Greek) here, from ERT, the Greek Public Broadcaster.)) The Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, took to Twitter to condemn the incident, stating that “whoever hits minors does not have a place anywhere”. ((Tweet is available (in Greek) here.)) The speed of the Minister’s reflexes can perhaps be explained by the fact that the memory of the 2008 murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, shot by a police officer in downtown Athens, is still fresh. 

The consequences of Grigoropoulos’s murder were staggering: Athens, and other Greek cities, burned during spontaneous riots that lasted for weeks. But the mistreatment of children by officials has also been documented in many other, less explosive, instances: some research has shown that children victims of abuse have been made to recount their ordeal to authorities up to fourteen times, in what cleary amounts to secondary abuse in the hands of the State; children who have been removed from their families are kept in hospitals, despite not being in need of hospitalisation, sometimes for years; and at least one institution has been strapping disabled children to their beds and locking them in cages. ((See our detailed report on the Lechaina unit for children with disabilities: "Hell as an Institution".)) Authorities have described such practices as unavoidable, necessary, or “for the good of the children”.

It is impossible to explain the persistence of such practices, at least in part, without considering the way that historical events have shaped Greek authorities’ attitudes toward minors. 

In the Hands of the Lord

Institutionalisation of children had been introduced very soon after the foundation of the Greek State, with the City of Athens already operating an Orphanage for Abandoned Infants in 1838. However, a quasi-system of fostering also existed, with foster families often paid a meagre fee to host abandoned children, and institutionalisation was in part seen as a solution to abuse and neglect within this unregulated framework. 

The Athens Municipal Nursery was founded by the city’s Mayor in 1859, and brought under the auspices of the Royal Family in the 1870s. According to its own data, between its foundation and the mid 1960s, it hosted over 50.000 children. During its peak, it hosted about 600 at one time. As Maria Athanassopoulou and Marianna Drakopoulou write in their Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece, it was within the Municipal Nursery that the first attempts were made to systematically document child ailments and statistically study infant mortality. ((See Maria Athanasopoulou, Mariana Drakopoulou, A Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece (Istoriki anadromi gia ta ektheta vrefi stin Ellada), To Vima tou Asklipiou, tome 9, issue 1, Jan-March 2010, available online (in Greek) here.)) 

As was common in many countries — and remains today — the Municipal Nursery also introduced a vrefodohos, or baby hatch, where mothers could abandon their babies anonymously. On the outside, there was an inscription from Psalm 27: “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.” 

Also on the initiative of the Royal family, the Patriotic Foundation for Social Welfare and Perception, or PIKPA, was founded in 1914, initially as the “Patriotic Association of Greek Women”. Although its initial mandate was to cater for the families of soldiers fighting in the war, after the 1920s it gradually shifted to the sheltering of orphaned and displaced children. 

By the end of the 1930s, even the few progressive ideas about government and lawmaking that had emerged in Greece during the interwar period had been snuffed out — first by dictatorship, then by war and occupation. Civil war followed, then two decades of “feeble democracy” and a military junta, until a tumultuous return to democratic politics finally led to stability and the relative strengthening of public institutions. Only then, near the end of a seventy year period, did a political consensus appear that the State should provide a safety net for children, who had either broken the law or been neglected or abused. 

The Youth Problem

Dictator Ioannis Metaxas ruled Greece from 1936 to 1941, a period known as the 4th of August Regime. Although his legacy of oppression has been somewhat tempered by the fact that he denied fascist Italy’s demand to allow Italian troops to occupy Greek territory, his regime was totalitarian and he was an admirer of fascism. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had reciprocated Metaxas’s admiration in his official visit to Greece in 1936. Although the 4th of August Regime was not in the strictest sense fascist, and Metaxas personally was more influenced by Portugese dictator António Salazar, it did have common traits with fascism and nazism, including the targeting of youth for indoctrination. In 1936, Metaxas created the National Union of Youth, or EON, the Greek version of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio and the Hitlerjugend, which sought to shape minors into future supporters — if not functionaries — of the regime.

As was the case with every other fascist government in Europe, Metaxas’s policy choices often attempted to counter the voices pushing for progressive reforms, inspired by European Social Democracy that had bloomed in the beginning of the century. In her 2013 book “Youth in Peril: Supervision, Reformation and Justice for Minors after the War” ((«Νέοι εν κινδύνω»: Επιτήρηση, αναμόρφωση και δικαιοσύνη ανηλίκων μετά τον πόλεμο», Polis publications, 2013)), Efi Avdela, a Professor of Modern History in the University of Crete, has written about a number of progressive sociologists, legal theorists, feminists and socialists in the interwar era, who advocated among other things in favour of introducing welfare instead of penalisation for minors. According to Avdela’s account, the “criminalisation vs. welfare” debate would go on for decades after the war, although the scales would always tip heavily towards the former.

Two laws by the Metaxas government would cement the idea that children in peril should be treated as criminals (with all the implications that this word entailed at the time) to be reformed, instead of more progressive approaches to welfare. In December 1939, a law introduced Judges and Prosecutors for Minors. A year later, after Greece had entered the war against the Axis, a concise plan on operating reforming institutions was made into law, introducing two new entities subject to the State Prosecutor: the State Prefect for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors. They were both mainly tasked with guiding minors through the justice system, whether that meant carrying out social research on a minor’s background, or providing support for the minor that went through the system. They were mostly staffed by volunteers.

A month after passing the 1940 law, with Greece on the brink of Axis occupation, Metaxas died. But conservative conceptions of juvenile delinquency were crystallised in his laws, and the newly founded entities began working on minors, although their practices were modified to also address the humanitarian crisis caused by the occupation. According to Avdela’s findings, 4.600 minors went through the justice system in 1941 alone, but most of the volunteers’ work was focused on gathering and distributing food and clothing.

From 1947 onwards, some Societies for the Protection of Minors began operating their own institutions, which provided an interim shelter for rehabilitation between the time a minor was released from a reformation centre and the time they went free back to society. Until the fall of the Military Junta, in 1974, when Greek state institutions would gradually become more “liberalised”, the Prefects for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors would deal with all sorts of “moral panics” that focused on youth cultures: “teddy-boyism”, rock ‘n’ roll, sexual liberation and leftism — all filed under “anti-social behaviour”.

War, Children

During the Greek Civil War, the issue of child protection took a darker turn for both competing sides, and the particulars of what actually happened are subject to debate until today. In 1947, the United States of America began providing military, technical and financial assistance to the Greek government and its National Army against the Democratic Army of Greece, formed by the Greek Communist Party and former resistance guerrillas. The scale of U.S. military assistance meant that the government could now launch air attacks against guerrilla strongholds, which included the first documented use of napalm bombs. 

From 1948, when the war scales started tipping in favour of the government, the guerillas began transferring children away from the conflict zones of northern Greece that were being bombed, to countries of the Eastern Bloc. Pro-government voices named this paidomazoma (literally, “child-gathering”), after the much older practice of Devshirme, or “child levy”, in which Ottoman authorities abducted children from among their Balkan Christian subjects, converted them to Islam and trained them for military or civil service. Pro-Democratic Army voices, in turn, countered by calling the practice paidososimo (“child-saving”) or sotiria (“salvation”). Up to this day, left-wing and progressive historians have been debating with conservatives, as well as the far-right, on whether this was a humanitarian operation or recruitment.

A year earlier, Paul I had ascended the throne of the Kingdom of Greece and his wife, Frederica of Hanover, had become Queen. More than any of her predecessors or successors, Frederica was actively involved in politics and was often in the public spotlight.

Τhe Royal Family of Greece had patronised all sorts of high-society philanthropic societies since the 19th century, among which several devoted to children, with a special focus on juvenile delinquency. Frederica combined the Royal Family’s tradition of philanthropy with her own penchant for politics, and began an operation parallel to the guerrillas’ paidomazoma, thereby removing children from conflict zones and placing them in special institutions that she founded, called Paidopoleis (“Child cities”). 

This operation, introduced by Royal Decree in 1947, was named the “Charity Drive ‘Welfare for the Northern Provinces of Greece’ Under the High Authority of Her Majesty, the Queen”, although everyone would refer to it simply as Charity Drive (Eranos in Greek), or after 1955 as Royal Welfare. It was carried out by the National Army. Fifty-two such Paidopoleis were opened all over Greece, all working under a similar model: a strict upbringing, and a daily military-style regimen that would inscribe “proper values” to children.

During her youth in Hanover, Frederica had been a member of the Hitler Youth, and in Greece she was considered sympathetic towards the Nazi regime (as well as the United States). In his book on the children of the civil war ((Λουκιανός Χασιώτης, Τα Παιδιά του Εμφυλίου, Βιβλιοπωλείο της Εστίας, 2013)), historian Loukianos Hasiotis claims that the Charity Drive was at least partially modelled after the Franco regime’s Auxilio Social, which employed similar messages. 

Since the Greek Civil War is now widely accepted as the first episode of the Cold War, it should come as no surprise that the conflict over children was also played out on an international level. The Greek government branded the removal of children from conflict zones by the guerrillas as a “genocide”, a position accepted by the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) in its 1948 report. The idea was also promoted by officials with prominent positions on the international stage, like the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul. The United Nations Committee was tasked with investigating what the guerrillas were doing — but, naturally, not what was happening in the Paidopoleis. 

Thus, until historical research caught up, what is known about the Paidopoleis of the era mostly came from oral narratives of the children that grew up in them. In 2007, when a popular historical programme on Greek television, The Time Machine, aired two episodes about the children of the Civil War, the testimonies of people that had lived in the Paidopoleis during their childhood were divergent even within the same episode. This disagreement in testimonies of the children, now in their old age, persists in the popular press to this day.((See, for expample, Marina Karpozilou, “Growing up in Frederica’s Pedopoleis: The ‘Guerrilla-striken children of the ‘Big Mother’” (in Greek: “Μεγαλώνοντας στις παιδουπόλεις της Φρειδερίκης: Τα 'ανταρτόπληκτα' παιδιά της 'Μεγάλης Μητέρας'”), News247.gr, 9/1/2016)) Some reminisce about their time in the Pedopoleis with nostalgia and others with a more critical view, even sparking literary debates: in his 2009 book, The Blurry Deep ((Γιάννης Ατζακάς, Ο Θολός Βυθός, Άγρα)), author Yiannis Atzakas recalls his time in a Paidopoli as trauma haunting him well into his middle age, while Antonis Venetis, in his 2014 book Letters ((Αντώνης Ν. Βενέτης, Επιστολές, Αρμός)) considers Frederica’s Drive beneficial to children and states his belief that “the ‘blurry deep’ can only be found in fixations, prejudices and obsessions”.

Under Frederica, the PIKPA became the second pillar of childcare, a sort of supplement to the Paidopoleis, housing children that had been orphaned in the war. PIKPA structures followed a similar regiment of strict, military-style upbringing and carried out adoptions, as well as absorbed some of the prominent figures of Frederica’s Charity Drive. Lina Tsaldari, the widow of former Prime Minister Panagis Tsaldaris, was one of the aristocratic “Appointed Ladies” who actively participated in the Charity Drive. Ιn 1950 she became the President of PIKPA.

The third pillar of Frederica’s childcare initiatives was the “Houses of the Child”. These were small daycare centers in the villages of rural Greece (mainly in the north) that after 1950 started taking in children while their parents were working. Without a public education system in place, especially in these remote areas, the Houses of the Child, 140 in total, acted as a nursery or elementary school — with a twist. In them, children would be taught farming and technical skills, while also being indoctrinated with “religious and patriotic values”.

The Eranos might have been Frederica's personal project, but its funding was very much public. Royal Welfare was funded by special import taxes, tariffs on cigarettes (two cigarettes in every pack), percentages of cinema tickets, a part of workers’ wages, and other measures. Researchers have calculated that between 1949 and 1956, the Royal Welfare Foundation took in more than 186 million drachmas — and a lot more after that.((More information on relevant activities by the Greek Royal Family is available (in Greek) in research by the Ios journalistic outfit.))

For the majority of children that were taken to Eastern Bloc countries, it wasn’t until the 1980s and the campaign of the centre-left PASOK government for the right-of-return of political refugees that they would see Greece again.

Leftists and progressives have been claiming for decades that the Charity Drive was the real paidomazoma. In any case, after the Democratic Army’s defeat and the end of the Civil War, only 14 of the paidopoleis continued to operate. Nowadays, four of them are still working as institutions for children without families.

Searching for Roots

Mary Theodoropoulou runs “Roots”, an NGO, from a small apartment in Kesariani. Historically known as the place where in 1944 the Nazis executed 200 communist political prisoners that had like many others been handed over to them by the collaborationist authorities, Kaisariani is a working class neighborhood in Athens, where the Communist Party still gets one of its highest percentages. 

Abandoned as a newborn in the Athens Municipal Nursery baby hatch, Theodoropoulou has often appeared in the media talking about her quest to find her biological parents, after she discovered in her twenties that she had been adopted. Her efforts to date have not been successful. She and seven others, all of whom had also stayed at the Municipal Nursery as children, founded the NGO in the late 1990s, to help people search for their biological parents.

Theodoropoulou has done extensive work on institutions. Not only did Rizes produce the only comprehensive study that looked into the state of Greek institutions for children in 2015, but her work on tracing the roots of adopted children means she has heard a massive amount of personal stories about what has been happening inside these institutions.

After World War II, according to Theodoropoulou, there was a further, major shift towards institutionalisation. “The practice of trofoi, foster mothers that were paid to breast-feed and take care of babies, had been in place since the late nineteenth century,” she said. “A shortage of milk and absolute poverty meant that babies would die otherwise”. State institutions mostly acted as halfway houses that would assign a newborn to a trofos after a short stay. Later, after the War, the trofoi acted as a means to relieve the institutions from the strain caused by the huge numbers of children.

Theodoropoulou told us how, after the war was over, the trofoi framework was expanded. PIKPA, which took care of many of the orphaned or abandoned children, would now hand them over to families, some of whom took in numerous children. “But there was no framework,” she said. “There were no rules on hygiene, no supervision and the remuneration of foster parents was low and infrequent. A trofos would bring back the body of a baby she had taken in and say to the Nursery staff that ‘this is frozen’ — meaning dead. In other cases, foster families abandoned children all over again. There were also cases of abuse, even rape. All these things undermined foster care and institutions gained ground.”

The suffering of children that went through the foster care system unsupervised could be prolonged even after they were out of it. Theodoropoulou told us the story of a boy who tried to report that his foster parents had sexually abused him. He was deemed mentally ill and forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution. In other cases, disabled children, and children with mental illness or developmental problems, would end up in the PIKPA of Leros, founded in 1963 to take in children from the Public Pediatric Neuropsychiatric Hospital “Daou Pentelis”, as part of the overall project of transferring — and isolating — the mentally ill from all over the country to Leros. The PIKPA of Leros formed part of the so-called “Psychopath Colony”, established on the island in 1957, and now known as the infamous kolastirio (“hellhole”). Many of those committed to the kolastirio would not leave until an international deinstitutionalisation initiative in the 1990s, funded by the EU, after a series of stories in the international press and a documentary had revealed the horrible conditions to which patients had been subjected. ((Deinstitutionalization in Leros has been documented in various sources. Psychiatrists who participated in the process like Ιοannis Loukas, Ιοannis Tsiantis, Theodoros Megalooikonomou and Felix Guattari, among others, have all written their own accounts and commentaries on it.))

Since 1939, when it came under the authority of the Ministry of Health, PIKPA has gone through a great number of changes in administrative structure and oversight, but by the 1950s and 1960s, it expanded almost to the size of a full healthcare and welfare system for minors. At its peak, its services included everything from schools for medical personnel and mobile medical units to clinics, hospitals and nursery schools. Since 1925, it had also been operating summer camps from June to the end of September for quality time and healing for children suffering from tuberculosis. The “exoches”, as they were called, stopped during the war, but began operating again after 1945. In 1948, their mandate was expanded to accept impoverished children with problems in development, or any chronic disease, and in 1951 to include working children, and all children monitored by doctors. In 1956, PIKPA put together its first structure for disabled children in Voula. Gradually, it would end up running most of the institutions for disabled children in Greece. 

Institutionalisation in the Paidopoleis, the orphanages and the nurseries gave rise to a different problem that haunts families until today: illegal adoptions. In her memoirs, Frederica had claimed that communist women had been abandoning their children and even that she witnessed a woman literally throwing her baby away, which was supposedly picked up by an army officer and handed over to her. After the military junta of 1967-1974 fell, communist guerrillas that had been exiled in camps in the islands reported that their children were abducted from there. In fact, the children were taken to the Paidopoleis or the PIKPA, and were then sold to foster parents in the United States, often assisted by officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, as well as Greek-American Organisations ((The Greek-American Organization AHEPA was found to have been involved in a trafficking ring for children - see, for example: The adopted Greek children of the Cold War, Margarita Pournara | Kathimerini)). Although the Greek press had published stories on the issue since the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1996 when U.S. media would start digging into the story and get to the bottom of it, that the full extent of what had happened would be revealed.

Discovering the Victim

After King Constantine’s failed counter-coup attempt against the Military Junta, in December 1967, the Royal Family was forced to flee the country. So, in a strange twist of fate, it was the dictators who brought welfare, including child protection, under the purview of the State. With a Law Decree, in 1970, all the Royal Foundations and Charities — along with their funding provisions — were absorbed into the National Welfare Organisation. Their role did not change significantly for the next decade, although Greece’s evolution into a more advanced economy, after the long and tumultuous process of post-war reconstruction, meant that the numbers of children in peril would gradually start to decrease.

It wasn’t until 1981, when centre-left PASOK came to power, that the welfare system would advance into the next phase. One of PASOK’s most important and enduring achievements was the creation of the National Healthcare System, or ESY, in 1983, which put in place a concise framework for healthcare that also included aspects of welfare. The Ministry overseeing it was now renamed the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The first eight years of PASOK in power, from 1981 to 1989, included many decisive progressive reforms in worker’s rights, civil rights and education, but welfare was still mostly understood as benefits, and were lagging behind the drastic changes overtaking Greek society. Not only did the National Welfare Organisation go through no significant change in the 1970s and 1980s, but especially with regard to child protection, the idea of preventing victimisation and abuse, although gaining traction in Europe, was not present in any sector of the Greek state.

Xeni Dimitriou, the former Chief Prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court, has served three tenures as a State Prosecutor for Minors over three different decades. She has gone through thousands of pages of legal theory on children, attended hundreds of conferences and exchanged opinions with dozens of other prosecutors all over the world. When we met her, shortly after her recent retirement, she spoke to us about her firsthand experience of what Greece’s long refusal to acknowledge the victimisation of children had led to. In her early days as Prosecutor for Minors in the 1980s — ”an unprivileged position, almost a punishment back then” — she witnessed time and again policemen marching into her office with arrested children that had been severely beaten. One boy came in with massively swollen ears. He told her that they had put clothespins in his ears to interrogate him and had hanged him upside down from the precinct’s balcony to scare him into confessing. In other cases, following the letter of the law, she was forced to put six and seven-year-old kids on trial, or send underage lawbreakers away in institutions that were practically prisons.

Dimitriou referred to Kalliopi Spinelli, a well-known criminologist as her “teacher, the teacher of all of us”. Spinelli is credited, among many things, with proposing the replacement of the term “juvenile criminals” with “juvenile offenders”, and with advocating for a pedagogical instead of a penal approach to justice for the underage. A few other prominent legal theorists and professionals gradually began to advocate for a different relation between the children and the State.

Modern international ideas on children’s rights speak only of “victims,” Dimitriou insisted. “We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking,” she said. “Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who took that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world. The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold aspect. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold aspect. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim. Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.”

In a conference speech Dimitriou gave in 1991, in-between her tenures as Prosecutor for Minors, she said that a bill for “Units of Care for Minors” had been drafted since 1984. The purpose of the plan was to set up a structure so that “juvenile offenders until 12 years of age would not be involved in any way with suppression mechanisms such as the police, the Prosecutor and the Court for Minors, but would be taken care by welfare services instead”. She then went on to describe best practices found in existing institutions — stopping at one point to wonder whether “it’s time to legislate that juvenile delinquents could be placed into foster families. The society responds positively. Why delay any more?”

Dimitriou’s 1991 speech echoed the ideas that would start to shape new concepts of child welfare. In 1985 and 1990, the UN had published guidelines on handing justice to juvenile delinquents and the prevention of delinquency in minors respectively. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was also signed at the time.

Things were changing, but in the case of Greece, the pace was and remains slow. The Greek governments of the 1990s made a few attempts to modernise the welfare system, or rather to establish one, since throughout their evolution the various services had operated independently. In 1992, a law practically dissolved the National Welfare Organisation and the PIKPA, in an attempt to create a unified system that was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. 

Another law, in the same year, introduced legal procedures for foster care and was amended in 1996, by adding a stricter framework for the role of social investigations in adoption and foster parenting procedures. That law also took an important step by changing Metaxas’s laws to introduce social services in the courts and the State Prosecutor offices, although their mandate remained to handle the delinquency of minors. 

Probably the most important step at the time was taken in 1998 by another PASOK government, this time under Prime Minister Kostas Simitis, when the creation of a National System of Social Care was attempted. In the following years, the former PIKPA units were successively centralised, then decentralised again. Generally under the oversight of regional administration, these units followed divergent courses. One post-PIKPA incarnation, the Lechaina unit for disabled children, achieved world-wide notoriety for its horrific conditions.

The new system gave explicit roles to regional governments, but also cleared up the terms under which private NGO’s could carry out welfare programmes. Thus, the 1990s was also the decade when NGOs would increasingly start to step in and cover for the shortcomings in child protection. The Greek branch of SOS Children’s Villages had been active since 1975, but now non-government care for children would diversify. The Smile of the Child was created in 1995 and The Ark of the World would follow in 1998. All three of these organisations would grow in the years that followed and actively supplement state welfare. 

The decade ended with a presidential decree in 1999 that attempted to contain illegal adoptions by also giving all oversight responsibilities to regional welfare services — Regional institutions and Directorates of Social Care. With an amendment in 2003, even more welfare responsibilities would be directed to the Regional Health Services that had been created a year earlier. According to the explanatory report that came with the draft of the bill, this would allow for “better coordination, monitoring and evaluation” of social welfare services. The UN Committee overseeing the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child noted this attempt, but still found it fell short of a coherent Child Protection System. Some of the problems highlighted by the Committee included the lack of a clear mandate between authorities and a central body that would coordinate all services, problems that are still partially present to this day.

Xeni Dimitriou’s 1991 speech ended by saying that “maybe it is time for juvenile law to grow up”. It marked the beginning of a period of intense pressure by child protection professionals for a proper children’s welfare system to be designed and implemented. But in the 1990s, a welfare system that would address problems that could not be solved with benefits was still a challenge. Also, the word deinstitutionalization had just been popularised for the first time after the attempts to change conditions in Leros, but that programme, which continued for the best part of the decade, would suffer setbacks. Voices of experts speaking about the need to address different vulnerabilities or how institutionalised child welfare could actually be harmful, were only just beginning to be heard.

As it happens, the regressive character of children’s welfare was officially, albeit mostly symbolically, challenged in 2010, by an amendment to a law of the Metaxas regime, mandating the Societies for the Protection of Minors to not only deal with “delinquency”, but also the “victimisation” of minors.

However, just as the need to shift the focus of the child protection system was becoming obvious to policy-makers, Greece found itself in the throes of a terrible financial crisis. Successive governments have since then introduced a variety of “plans” for children’s welfare, which have one thing in common: almost none of their provisions have been implemented.

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How did the decision for the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance" to occupy the Lechaina Unit in November 2015 come about?

Zero Tolerance was formed in 2010 with a view to building a disability activist movement, a movement for the emancipation of disabled subjects, alongside the Movement of Disabled Artists. We began implementing actions, publishing articles, occupying premises, staging all kinds of interventions. And then came the time to emancipate ourselves so that we could deal with the grave issue of institutionalised life and deinstitutionalisation. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, unable to advocate for themselves, having no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present. So, we, their fellow disabled, began to advocate for their rights.

A two-day festival was held at the self-managed theatre “Embros” shortly before the occupation, a solidarity festival for the children and adults of Lechaina as well as all the other institutions. There were discussions, documentary screenings, plays. The groundwork for the occupation was laid there.

What was the aim?

To highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living.

What was the plan?

To occupy the premises in question and invite civil society to join us in becoming many. It did not happen. The response was not there. The cameras were there, in that there was widespread media coverage at the time.  All the TV channels, both public broadcaster ERT and private broadcasters, aired reports, each in their own manner. A lot of the coverage took on an anti-government bias. We were not focusing on that aspect at all, at the time. Besides, the SYRIZA-ANEL government had only been in power for two months. Our focus was to highlight what was a chronic situation. Lechaina had not been happening for two months, it had a history of 37 years.((For an in-depth account of the Lechaina Unit, read our case study: Hell as an Institution))

We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad. In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. In other words, we were not doing anything new, something that had never been done before. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, “Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.” We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside.  

Were you afraid?

No, no, no. Not at all. We were in the right, I had nothing to fear. None of us was afraid. We had already occupied the Social Insurance Institute (IKA) in 2011. When Syntagma Square was packed with half a million people, we went and peacefully occupied the IKA headquarters for four days. We stayed in Lechaina for four days, too; apparently that is how long our bodies can withstand being exposed to these conditions…

We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime, a total of nine people, most of us disabled, in four cars. We explained who we were. The Chairman of the Board of the facility said we needed a permit to enter – the police conveyed the management’s request to us. We were prepared, ID cards in our pockets. We told the policeman that the violations taking place here were far greater than any violation our presence might give rise to, that we had no intention of hindering the staff in their work but had no intention of leaving either. We went inside knowing what awaited there, but the reality is always much harsher than anything you could have imagined.

Did you have any run-ins with the authorities after the occupation?

We are the ones who went to the Public Prosecutor. Four of us left the unit and went to the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada and filed a complaint. To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify.((The Prosecutor's office archived the complaint in 2016. See our case study on the Lechaina Unit: Hell as an Institution))

The complaint was filed officially, not anonymously. There are specific liabilities at stake: who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed the medication? Specific criminal liabilities are pending, and, to date, they have not been investigated. Unless we are to accept that the disabled persons at the unit are unworthy of living, in which case no criminal liability arises.

The fact that no one is held accountable for this conduct, the fact that nobody seems to wonder about who is to blame for these people’s torture–it is just not possible that no one is to blame—is indicative of the treatment  of disabled subjects in institutions. Is the psychiatrist responsible? Did she prescribe by fax? Was she contacted at two in the morning and told “so-and-so is hitting themselves,” and did she reply, “I’ll fax you a prescription”? Did she do that? If so, is it allowed? Is it a punishable offence? Are prolonged physical restraint and/or prolonged chemical suppression scientifically accepted practices? Are they torture? The UN says they are. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed.

We met the psychiatrist, too, she came to the premises while we were inside. We wanted to speak to her. She did not.

Ideologically, we stand against doctors. Obviously, we do not refuse the intervention of medical science. At the same time, however, we are aware of the part that the medical field has played in us being disabled. By “disabled” in this instance I mean “oppressed”, I do not refer to the impairment. The initial impairment is a separate matter. But if you study the file of a person who has spent twenty years in an institution, his resulting state bears no relation to the initial impairment. Because the impairment of institutionalisation has been added on top.

Several other attempts had been made prior to your intervention and official complaint…

Are you asking why we left it for so long?

No…

I do wish to answer that, nonetheless. We have critically self-reflected on this, on why we left it for so long. Nine of us went there and did something. Why did we leave it so late, why did we not act sooner? We would have made a difference to more people. We looked away, we did not want to face it, we could not face it.

One in two people will project. One of our fellow disabled members, who has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation in the past. His mother had been told the all-too-frequent “Don’t make it harder on yourself. Send him to an institution so you can focus on raising your daughter”. It was hard. I, with my acquired disability, never felt that. I did not believe at twenty-one that my parents would lock me up in an institution. I was already a director; I was working in television. But for other members of the group, who were born disabled, that was one of the turns their life could have taken. We became wiser…

That is what our group is all about, the emancipation of the disabled. The first to become emancipated are the members themselves through this process. We did not want to face this harsh aspect of reality, this prospect that could have been ours. On the other hand, once we stepped outside this individualised perception of disability, once the personal became social, that is when we began to think about what we could do. Could our small band go inside and do something impactful? Not just take a couple of photos and then leave. Would we be taken seriously? Would there be news coverage? Would the ministry take note? Because frustration also plays a part. When you have experienced frustration so many times, over and over, you think it over and wonder, “Should I get involved or will it lead to yet more frustration?” In the end, we burst in and ultimately, some things were put in motion.

Therefore, in terms of a section of society staging an intervention, it was an action worth taking. At the same time, the self-criticism for the delay still stands. We had to fight against our own taboos. That is no small thing. It was a more painful process for our members who had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation at some point than for us. It was harder for them to cope with it. We used to meet, days later, not out of a need to discuss politics or organisational matters, but to talk. To cry, to drink, to cry again… mainly to be there for those who had found it most painful. If you talk to the fellow disabled member I mentioned, he will tell you this: “No matter where I find myself, a cage stands beside me. I carry it with me.” It was an experience that marked people, and I don’t just mean the members of Zero Tolerance. But we are not enough. For deinstitutionalisation to become a demand, for this monstrosity to stop being socially acceptable and normalised, we need to change the way society thinks of disability. We are not interested in everyone’s personal sensibilities. We are interested in mobilising civil society.

What we say applies to all institutions. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism, in living bereft of human dignity in a difficult part of the country, where people perceive disability in the manner stated by Minister of Agricultural Development Makis Voridis,  namely that there are disabled people who have the capacity for understanding and disabled people who do not.((Minister Voridis, during a TV panel discussion, had quipped that children at sixteen "are not disabled", meaning that at that age they have a capacity of adult communication. Video is available (in Greek) here.)) And as a society, we still hold on to the belief that the people in Lechaina do not have the capacity for understanding.

Lechaina must be shut down, the people there must leave. Four years to the day, however, we are still discussing what must be done.

Why do you think that is the case?

It is rotten from the start. Because when a child is born, the first thing the parents, where available, will hear is the medical opinion. It is rotten from the moment the obstetrician enters the room and tells the new mother, “Your child was born faulty.” He will not tell her, “Look, there are difficulties ahead, but you can do this and that.” He will only tell her about the difficulties. He will not offer comfort but launch into the medical script of “he will not be able to think, to see, to hear” and so on. That this child will be bad for her other children, that this child will ruin her relationship with her husband, so “Do not breastfeed, I will interrupt your milk-flow and we will send it to an institution. Your responsibility ends there, you do not need to concern yourself with the course of this child’s life.” That is the classic scenario.

In this instance, we are not talking about broken families, about offenders who are imprisoned, and whose children end up in institutions. We should note here that only fourteen to fifteen per cent of the institutionalised have absolutely no point of reference, in other words, a parent who could potentially take on some responsibilities. Therefore, we are talking about abandonment; about how a couple imagines the stork bringing a blond, green-eyed “normal baby” and then receives a “faulty baby” and decides to bin it.  In those cases, it is the doctor’s intervention that causes the initial damage. Add the way society espouses those same views and the parents freak out. They suffer too, of course, but that does not change the end result.

We saw this in the case of Maria in Lechaina, when we spoke to her mother. The moment her daughter was born, the doctors began to list everything that could happen, medically speaking. But a person is not a medical diagnosis. They are a person. And the problem arises when you start listing all the medical difficulties that lie ahead instead of how they could be dealt with in an organised society.

Does that organised society exist?

Well, people who, despite all these difficulties, make a choice that goes against the medicalised belief that a person who thinks differently ought to be normalised certainly do exist. People who, for example, do not try to normalise autistic children, who do not have a neurotypical brain but an autistic one, and make them be like us. Because that is the beginning of Nazism.

According to Lev Vygotsky, there is a belief that the disabled are a priori unhappy.((Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist. More info available in Wikipedia.)) It is a racist belief, this belief that our lives are lives of suffering, that sometimes they are lives not worth living.

Adriana, who recently passed away, was nineteen years old. I think Adriana’s original diagnosis was glaucoma, meaning she was blind. When we found Adriana, she did not speak, she did not walk, because she lived in a cage. She was restrained when she was around seven years old, because they had no way of confining her and because they could not “nurse” her. So, they put her in a cage because she was active, and no personnel was available to watch over her. The most common question in there is “What are you doing standing up?”. It’s like a regular barracks. Why must they be lying down all day long? Why must they be confined to their bed? Why can they not be outside on the swings?

The standard reply is that the unit is understaffed. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Why are they understaffed? Why are all the residents in diapers? Why do none of them know how to be self-reliant, to use the toilet on their own, to feed themselves? Because they have lost their skills due to institutionalisation and the complete deprivation of every social right. Therefore, the reason the personnel does not suffice is that all these people have been rendered incapacitated.

Is there some kind of logic in what the staff are claiming? There are two people per floor in each shift.

That’s true. But the conclusion depends on your starting point. Do you begin by examining why this happens, or are you only interested in examining the outcome you are dealing with? Two people per floor in each shift are obviously not enough. But why does that happen? How can it be possible for a person with spastic quadriplegia not to be autonomous? Not to be able to eat, drink, use the toilet on their own? How can the rest of us do all those things? They were never allowed to develop.

Or their abilities were “anaesthetised”. A child enters the institution mobile and within a week stops using the toilet. Then the child gets given a bedpan…

A bedpan, really? They soil themselves and then are cleaned with a wipe. They only rarely shower. If a minister is planning to visit, they’ll be given a bath, so they don’t stink. If anyone makes the mistake of soiling themselves after the diaper change, they must wait for the next round. There is no personalised care for this. That means someone can spend hours in a soiled diaper. That is why you end up with that pervading smell in institutions that they can’t wash away.

Have you seen their bodies? Have you seen how many functional deformities have resulted from the repeated adoption of certain postures? Would you like to hear something strange, which also demonstrates the oppression, the torment they have been subjected to? The persons freed by Nikolaidis’ team, unfettered, still slept at night in the same sleeping position they had been restrained in for years. Do you understand what that means? The most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured. That is why, in the early days, almost no one accepted the intervention. That is why it was such an enormous, difficult task for that team.  

Another scene I will never forget is the two young girls, Ellie and Maria, who were eleven years old at the time. When the intervention team arrived at Lechaina, these two girls, being the youngest, were removed to the Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children (PIKPA) in Voula. We used to go and visit them there. One day, they came to our home for a few hours, accompanied by PIKPA volunteers. I remember Ellie in particular, looking for a place to hide. Under the table… always a sheltered spot, away from people and animals. By the end of the day, they were crying because they did not want to leave. It was our understanding that they had never been in a house before. She lay down on our bed, she wanted us to tuck her in so she could sleep there. She saw a dog for the first time, she had never seen one before. She stared at the dog, watched it as if wondering what that strange creature was. We ate together, they had dessert, we danced… same as one would with any other child.

Except that these children had been deprived of love and care. Real love, not the care that an institution’s staff can give. I do not dispute that some of the staff may form emotional attachments with the disabled there, but the way of life in an institution is the very opposite of nurturing care. You spend your whole life being approached by someone in a laboratory coat. Why? They can’t even grasp the fundamental concept of turning up in your own clothes. The gloves, too. Wearing surgical gloves to feed the residents. Why? What are you going to catch? The whole set up of institutions is medico-centric.

You are not only an activist; you are a director too. You are currently working on a documentary about Lechaina…

The two roles are interconnected in any case.

So you enter the occupied building with a camera…

I was not the one holding it, but yes. Two cameras. We went to record what was happening. That’s how it started.

What was the initial purpose of filming? Did you take the cameras as protection?

On the one hand, it was to protect ourselves against anything that might happen, on the other hand, it was to record that moment. Film it and see what was happening there. What we encountered was beyond our worst nightmares.

Did you also take cameras to the occupation of the IKA headquarters you had previously staged?

Yes, small cameras then too, to record everything. As well as for protection, we use the cameras to film material that we can then upload on Zero Tolerance’s social media.  

After the press conference we held at the Lechaina Child Care Centre (KEPEP) on the third day and our departure on the fourth day, the first thing I did was to edit some early material, which is still available online, to accompany the press conference in Athens, to show the journalists and launch the discussion.

When did you decide that you wanted to turn this into a documentary?

I decided during the occupation. I realised that this was an issue I needed to follow up. So, I returned at various intervals, no longer as an “occupier” but first and foremost as a disabled person. And I kept filming. I stayed inside the unit for three, sometimes four days at a time, left, returned, again and again. These past four years, I have made 34 trips to Lechaina if my memory does not fail me. I keep a diary…

This allowed us…

You use the first-person plural?

Not out of politeness, but because I consider this to be a group project, not my work exclusively.

Anyway, this allowed us to observe how things evolved inside Lechaina because one year later, Nikolaidis’ team arrived to implement the interim intervention. The emergency relief intervention for the residents was introduced, and we began to see how these people changed thanks to it.

How their behaviour changed, how the residents we first met, who were uncommunicative, tied up, inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, eyes unfocused, began to blossom in the year and a half that followed the start of the intervention. We watched them develop their skills, we heard them speak, utter words, we heard others express specific requests, “I want a bedside table”, “I want my own clothes”, “I want a TV set”, “I want a remote control”. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving “the prescribed treatment for their own good”.

We saw them step outside. Leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, and that momentous occasion when they saw the front door, stepped outdoors. We witnessed their fears and inhibitions. They did not want to break their routine. For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps; “bed restraint” or “mechanical restraint” as they call it. Some did indeed refuse to cooperate. But that is perfectly normal. Fear was the cause.

But we also saw people suddenly use a spoon and feed themselves, it was incredible! Because up until then they had been bottle-fed, lying down, gulping down liquidised meals in seconds. They did not know how to use their mouths to eat. That is why the teeth of nearly all the residents are in a terrible state. This change took place inside the institution – we did not go to a new space where things were different. It was inside those premises, that place of torture, that the situation changed.

What I had not anticipated in the making of this documentary was filming the dead. People we had met. Attempts were made to remove them from the institution, but they subsequently passed away. I’m not talking about elderly people, they were young.

Take Panagiotis, for example, the oldest resident at fifty years old. It is a miracle he has managed to survive like this, staring at the ceiling. The people who died were much younger: Christos and Ellie and Adriana and Maria.  Ellie was fifteen. Adriana had just turned nineteen. She was the blind girl.

We imagine you have spoken to the staff during your visits. You must have interviewed some of them…

They did not want to be interviewed. Now that they have found out I’m not filming for the sake of it, that I am creating something specific, they might change their mind. I never film with any formality; I do not shout “action!” I prefer things to be spontaneous, a recording of reality without altering the environment so that the actual circumstances remain unchanged. This means that the set up must be minimal. Small cameras to avoid creating a sense of occasion, no boom mics, no lights, no large crew wearing headphones.

So, I met them as individuals first and foremost, learned about their lives, their stories, how they ended up working at the unit since most of them had no previous background, no connection to this field. That did not surprise us, they are locals who found work. Some of them have been working there since the very first day, so we heard about how they were thrown in at the deep end when the institution opened, without any organisational setup. They brought the residents there without any idea of how to deal with them. The staff told us how they ended up organising themselves and creating these conditions, meaning the beds that they enclosed in bars, turning them into cages.

Which they refer to as cots or playpens among themselves.

 Yes. Of course, the term was coined by the former Minister of Health, Katerina Papakosta. “Playpens” then, and that “strapping them down is for their own good” so that “they cannot harm themselves”. Once again, was it the chicken or the egg? When you are enclosed in a confined space for a prolonged period, without any stimulation, no sensory stimulation, no psycho-emotional stimulation, then you begin to hit yourself, to drink your own urine, to eat your own faeces and all the other things you hear about. But this applies to every human being subjected to these conditions, you do not need to have an impairment to reach that point. The institutionalisation makes you impaired. Of course, all behaviours are attributed to their disabilities, it is the easiest narrative to adopt. They tell you, “Can’t you see what they are like?”.

We imagine you have also wondered how these people accept to subject other human beings to this abuse. Do you have an answer to that?

I know that they struggled at first, at least according to their narratives.

Morally?

Morally, I would say yes, they morally struggled with strapping people down. The system is set up in such a way as to render them responsible for some people. But given that this conversation is constantly rehashed, the issue is not whether we can hire more staff so that the torture can go on, so that there is “better monitoring” and residents can continue to be drugged up to the eyeballs. The issue is that no matter how much personnel you hire, you are still running an institution. And the concept of an institution is not that far removed from the concept of a barracks or a prison. Wake up at set times, eat at set times, sleep at set times.

Were these people convinced by scientists that this is the appropriate approach?

Scientists prescribed both “mechanical restraint” and the drug dosages. With absolutely no supervision. In fact, in some cases, they added a new medication to the mix without discontinuing the previous medication. Without anyone ever checking drug interactions or potential side effects. We saw the end result. Zombies. That’s it.

For years the personnel refused to accept the new state of affairs. They did not want to accept that there is an alternative way to provide care. 

Because it meant stepping outside their comfort zones?

I think they did not want to accept that they might be doing something wrong. The prevailing attitude was “Are you here to tell me that what I have been doing for twenty-five, thirty years is not right? How dare you?”

But you are not just telling them this is wrong, you are saying this is inhuman, this is torture.

 “We love these children very much, but there is no other way to manage them. They are monsters. They are unpredictable. If we don’t restrain them, they’ll be climbing up the walls. They could eat the plaster. They could eat their own faeces. They could swallow a large object, choke and die.” These are all actual words we have heard. That is why our position is that none of these people should continue to work in this environment. I don’t mean that they should lose their jobs. I mean that they should go and work in a different environment, certainly not in an institution.

By talking to them, showing them examples from abroad, we managed to persuade a few of them, too few. We were thinking of organising screenings of foreign documentaries on deinstitutionalisation, where the residents themselves discuss life before and after the closure of their institution once they had lived in society and developed their capabilities. The response was, “You are in the Balkans now, this is all too European. Who will fund all this? They’ll run it for half a year and then back to the same old.”

The truth is that we went there having made the conscious decision not to go down that frequent route. Blaming personnel is the easiest thing in the world. That is not to say there is no personal accountability, but the main responsibility lies with the so-called, in our view non-existent, welfare state. It lies with the politicians, who have kept us trapped in a time warp all these years.

And when the issue was all over the news, they would come out with statements. Like former Health Minister Andreas Loverdos in 2011, who stated that he would grant access to any journalist who wished to visit an institution and report on the conditions. And former Deputy Minister of Health Katerina Papakosta, who visited Lechaina following the BBC report and informed us that the situation was not what had been presented, that the “cots” were used for the children’s own protection and that they were standard practice. Then, former Minister Effie Achtsioglou and Deputy Minister Theano Fotiou announced a deinstitutionalisation scheme, and for the first time in Greece, the word “deinstitutionalisation” was pronounced by someone in power.  

What was the reaction at the Lechaina unit?

Their first reaction when deinstitutionalisation was announced and I visited Lechaina was, “It’s going to be just like ERT. They are going to shut it down and fire us all.” They needed to hear reassurances from the ministry that they would not lose their jobs. Very few said, “OK, I can understand why this needs to happen, this situation cannot continue. What will our part be going forward? How will this thing work? What’s the next step?” I told them, “It would be far better to work in a real home in the city of Lechaina or a place nearby and work in more humane conditions.”

Moreover, the professional foster care scheme had been announced, which would enable some of the workers to foster a resident in their home. Some of them had, indeed, bonded with certain residents, bonded with the “children”, everyone is called a “child” there, even when they are fifty years old, so they could opt for professional fostering and work from home.

The SYRIZA-ANEL former government announced professional foster care but did not take the necessary actions to implement it. How did your interlocutors react to the idea, nonetheless?

I discussed this with a worker who calls one of the residents her “daughter”. I told her, “Why don’t you take your daughter home under the professional foster care scheme then?” She fell silent. She just gaped at me. Being in your workplace and having formed a bond with someone there is very different to transferring that relationship into your own home. I imagine that would require discussions with her husband, her children, her social circle. Even without the implementation of professional foster care, the option to take a resident home for the weekend was still there. All it required was the permission of the Board of Directors. No one ever did that.

Or for the holidays, Christmas…

Every Christmas they host an event for “normal” children who are allowed into the lobby, they do not go further inside, and sing Christmas carols.

There are children who have been inside the unit and decorated the cages...

Yes, from the American Community Schools of Athens (ACS), to brighten up the torture of the people kept inside the cages. Of course, the residents were not physically inside the cages while the students painted them.

Small mercies…

That was one of the most vivid contrasts that struck me as I entered the centre. The dystopian landscape. The stench of excrement, fettered residents moaning and groaning and “I love you” painted on the walls, signed by ACS. I really would like to know what on earth the educator in charge had been thinking.

Returning to the subject of the personnel, I have seen the extent to which they have accepted the work they are asked to carry out and the resulting way of life for the residents. It never ceases to astound me, in all the institutions I have visited, be it Crete, the PIKPA in Voula, Thessaloniki, Komotini, Rhodes… This situation is normalised. It might shock those of us witnessing it for the first time, but that is the reality as far as they are concerned. I was also astounded by the fact that few visiting relatives seemed to be astonished by what they saw. They found it normal too.

We have also witnessed an admission being deterred. A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. The reasoning behind the decision was to save her marriage and spare her other children. She was evidently being pressured by her husband to abandon the disabled child, so they could focus on their “normal” children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears.

Did she take the child with her?

Yes.

So at least one child was spared…

Maybe she split up with her husband. Who knows what kind of pressure she was under? The guilt she carried with her for giving birth to a disabled child. The belief that she was being punished by God for some previous sin… In any case, yes, we were glad that the admission was averted.  But they did admit a new resident recently. Various organisations were mobilised, we opposed the decision publicly, the ministry intervened, and the child was brought to Athens because the public prosecutor would not rescind the order. That is also a big issue. I do not know if a decision to prohibit new admissions at Lechaina has been officially made.

There is a Board of Directors decision to suspend admissions.

Only that. Theano Fotiou, Effie Achtsioglou or the General Secretary for Welfare, I do not think they ever issued a decision to ban new admissions when they decided Lechaina would eventually close. Of course, things are no better elsewhere in Greece. Lechaina differed in the use of those “cots”. But I have seen a resident fettered with ropes in another institution, I have seen those tall “cots” with high bars, allegedly to stop people from falling if they stand up on their beds. All institutions operate along the same lines. Even the smell is the same. They all smell the same.

What did you have in mind when you began working on this documentary?

Look, when you start a documentary, you are not in charge, the reality guides you. Going into Lechaina, I decided to do what the documentary title says: From Asylum to Society. In other words, we decided to take what society rejects by relegating it to an isolated building somewhere far away, record it and bring it before its eyes. I wanted to experience it, to go on this journey that I think is gradually coming to its end. I cannot sit and wait to see how the new government will act.  See if it wants to raze everything that happened before to the ground and do something entirely different. Many rumours are going around, some bordering on science fiction, but there are some others which may find us in agreement. I wanted to record this unbearable situation, which is one hundred per cent legalised and imposed by the state itself. A situation that is connected to the perceptions we all have, including the country’s politicians, about the lives of the disabled who find themselves outside the family circle for some reason, and that is the only protection we afford them.

Unfortunately, a documentary cannot communicate the smells, nor what being there does to someone like you or me. But the conditions… the conditions inside an institution. No matter how good you try to make them, an institution remains a place of torture. Torture that has been normalised using the physical impairments of the those confined there as a pretext.

You must have been hoping for something at the beginning of the documentary, however.

Yes, I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. I did…

Do you feel frustrated?

We are used to frustration… Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that Effie Achtsioglou’s announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the birth family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That they would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.

During the four days of the occupation there was tension, our interactions were formal, information would reach us, Theano Fotiou made a statement, we made a statement. In the end, we decided the pressure group must move from inside Lechaina to headquarters, we announced that we expected to be called to the Ministry to discuss everything we had recorded. At the same time, we sent all the material we had gathered abroad to spark a reaction in Europe, the bodies charged with welfare. We sent it to the UN, and they issued a recommendation that we read out during the press conference we held at Lechaina on the afternoon of the third day, inviting local press. The mayor came, along with various others.

 We broke down on the day of our departure. We broke down because we were saying goodbye to our fellow disabled, and we could not grasp that we were free to leave that place, but they would stay behind. We broke down. We wept. We sobbed. We said goodbye and gathered around a bench outside, by the olive trees and burst into tears. An olive tree is planted every time someone dies. All these people, they enter the institution as children and leave when they are adults… by dying. “Deinstitutionalisation” via movement to the great beyond, if you are a believer. We wept because we knew that we were going home and that from that day forth, we would have to find a way to change the reality we had experienced, no matter what.

I also feel great sadness. Because, for us, the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. They have been ready to leave the institution for a year now. Nikolaidis rightly said from the start that you cannot just take people out of a cage and simply transfer them elsewhere, there needs to be a training and transition process. That process has taken place.

So, I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen. But, sadly, society is not mobilising.  And that is the heart of the matter. The issue of deinstitutionalisation is vast, it concerns a great number of people. In 2014, the Roots Research Centre in Greece estimated that approximately 900 disabled persons are held in institutions. They enter as children and depart as olives. That is the Greek version of deinstitutionalisation. It is a massive issue. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.

The Covid-19 lockdown was challenging for everyone. What did it mean, however, for children faced with abuse or neglect? In Greece, where the child protection system is disjointed, understaffed and disorganised, how did the lockdown affect children who were forced to not have contact with anyone else apart from their abusers? How did State services respond during such a trying period? After the lockdown ended, were any measures put in place to assess and alleviate the consequences for vulnerable children? What is the plan, in case an increase in Covid-19 cases forces a new lockdown?

We sought answers to these questions through five interviews with child protection experts that were streamed live on The Manifold Facebook Page.

Interview #1: Theoni Koufonikolakou

Theoni Koufonikolakou is Deputy Ombudswoman for Children's Rights.

Interview 2: Antonis Rellas

Antonis Rellas is a film and stage director and a disabled activist with "Zero Tolerance". (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #3: Giorgos Nikolaidis

Giorgos Nikolaidis is a psychiatrist, director of the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate of the Institute of Child Health, and former chairperson and current member of the Lanzarote Committee. (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #4: Triantafyllia Athanasiou

Triantafyllia Athanasiou is a social worker, chairperson of the Association of Social Workers of Greece.

Interview #5: Stefanos Alevizos

Stefanos Alevizos is a psychologist with The Smile of the Child NGO.

The Unit stands at the exit from the town of Lechaina in the direction of the village of Myrsini, facing the substation pylons of the Greek public power corporation. The building, which belongs to the episcopal see of Elis, is a four-storied, cross-shaped construction crowned by a dome. Its design could hardly be described as suitable for its intended use.

Perhaps that was the reason it was deemed necessary to restrain the seven-year-old blind girl who had been admitted to the institution at the age of three. Fully mobile yet blind, brimming with the energy of childhood, she would have needed someone to watch over her constantly. Lechaina has always been understaffed. “For her own good”, then, someone decided that she should be locked up in a cage. By the time she was sixteen, she could not even articulate her own name.

The Lechaina Unit was founded in 1987 as a "Child Care Centre", or KEPEP, and began operating two years later, with the mandate of caring for disabled children between the ages of six and eighteen. In its initial conception, it was intended for the children of the Region of Elis and the wider Peloponnese. Progressively, disabled children from all over Greece were brought in, either following a request by their parents or a State Prosecutor's order. Formerly an independent institution, since 2013 it is one of the annexes of the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, which is supervised by the Welfare General Secretariat of the Ministry of Labour. As a rule, the care workers at the Unit are unskilled and their numbers insufficient: five healthcare workers, seven assistants and five auxiliary contract staff for 44 residents, at present. The carpenter who fashioned the cages is also considered institution personnel.

Frozen in Time

In the Lechaina Unit, disabled children were strapped to their beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. These practices were hardly a secret.

In 2008, a group of European volunteers who spent some time at the Lechaina Centre, shocked by the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children, drafted a report which they distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations.

In September 2009, a delegation from the Children’s Ombudsman's office, comprised of the Ombudsman himself, Giorgos Moschos, the Ombudswoman for Health and Social Protection, two scientific experts and May Papoulia, a psychologist and wife of the then President of the Republic, visited the institution for the first time. In March 2011, the Ombudsman issued a damning report on the Unit’s inhuman conditions.

Shortly before the publication of the delegation’s findings, in February 2011, the cameras of ERT, the Greek public broadcaster, entered the institution. The news story aired in the main evening news and Andreas Loverdos, the Minister of Health at the time, intervened on air.

After lauding the work of the manager of Lechaina, the minister announced his intention to allow journalists inside all of the country’s institutions to report on the living conditions. When the newscaster observed that journalists should shed light on issues, but it was the Minister's job to solve them, Loverdos promised that five more healthcare staff and an additional three workers would be hired by the end of the year, attributing the torture brought to light by the news report to understaffing. He also promised that new premises would be secured, so that minors could be separated from adults.

Three years later, pictures from Lechaina spread across the world, when the BBC published an article headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. A few days later, Katerina Papakosta, who by then had become Deputy Minister for Health in a new government formed by New Democracy, visited the institution in a move that seemed rather forced, after the outcry that followed the article’s publication.

In her statements to the media, she claimed that the Unit did not fall within her mandate but that of the Ministry of Welfare and stated: “I came here on my own initiative to examine (the situation), because I have been informed by scientific experts that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

Having normalised cages as “cots", Papakosta, too, promised the recruitment of qualified personnel.

It should be noted that the widespread use of chemical suppression through medication, the practice of restraining children to their beds using straps, the use of cages and electronic surveillance, were already condemned in the 2011 report of Children’s Ombudsman as “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions.”

As to the reassurances given to the Deputy Minister by "experts", it should be noted that in the course of the Ombudsman's investigation, which led to the aforementioned report, the Unit’s psychiatrist at the time, Dionysios Tsangos, was asked to submit a written reply. In it, he stated: “I clearly acknowledge that restraining a patient with straps largely violates individual human rights, but they are superseded by the right of life itself. Given the severity of the patients’ mental disability, it is absolutely necessary to restrain them with straps to avert any self-harming acts which the patient will naturally not become aware of due to their condition. The straps will continue to exist for as long as such severe, high-risk level cases continue to exist. As to the matter of the wooden enclosures, a proposal was submitted by the scientific team in April 2008 and a report by child psychologist Mrs Lolou will follow. Certainly, patient accommodation can be improved with the use of more suitable beds, successfully combining the goals of development and security.”

The Ombudsman's report noted that the Unit's psychiatrist had responded without submitting “any medical opinions on specific patient cases, nor any scientific evidence supporting the need for restraint”. It also pointed out that “the Recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture under The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment do not appear to justify physical restraint, with the exception of psychiatric units for adult patients and only under certain conditions. Confinement to beds/enclosures in particular, is considered an unsuitable psychiatric practice and constitutes degrading treatment.” As to the decision to “use means of ‘mechanical restraint’, such as straps, its appropriateness is decided on a case-by-case, mutatis mutandis basis and is used rarely and only when prescribed by a doctor (or following a doctor’s immediate notification and receipt of approval). Recourse to it should be made exceptionally, as a last resort and for the minimum duration necessary, while its long-term use has no therapeutic properties and is considered misuse in therapeutic terms. This practice cannot be excused by staff shortages, as every instance of restraint demands that a member of staff provide immediate personal assistance and constant supervision, while electronic surveillance cannot substitute the constant physical presence needed. At the same time, every such instance should be recorded in a special register and in the patient’s personal medical file with specific details, such as the start and end time of restraint, the doctor’s name etc. Staff must receive ongoing training in alternative, gentler methods of patient control and be educated in the effects the practice of physical restraint has on the patient.  The Authority believes that the practices chosen clearly fall outside the scope of legality and gravely contravene the duty to respect and protect the human rights of residents with serious mental disabilities.”

The situation in the Lechaina Unit, therefore, was not only fairly widely known, but also officially documented, by March 2011.

“From Asylum to Society”

Approximately a year after Deputy Minister Papakosta’s visit, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Mideniki Anohi” ("Zero Tolerance") occupied the Lechaina premises. The occupation, a protest against the abuse of disabled children taking place in the Unit, began on November 4, 2015, and lasted for four days.

We met with Antonis Rellas, a film director, disabled activist, and member of Zero Tolerance, in his apartment. He let us in himself and led us to his studio.

“We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad," he told us. "In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, ‘Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.’ We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, those who are unable to advocate for themselves, have no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present.”

A video can be found on Zero Tolerance’s youtube channel, entitled From Asylum to Society. Rellas put the footage together immediately after the occupation, to be screened for journalists during the press conference Zero Tolerance held upon its return to Athens.

“We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime," he said, "nine people in four cars, with two cameras. We wanted to record what was happening and highlight those that society rejects by relegating them to an isolated building somewhere far away, turning a blind eye to these images. We wanted to highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living. For us disabled activists, there is no such thing as a good institution. Even if Lechaina were the Hilton, it would remain a secure-type institution that violates every notion of human dignity. I have seen people restrained with ropes in other institutions too, not just Lechaina. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism. No matter how prepared we were, the reality exceeded our worst nightmares…”

During the occupation, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the State Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the human rights violations against the disabled children and youths kept at the institution.

“To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify," Rellas told us. In fact, the Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

"There are specific liabilities at stake," Rellas said. "Who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed prolonged chemical suppression?  Not holding anyone accountable is like asking us to accept that the disabled residents are not worthy of living and therefore, no criminal liabilities arise. The UN, who saw the material we gathered during the occupation, says this is torture. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed."

On November 5, 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee publicised its concluding observations after examining Greece’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Regarding the situation at Lechaina, the Committee stated that “the State party should take immediate measures to abolish the use of enclosed restraint beds and systematic sedation in psychiatric and related institutions. The State party should also establish an independent monitoring and reporting system and ensure that abuses are effectively investigated, those responsible are prosecuted, and redress is provided to the victims and their families.” Similar recommendations had been made three years earlier, with specific reference to the institution at Lechaina.

On November 13, 2015, a few days after the occupation staged by Zero Tolerance, the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO human rights watchdog, filed a complaint at the State Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court of Greece. “In view of the fact," the complaint stated, "that the long-term torture of children took place with the knowledge of all authorities, from the Ministry down to the local prosecutor’s office, while the report of the Ministry’s Committee confirms that this is standard practice in psychiatric units across the country, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court is asked to order the judicial investigation of the claims made here, instructing a public prosecutor in Athens to this end, and demanding that the Ministry of Labour immediately cease using these inhumane methods that amount to torture.”

None of this was enough to mobilise justice to pursue those responsible for the fact that disabled children and young people were being kept in confinement, physically restrained in cages of two by two by one metres, not being let outside even for an hour, medicated for psychiatric and other illnesses — despite the fact that, according to the study carried out by the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, out of the 78 people that have resided in the Lechaina unit over the years, only five had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for psychiatric disorders. 

“In Greece today," Giorgos Nikolaidis, Director of the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, told us, "no court has the legal capacity to impose such a sentence on anyone. How is it possible to tolerate that a person be subjected to this confinement and not ask who ordered it and why? Which ministers, general secretaries, which of my colleagues gave instructions that these people be restrained? Who imposed this deprivation of their rights?”

Breaking the Cages

Shortly after the occupation by Zero Tolerance, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by Harry Potter writer J. K. Rowling to promote and advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises.

At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention, with an initial duration of six months. The intervention team would release the patients from their restraints, re-examine the use of medication, and prepare them through appropriate training, so that they could either return to their families, where possible, or otherwise move to smaller hostels, where the effects of institutionalisation would be alleviated. Meanwhile, the government was supposed to form a plan to radically restructure institutions, with the ultimate aim of deinstitutionalisation.

The emergency intervention was launched in July 2016, under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. It was to last six months, because, according to Nikolaidis, "rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?"

"Unfortunately," he said "the fact of the matter is that, after a lot of pressure, they simply gave an approval so that an initiative taken by other people and institutions, with the funding of others, could be implemented. A programme that enjoyed no jurisdictional backing vis-à-vis the unit in question, its personnel, the way it functions. The political leadership just said, ‘Great, you can go to the Unit and do what you think is best’.”

Two summers later, we visited the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health for the first time. Giorgos Nikolaidis had just entered his office and was in the process of transferring a video from his phone to his PC. He invited us to view some of the material.

The first video was shot as the carpenter of the Lechaina Unit dismantled the wooden cage of a twenty-year-old man, who had been confined to it for years. The man's initial disbelief subsides, as joy and relief burst forth in almost ecstatic laughter. The camera turns back to the carpenter and switches off.

In the second video, someone else is holding the psychiatrist’s phone. The scene takes place in the sea. Nikolaidis is holding a pool noodle, the buoyant foam tube used to teach very young children how to swim. He has passed the tube under the waist of another Lechaina resident, stretched him out on his back, and sways him gently from side to side. Another outburst of joy is heard, as a long-suffering body finds relief in the water.

Antonis Rellas decided to follow the course of events from Zero Tolerance’s occupation to the promised closure of the institution not just as an activist, but as the director of a documentary about Lechaina. Having visited the Unit over thirty times these past years, he explained: “I had the chance to watch how behaviours changed. How the residents I first met, who were uncommunicative, eyes vacant as they lay strapped to beds or locked inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, began to blossom. To watch them leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, to develop their skills. We heard them speak, utter words. Some began to express specific requests, ‘I want a bedside table’, ‘I want a remote control’, ‘I want my own clothes’. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving ‘the prescribed treatment for their own good’.”

“I witnessed their fears and inhibitions," he went on. "For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps. Even after the intervention team removed their restraints, do you know how they slept at night? In the sleeping position that they had been kept for years. For them, the most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured.”

One of the many paradoxes of this story is that, despite the admission by the political leadership that institutionalisation must end, and more specifically that the Lechaina Unit must be shut down, a decision to prohibit new admissions to the institution was never officially made.

Rellas recalled such an incident: “A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. She was evidently being pressured to abandon the disabled child and focus on her ‘normal’ children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears. She took her child and left.”

 “That was not the only incident where admission was averted,” explained Nikolaidis. “We had asked for admissions to be prohibited, everyone agreed, but that agreement never translated into a legal act. I used to arrive at Lechaina and be told that the Board of Directors had admitted a new child. Every time we had to rush to right things after the fact. I would meet the parents, explain the implications of such an admission, try to understand why the family was asking for this. Usually, there was a lot of hidden pain, the decision to leave their child at an institution was not sudden.  Therefore, we created the after-school clubs for many of them, activity clubs to occupy their children after special school. The aim was to offer families some respite so that the children did not end up in an institution.”

Most of the stories shared common ground. “These were children," Nikolaidis told us, "with mental disabilities that the family had kept until their preadolescence- adolescence and then found harder to manage. They usually had other children with typical development too and struggled to look after them all. We set up this service at Lechaina and Patras so that the child could stay at a space with qualified personnel who would occupy them, train them, and then be able to return home at night.”

Resistance

The emergency intervention that was intended to last six months ended up lasting for almost three years, after repeated extensions. Experts have pointed out that reintroducing people who had been subjected to extreme and prolonged abuse into humane conditions was always going to be difficult, but their task was continually complicated by the resistance that they met.

During one of our visits to the Lechaina Unit, we met Patty Sotiropoulou, special needs educator and member of the emergency intervention team. As introductions were made, we witnessed the following incident: one of the centre’s residents had undergone surgery following self-injury to his eye. The surgeon had recommended forty-five days of bed restraint to protect the wound. Our arrival at the centre coincided with the end of his confinement and the intervention team was asking staff to transfer him to a bed. The staff resisted this move, claiming that it could be dangerous because the resident had chewed on his mattress… ten years ago!

 “One day, members of the team took a girl outside for a walk in the courtyard," an exasperated Sotiropoulou told us. "The girl fell down and needed two stitches on her chin. Not only did the staff overreact due to their reigning fear of accountability, but the doctor who put in the stitches also instructed that she be kept inside a cage for ten days. Ten days confinement for two stitches! And when you point out the absurdity, you just get told: ‘doctor’s orders’.

Sotiropoulou said she had been exhausted by the constant battle over matters that should be self-evident. "No culture has been fostered," she said, "that it is unacceptable to keep children inside cages in an institution. If we had seen a child with typical development inside a cage in those news reports, the reaction would have been different. In the case of disabled children, both the system itself and, unfortunately, a large section of society accepts all too willingly that ‘there is no alternative’, that ‘the specialists say they need to be physically restrained so they must be right’, and ‘thank goodness there is an institution to house them’.”

The battle over matters that should be self-evident, as Sotiropoulou put it, rages at the Lechaina Unit even when the proposed changes are also intended to benefit the workers themselves. 

“During the intervention," Sotiropoulou told us, "we trained staff in the use of a small crane to lift people from the bed. It is essential that the residents change positions. It might not sound like that big of a deal, but there is a world of difference between spending twenty-four hours a day confined to a bed and getting up, both physically and in terms of receiving some stimulation. At the end of the day, only our team and the volunteers use the crane."

"It's a small example of the resistance here," she said. "You have a goal, to get people out of bed. And it can’t be achieved. You give them a tool that can help the carers, too. And I say this being fully aware that just changing the sheets and diapers of so many people is extremely taxing physically. And yet, they will not use it. So, on the one hand, you see a resistance to change, even when the change is beneficial to them, and on the other hand, you realise that they cannot appreciate the importance of people being out of bed.”

The deinstitutionalisation that never was

In December 2017, the Greek Government announced that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Unit and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future, setting out the transition process, the facilities to be developed, the timetable, etc.

 “Incidentally," Nikolaidis told us, "I should mention that we had already drafted such a detailed plan and submitted it to the government, as well as the board of directors of the Centre of Social Welfare, and the relevant services of the Commission and other bodies both within Greece and abroad. We had also discussed it with the permanent personnel of the Unit. I’m not saying that this was the best plan and should be adopted as the final detailed plan. I’m just saying that the commitment made by the government to form such a plan never materialised. The most disheartening aspect is that this time the funds are there, so that’s not the impediment.”

The emergency intervention ended in February 2019. When we asked Nikolaidis why the Institute of Child Health did not continue with the intervention, as well as why the collaboration between the Institute and Lumos was not renewed, he replied: “Because in February 2019, the representatives of Lumos visiting Greece met with the Minister for Social Solidarity Theano Fotiou and were informed that for as long as they cooperated with us, any cooperation with the Greek government was out of the question. So Lumos interrupted its cooperation with us and began working with NGO SOS Children's Villages, which was recommended to them.”

We went on ask why in Nikolaidis’s opinion the government, through its minister, would do this. 

“I think,” Nikolaidis told us, “it was because we kept raising the need to close down the unit, and for a number of real actions, not PR, leading to the residents’ psychosocial rehabilitation and deinstitutionalisation to be taken. Ms Fotiou had probably decided that she wanted to adopt ostensible rather than true actions. The timing also coincided with the completion of a phase of our actions in Lechaina, with the gradual and progressive transfer of all the residents out of confinement, be it cages, or straps or any of the other inventive methods used by the institution. Our task had been to provide interim emergency relief geared towards the abolition of confinement, pending the implementation of a deinstitutionalisation scheme. Having completed that work, having drawn up a plan for deinstitutionalisation and secured a budget for that purpose, and seeing that no steps were being taken in that direction, we had no intention of remaining at Lechaina to window-dress the perpetuation of institutionalisation.”

Former Minister Fotiou did not comment on these statements by Nikolaidis, despite our repeated requests. Lumos likewise did not reply to our request for comment. SOS Children’s Villages, which signed a cooperation agreement with Lumos in May 2019, replied that “after a request by Lumos and the Ministry, we agreed to become the organisation responsible for dispensing salaries to personnel that was hired for three months, without participating in any way in the scientific work, or observing its implementation on location”. 

In the event, personnel to staff the action team that would implement a three-year deinstitutionalisation programme was hired in June 2019 on twelve-month contracts. Selected by competition, team members have no work experience in matters of deinstitutionalisation. This move provoked the strong reaction of the institution’s staff, who once again reiterated their longstanding request for the recruitment of permanent personnel.

While time was again grinding to a halt in Lechaina, the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity came under increasing pressure to submit a long overdue general deinstitutionalisation strategy proposal, which was an obligation under the terms of 2014-2020 NSRF funding, and should in fact have been submitted since 2014. The Ministry asked for technical assistance from the European Commission and the Structural Reform Support Services (SRSS). A Brussels-based NGO, the European Association for People with Disabilities (EASPD), was awarded a 200.000 contract by SRSS to draw up a deinstitutionalisation plan for Greece.

In July 2019, national elections were called, SYRIZA lost power, and New Democracy found itself in government. Domna Michailidou became the new Minister. 

EASPD presented a draft paper on a national deinstitutionalisation strategy to the Ministry, as well as several experts, in January 2020. Presumably, somewhere at the end of this process, the promise made to the Lechaina residents through the emergency intervention, that they may have a chance to leave institutionalised living behind, might eventually be fulfilled. For the time being, though, they have to wait and endure - again.

When asked about the feelings their experiences at Lechaina have left them with, everyone we spoke to gave the same reply: frustration. Antonis Rellas’ response, when asked about his hopes at the start of filming the documentary, was riveting: “I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that the announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the biological family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That someone would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.”

Frustration, then, and sadness. “For us," Rellas said, "the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen and sadly, it is not mobilising.  That is the heart of the matter. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.”

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Modern Greek history has seen its fair share of brutalities, but few among them have been as little discussed as the ways in which children have been mistreated, abused, neglected and institutionalised by the State. From the late 19th century, when a prototype welfare system was first put in place under the Greek Royal Family, all the way to the nationalisation of welfare from the 1970s onwards, one constant has been that children have concerned the State as props in the political game or as potential perpetrators of crime — usually both. This chronic undermining of children’s rights affected most aspects of the public sector; and its traces are still visible today.

A recent video of a policeman beating up an eleven-year-old child in the outskirts of Athens, that surfaced on social media, raised the question of what ideas police and other authorities continue to have regarding the treatment of minors — whether suspected offenders or not. ((The video is available (in Greek) here, from ERT, the Greek Public Broadcaster.)) The Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, took to Twitter to condemn the incident, stating that “whoever hits minors does not have a place anywhere”. ((Tweet is available (in Greek) here.)) The speed of the Minister’s reflexes can perhaps be explained by the fact that the memory of the 2008 murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, shot by a police officer in downtown Athens, is still fresh. 

The consequences of Grigoropoulos’s murder were staggering: Athens, and other Greek cities, burned during spontaneous riots that lasted for weeks. But the mistreatment of children by officials has also been documented in many other, less explosive, instances: some research has shown that children victims of abuse have been made to recount their ordeal to authorities up to fourteen times, in what cleary amounts to secondary abuse in the hands of the State; children who have been removed from their families are kept in hospitals, despite not being in need of hospitalisation, sometimes for years; and at least one institution has been strapping disabled children to their beds and locking them in cages. ((See our detailed report on the Lechaina unit for children with disabilities: "Hell as an Institution".)) Authorities have described such practices as unavoidable, necessary, or “for the good of the children”.

It is impossible to explain the persistence of such practices, at least in part, without considering the way that historical events have shaped Greek authorities’ attitudes toward minors. 

In the Hands of the Lord

Institutionalisation of children had been introduced very soon after the foundation of the Greek State, with the City of Athens already operating an Orphanage for Abandoned Infants in 1838. However, a quasi-system of fostering also existed, with foster families often paid a meagre fee to host abandoned children, and institutionalisation was in part seen as a solution to abuse and neglect within this unregulated framework. 

The Athens Municipal Nursery was founded by the city’s Mayor in 1859, and brought under the auspices of the Royal Family in the 1870s. According to its own data, between its foundation and the mid 1960s, it hosted over 50.000 children. During its peak, it hosted about 600 at one time. As Maria Athanassopoulou and Marianna Drakopoulou write in their Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece, it was within the Municipal Nursery that the first attempts were made to systematically document child ailments and statistically study infant mortality. ((See Maria Athanasopoulou, Mariana Drakopoulou, A Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece (Istoriki anadromi gia ta ektheta vrefi stin Ellada), To Vima tou Asklipiou, tome 9, issue 1, Jan-March 2010, available online (in Greek) here.)) 

As was common in many countries — and remains today — the Municipal Nursery also introduced a vrefodohos, or baby hatch, where mothers could abandon their babies anonymously. On the outside, there was an inscription from Psalm 27: “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.” 

Also on the initiative of the Royal family, the Patriotic Foundation for Social Welfare and Perception, or PIKPA, was founded in 1914, initially as the “Patriotic Association of Greek Women”. Although its initial mandate was to cater for the families of soldiers fighting in the war, after the 1920s it gradually shifted to the sheltering of orphaned and displaced children. 

By the end of the 1930s, even the few progressive ideas about government and lawmaking that had emerged in Greece during the interwar period had been snuffed out — first by dictatorship, then by war and occupation. Civil war followed, then two decades of “feeble democracy” and a military junta, until a tumultuous return to democratic politics finally led to stability and the relative strengthening of public institutions. Only then, near the end of a seventy year period, did a political consensus appear that the State should provide a safety net for children, who had either broken the law or been neglected or abused. 

The Youth Problem

Dictator Ioannis Metaxas ruled Greece from 1936 to 1941, a period known as the 4th of August Regime. Although his legacy of oppression has been somewhat tempered by the fact that he denied fascist Italy’s demand to allow Italian troops to occupy Greek territory, his regime was totalitarian and he was an admirer of fascism. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had reciprocated Metaxas’s admiration in his official visit to Greece in 1936. Although the 4th of August Regime was not in the strictest sense fascist, and Metaxas personally was more influenced by Portugese dictator António Salazar, it did have common traits with fascism and nazism, including the targeting of youth for indoctrination. In 1936, Metaxas created the National Union of Youth, or EON, the Greek version of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio and the Hitlerjugend, which sought to shape minors into future supporters — if not functionaries — of the regime.

As was the case with every other fascist government in Europe, Metaxas’s policy choices often attempted to counter the voices pushing for progressive reforms, inspired by European Social Democracy that had bloomed in the beginning of the century. In her 2013 book “Youth in Peril: Supervision, Reformation and Justice for Minors after the War” ((«Νέοι εν κινδύνω»: Επιτήρηση, αναμόρφωση και δικαιοσύνη ανηλίκων μετά τον πόλεμο», Polis publications, 2013)), Efi Avdela, a Professor of Modern History in the University of Crete, has written about a number of progressive sociologists, legal theorists, feminists and socialists in the interwar era, who advocated among other things in favour of introducing welfare instead of penalisation for minors. According to Avdela’s account, the “criminalisation vs. welfare” debate would go on for decades after the war, although the scales would always tip heavily towards the former.

Two laws by the Metaxas government would cement the idea that children in peril should be treated as criminals (with all the implications that this word entailed at the time) to be reformed, instead of more progressive approaches to welfare. In December 1939, a law introduced Judges and Prosecutors for Minors. A year later, after Greece had entered the war against the Axis, a concise plan on operating reforming institutions was made into law, introducing two new entities subject to the State Prosecutor: the State Prefect for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors. They were both mainly tasked with guiding minors through the justice system, whether that meant carrying out social research on a minor’s background, or providing support for the minor that went through the system. They were mostly staffed by volunteers.

A month after passing the 1940 law, with Greece on the brink of Axis occupation, Metaxas died. But conservative conceptions of juvenile delinquency were crystallised in his laws, and the newly founded entities began working on minors, although their practices were modified to also address the humanitarian crisis caused by the occupation. According to Avdela’s findings, 4.600 minors went through the justice system in 1941 alone, but most of the volunteers’ work was focused on gathering and distributing food and clothing.

From 1947 onwards, some Societies for the Protection of Minors began operating their own institutions, which provided an interim shelter for rehabilitation between the time a minor was released from a reformation centre and the time they went free back to society. Until the fall of the Military Junta, in 1974, when Greek state institutions would gradually become more “liberalised”, the Prefects for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors would deal with all sorts of “moral panics” that focused on youth cultures: “teddy-boyism”, rock ‘n’ roll, sexual liberation and leftism — all filed under “anti-social behaviour”.

War, Children

During the Greek Civil War, the issue of child protection took a darker turn for both competing sides, and the particulars of what actually happened are subject to debate until today. In 1947, the United States of America began providing military, technical and financial assistance to the Greek government and its National Army against the Democratic Army of Greece, formed by the Greek Communist Party and former resistance guerrillas. The scale of U.S. military assistance meant that the government could now launch air attacks against guerrilla strongholds, which included the first documented use of napalm bombs. 

From 1948, when the war scales started tipping in favour of the government, the guerillas began transferring children away from the conflict zones of northern Greece that were being bombed, to countries of the Eastern Bloc. Pro-government voices named this paidomazoma (literally, “child-gathering”), after the much older practice of Devshirme, or “child levy”, in which Ottoman authorities abducted children from among their Balkan Christian subjects, converted them to Islam and trained them for military or civil service. Pro-Democratic Army voices, in turn, countered by calling the practice paidososimo (“child-saving”) or sotiria (“salvation”). Up to this day, left-wing and progressive historians have been debating with conservatives, as well as the far-right, on whether this was a humanitarian operation or recruitment.

A year earlier, Paul I had ascended the throne of the Kingdom of Greece and his wife, Frederica of Hanover, had become Queen. More than any of her predecessors or successors, Frederica was actively involved in politics and was often in the public spotlight.

Τhe Royal Family of Greece had patronised all sorts of high-society philanthropic societies since the 19th century, among which several devoted to children, with a special focus on juvenile delinquency. Frederica combined the Royal Family’s tradition of philanthropy with her own penchant for politics, and began an operation parallel to the guerrillas’ paidomazoma, thereby removing children from conflict zones and placing them in special institutions that she founded, called Paidopoleis (“Child cities”). 

This operation, introduced by Royal Decree in 1947, was named the “Charity Drive ‘Welfare for the Northern Provinces of Greece’ Under the High Authority of Her Majesty, the Queen”, although everyone would refer to it simply as Charity Drive (Eranos in Greek), or after 1955 as Royal Welfare. It was carried out by the National Army. Fifty-two such Paidopoleis were opened all over Greece, all working under a similar model: a strict upbringing, and a daily military-style regimen that would inscribe “proper values” to children.

During her youth in Hanover, Frederica had been a member of the Hitler Youth, and in Greece she was considered sympathetic towards the Nazi regime (as well as the United States). In his book on the children of the civil war ((Λουκιανός Χασιώτης, Τα Παιδιά του Εμφυλίου, Βιβλιοπωλείο της Εστίας, 2013)), historian Loukianos Hasiotis claims that the Charity Drive was at least partially modelled after the Franco regime’s Auxilio Social, which employed similar messages. 

Since the Greek Civil War is now widely accepted as the first episode of the Cold War, it should come as no surprise that the conflict over children was also played out on an international level. The Greek government branded the removal of children from conflict zones by the guerrillas as a “genocide”, a position accepted by the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) in its 1948 report. The idea was also promoted by officials with prominent positions on the international stage, like the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul. The United Nations Committee was tasked with investigating what the guerrillas were doing — but, naturally, not what was happening in the Paidopoleis. 

Thus, until historical research caught up, what is known about the Paidopoleis of the era mostly came from oral narratives of the children that grew up in them. In 2007, when a popular historical programme on Greek television, The Time Machine, aired two episodes about the children of the Civil War, the testimonies of people that had lived in the Paidopoleis during their childhood were divergent even within the same episode. This disagreement in testimonies of the children, now in their old age, persists in the popular press to this day.((See, for expample, Marina Karpozilou, “Growing up in Frederica’s Pedopoleis: The ‘Guerrilla-striken children of the ‘Big Mother’” (in Greek: “Μεγαλώνοντας στις παιδουπόλεις της Φρειδερίκης: Τα 'ανταρτόπληκτα' παιδιά της 'Μεγάλης Μητέρας'”), News247.gr, 9/1/2016)) Some reminisce about their time in the Pedopoleis with nostalgia and others with a more critical view, even sparking literary debates: in his 2009 book, The Blurry Deep ((Γιάννης Ατζακάς, Ο Θολός Βυθός, Άγρα)), author Yiannis Atzakas recalls his time in a Paidopoli as trauma haunting him well into his middle age, while Antonis Venetis, in his 2014 book Letters ((Αντώνης Ν. Βενέτης, Επιστολές, Αρμός)) considers Frederica’s Drive beneficial to children and states his belief that “the ‘blurry deep’ can only be found in fixations, prejudices and obsessions”.

Under Frederica, the PIKPA became the second pillar of childcare, a sort of supplement to the Paidopoleis, housing children that had been orphaned in the war. PIKPA structures followed a similar regiment of strict, military-style upbringing and carried out adoptions, as well as absorbed some of the prominent figures of Frederica’s Charity Drive. Lina Tsaldari, the widow of former Prime Minister Panagis Tsaldaris, was one of the aristocratic “Appointed Ladies” who actively participated in the Charity Drive. Ιn 1950 she became the President of PIKPA.

The third pillar of Frederica’s childcare initiatives was the “Houses of the Child”. These were small daycare centers in the villages of rural Greece (mainly in the north) that after 1950 started taking in children while their parents were working. Without a public education system in place, especially in these remote areas, the Houses of the Child, 140 in total, acted as a nursery or elementary school — with a twist. In them, children would be taught farming and technical skills, while also being indoctrinated with “religious and patriotic values”.

The Eranos might have been Frederica's personal project, but its funding was very much public. Royal Welfare was funded by special import taxes, tariffs on cigarettes (two cigarettes in every pack), percentages of cinema tickets, a part of workers’ wages, and other measures. Researchers have calculated that between 1949 and 1956, the Royal Welfare Foundation took in more than 186 million drachmas — and a lot more after that.((More information on relevant activities by the Greek Royal Family is available (in Greek) in research by the Ios journalistic outfit.))

For the majority of children that were taken to Eastern Bloc countries, it wasn’t until the 1980s and the campaign of the centre-left PASOK government for the right-of-return of political refugees that they would see Greece again.

Leftists and progressives have been claiming for decades that the Charity Drive was the real paidomazoma. In any case, after the Democratic Army’s defeat and the end of the Civil War, only 14 of the paidopoleis continued to operate. Nowadays, four of them are still working as institutions for children without families.

Searching for Roots

Mary Theodoropoulou runs “Roots”, an NGO, from a small apartment in Kesariani. Historically known as the place where in 1944 the Nazis executed 200 communist political prisoners that had like many others been handed over to them by the collaborationist authorities, Kaisariani is a working class neighborhood in Athens, where the Communist Party still gets one of its highest percentages. 

Abandoned as a newborn in the Athens Municipal Nursery baby hatch, Theodoropoulou has often appeared in the media talking about her quest to find her biological parents, after she discovered in her twenties that she had been adopted. Her efforts to date have not been successful. She and seven others, all of whom had also stayed at the Municipal Nursery as children, founded the NGO in the late 1990s, to help people search for their biological parents.

Theodoropoulou has done extensive work on institutions. Not only did Rizes produce the only comprehensive study that looked into the state of Greek institutions for children in 2015, but her work on tracing the roots of adopted children means she has heard a massive amount of personal stories about what has been happening inside these institutions.

After World War II, according to Theodoropoulou, there was a further, major shift towards institutionalisation. “The practice of trofoi, foster mothers that were paid to breast-feed and take care of babies, had been in place since the late nineteenth century,” she said. “A shortage of milk and absolute poverty meant that babies would die otherwise”. State institutions mostly acted as halfway houses that would assign a newborn to a trofos after a short stay. Later, after the War, the trofoi acted as a means to relieve the institutions from the strain caused by the huge numbers of children.

Theodoropoulou told us how, after the war was over, the trofoi framework was expanded. PIKPA, which took care of many of the orphaned or abandoned children, would now hand them over to families, some of whom took in numerous children. “But there was no framework,” she said. “There were no rules on hygiene, no supervision and the remuneration of foster parents was low and infrequent. A trofos would bring back the body of a baby she had taken in and say to the Nursery staff that ‘this is frozen’ — meaning dead. In other cases, foster families abandoned children all over again. There were also cases of abuse, even rape. All these things undermined foster care and institutions gained ground.”

The suffering of children that went through the foster care system unsupervised could be prolonged even after they were out of it. Theodoropoulou told us the story of a boy who tried to report that his foster parents had sexually abused him. He was deemed mentally ill and forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution. In other cases, disabled children, and children with mental illness or developmental problems, would end up in the PIKPA of Leros, founded in 1963 to take in children from the Public Pediatric Neuropsychiatric Hospital “Daou Pentelis”, as part of the overall project of transferring — and isolating — the mentally ill from all over the country to Leros. The PIKPA of Leros formed part of the so-called “Psychopath Colony”, established on the island in 1957, and now known as the infamous kolastirio (“hellhole”). Many of those committed to the kolastirio would not leave until an international deinstitutionalisation initiative in the 1990s, funded by the EU, after a series of stories in the international press and a documentary had revealed the horrible conditions to which patients had been subjected. ((Deinstitutionalization in Leros has been documented in various sources. Psychiatrists who participated in the process like Ιοannis Loukas, Ιοannis Tsiantis, Theodoros Megalooikonomou and Felix Guattari, among others, have all written their own accounts and commentaries on it.))

Since 1939, when it came under the authority of the Ministry of Health, PIKPA has gone through a great number of changes in administrative structure and oversight, but by the 1950s and 1960s, it expanded almost to the size of a full healthcare and welfare system for minors. At its peak, its services included everything from schools for medical personnel and mobile medical units to clinics, hospitals and nursery schools. Since 1925, it had also been operating summer camps from June to the end of September for quality time and healing for children suffering from tuberculosis. The “exoches”, as they were called, stopped during the war, but began operating again after 1945. In 1948, their mandate was expanded to accept impoverished children with problems in development, or any chronic disease, and in 1951 to include working children, and all children monitored by doctors. In 1956, PIKPA put together its first structure for disabled children in Voula. Gradually, it would end up running most of the institutions for disabled children in Greece. 

Institutionalisation in the Paidopoleis, the orphanages and the nurseries gave rise to a different problem that haunts families until today: illegal adoptions. In her memoirs, Frederica had claimed that communist women had been abandoning their children and even that she witnessed a woman literally throwing her baby away, which was supposedly picked up by an army officer and handed over to her. After the military junta of 1967-1974 fell, communist guerrillas that had been exiled in camps in the islands reported that their children were abducted from there. In fact, the children were taken to the Paidopoleis or the PIKPA, and were then sold to foster parents in the United States, often assisted by officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, as well as Greek-American Organisations ((The Greek-American Organization AHEPA was found to have been involved in a trafficking ring for children - see, for example: The adopted Greek children of the Cold War, Margarita Pournara | Kathimerini)). Although the Greek press had published stories on the issue since the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1996 when U.S. media would start digging into the story and get to the bottom of it, that the full extent of what had happened would be revealed.

Discovering the Victim

After King Constantine’s failed counter-coup attempt against the Military Junta, in December 1967, the Royal Family was forced to flee the country. So, in a strange twist of fate, it was the dictators who brought welfare, including child protection, under the purview of the State. With a Law Decree, in 1970, all the Royal Foundations and Charities — along with their funding provisions — were absorbed into the National Welfare Organisation. Their role did not change significantly for the next decade, although Greece’s evolution into a more advanced economy, after the long and tumultuous process of post-war reconstruction, meant that the numbers of children in peril would gradually start to decrease.

It wasn’t until 1981, when centre-left PASOK came to power, that the welfare system would advance into the next phase. One of PASOK’s most important and enduring achievements was the creation of the National Healthcare System, or ESY, in 1983, which put in place a concise framework for healthcare that also included aspects of welfare. The Ministry overseeing it was now renamed the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The first eight years of PASOK in power, from 1981 to 1989, included many decisive progressive reforms in worker’s rights, civil rights and education, but welfare was still mostly understood as benefits, and were lagging behind the drastic changes overtaking Greek society. Not only did the National Welfare Organisation go through no significant change in the 1970s and 1980s, but especially with regard to child protection, the idea of preventing victimisation and abuse, although gaining traction in Europe, was not present in any sector of the Greek state.

Xeni Dimitriou, the former Chief Prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court, has served three tenures as a State Prosecutor for Minors over three different decades. She has gone through thousands of pages of legal theory on children, attended hundreds of conferences and exchanged opinions with dozens of other prosecutors all over the world. When we met her, shortly after her recent retirement, she spoke to us about her firsthand experience of what Greece’s long refusal to acknowledge the victimisation of children had led to. In her early days as Prosecutor for Minors in the 1980s — ”an unprivileged position, almost a punishment back then” — she witnessed time and again policemen marching into her office with arrested children that had been severely beaten. One boy came in with massively swollen ears. He told her that they had put clothespins in his ears to interrogate him and had hanged him upside down from the precinct’s balcony to scare him into confessing. In other cases, following the letter of the law, she was forced to put six and seven-year-old kids on trial, or send underage lawbreakers away in institutions that were practically prisons.

Dimitriou referred to Kalliopi Spinelli, a well-known criminologist as her “teacher, the teacher of all of us”. Spinelli is credited, among many things, with proposing the replacement of the term “juvenile criminals” with “juvenile offenders”, and with advocating for a pedagogical instead of a penal approach to justice for the underage. A few other prominent legal theorists and professionals gradually began to advocate for a different relation between the children and the State.

Modern international ideas on children’s rights speak only of “victims,” Dimitriou insisted. “We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking,” she said. “Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who took that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world. The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold aspect. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold aspect. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim. Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.”

In a conference speech Dimitriou gave in 1991, in-between her tenures as Prosecutor for Minors, she said that a bill for “Units of Care for Minors” had been drafted since 1984. The purpose of the plan was to set up a structure so that “juvenile offenders until 12 years of age would not be involved in any way with suppression mechanisms such as the police, the Prosecutor and the Court for Minors, but would be taken care by welfare services instead”. She then went on to describe best practices found in existing institutions — stopping at one point to wonder whether “it’s time to legislate that juvenile delinquents could be placed into foster families. The society responds positively. Why delay any more?”

Dimitriou’s 1991 speech echoed the ideas that would start to shape new concepts of child welfare. In 1985 and 1990, the UN had published guidelines on handing justice to juvenile delinquents and the prevention of delinquency in minors respectively. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was also signed at the time.

Things were changing, but in the case of Greece, the pace was and remains slow. The Greek governments of the 1990s made a few attempts to modernise the welfare system, or rather to establish one, since throughout their evolution the various services had operated independently. In 1992, a law practically dissolved the National Welfare Organisation and the PIKPA, in an attempt to create a unified system that was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. 

Another law, in the same year, introduced legal procedures for foster care and was amended in 1996, by adding a stricter framework for the role of social investigations in adoption and foster parenting procedures. That law also took an important step by changing Metaxas’s laws to introduce social services in the courts and the State Prosecutor offices, although their mandate remained to handle the delinquency of minors. 

Probably the most important step at the time was taken in 1998 by another PASOK government, this time under Prime Minister Kostas Simitis, when the creation of a National System of Social Care was attempted. In the following years, the former PIKPA units were successively centralised, then decentralised again. Generally under the oversight of regional administration, these units followed divergent courses. One post-PIKPA incarnation, the Lechaina unit for disabled children, achieved world-wide notoriety for its horrific conditions.

The new system gave explicit roles to regional governments, but also cleared up the terms under which private NGO’s could carry out welfare programmes. Thus, the 1990s was also the decade when NGOs would increasingly start to step in and cover for the shortcomings in child protection. The Greek branch of SOS Children’s Villages had been active since 1975, but now non-government care for children would diversify. The Smile of the Child was created in 1995 and The Ark of the World would follow in 1998. All three of these organisations would grow in the years that followed and actively supplement state welfare. 

The decade ended with a presidential decree in 1999 that attempted to contain illegal adoptions by also giving all oversight responsibilities to regional welfare services — Regional institutions and Directorates of Social Care. With an amendment in 2003, even more welfare responsibilities would be directed to the Regional Health Services that had been created a year earlier. According to the explanatory report that came with the draft of the bill, this would allow for “better coordination, monitoring and evaluation” of social welfare services. The UN Committee overseeing the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child noted this attempt, but still found it fell short of a coherent Child Protection System. Some of the problems highlighted by the Committee included the lack of a clear mandate between authorities and a central body that would coordinate all services, problems that are still partially present to this day.

Xeni Dimitriou’s 1991 speech ended by saying that “maybe it is time for juvenile law to grow up”. It marked the beginning of a period of intense pressure by child protection professionals for a proper children’s welfare system to be designed and implemented. But in the 1990s, a welfare system that would address problems that could not be solved with benefits was still a challenge. Also, the word deinstitutionalization had just been popularised for the first time after the attempts to change conditions in Leros, but that programme, which continued for the best part of the decade, would suffer setbacks. Voices of experts speaking about the need to address different vulnerabilities or how institutionalised child welfare could actually be harmful, were only just beginning to be heard.

As it happens, the regressive character of children’s welfare was officially, albeit mostly symbolically, challenged in 2010, by an amendment to a law of the Metaxas regime, mandating the Societies for the Protection of Minors to not only deal with “delinquency”, but also the “victimisation” of minors.

However, just as the need to shift the focus of the child protection system was becoming obvious to policy-makers, Greece found itself in the throes of a terrible financial crisis. Successive governments have since then introduced a variety of “plans” for children’s welfare, which have one thing in common: almost none of their provisions have been implemented.

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How did the decision for the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance" to occupy the Lechaina Unit in November 2015 come about?

Zero Tolerance was formed in 2010 with a view to building a disability activist movement, a movement for the emancipation of disabled subjects, alongside the Movement of Disabled Artists. We began implementing actions, publishing articles, occupying premises, staging all kinds of interventions. And then came the time to emancipate ourselves so that we could deal with the grave issue of institutionalised life and deinstitutionalisation. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, unable to advocate for themselves, having no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present. So, we, their fellow disabled, began to advocate for their rights.

A two-day festival was held at the self-managed theatre “Embros” shortly before the occupation, a solidarity festival for the children and adults of Lechaina as well as all the other institutions. There were discussions, documentary screenings, plays. The groundwork for the occupation was laid there.

What was the aim?

To highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living.

What was the plan?

To occupy the premises in question and invite civil society to join us in becoming many. It did not happen. The response was not there. The cameras were there, in that there was widespread media coverage at the time.  All the TV channels, both public broadcaster ERT and private broadcasters, aired reports, each in their own manner. A lot of the coverage took on an anti-government bias. We were not focusing on that aspect at all, at the time. Besides, the SYRIZA-ANEL government had only been in power for two months. Our focus was to highlight what was a chronic situation. Lechaina had not been happening for two months, it had a history of 37 years.((For an in-depth account of the Lechaina Unit, read our case study: Hell as an Institution))

We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad. In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. In other words, we were not doing anything new, something that had never been done before. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, “Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.” We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside.  

Were you afraid?

No, no, no. Not at all. We were in the right, I had nothing to fear. None of us was afraid. We had already occupied the Social Insurance Institute (IKA) in 2011. When Syntagma Square was packed with half a million people, we went and peacefully occupied the IKA headquarters for four days. We stayed in Lechaina for four days, too; apparently that is how long our bodies can withstand being exposed to these conditions…

We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime, a total of nine people, most of us disabled, in four cars. We explained who we were. The Chairman of the Board of the facility said we needed a permit to enter – the police conveyed the management’s request to us. We were prepared, ID cards in our pockets. We told the policeman that the violations taking place here were far greater than any violation our presence might give rise to, that we had no intention of hindering the staff in their work but had no intention of leaving either. We went inside knowing what awaited there, but the reality is always much harsher than anything you could have imagined.

Did you have any run-ins with the authorities after the occupation?

We are the ones who went to the Public Prosecutor. Four of us left the unit and went to the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada and filed a complaint. To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify.((The Prosecutor's office archived the complaint in 2016. See our case study on the Lechaina Unit: Hell as an Institution))

The complaint was filed officially, not anonymously. There are specific liabilities at stake: who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed the medication? Specific criminal liabilities are pending, and, to date, they have not been investigated. Unless we are to accept that the disabled persons at the unit are unworthy of living, in which case no criminal liability arises.

The fact that no one is held accountable for this conduct, the fact that nobody seems to wonder about who is to blame for these people’s torture–it is just not possible that no one is to blame—is indicative of the treatment  of disabled subjects in institutions. Is the psychiatrist responsible? Did she prescribe by fax? Was she contacted at two in the morning and told “so-and-so is hitting themselves,” and did she reply, “I’ll fax you a prescription”? Did she do that? If so, is it allowed? Is it a punishable offence? Are prolonged physical restraint and/or prolonged chemical suppression scientifically accepted practices? Are they torture? The UN says they are. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed.

We met the psychiatrist, too, she came to the premises while we were inside. We wanted to speak to her. She did not.

Ideologically, we stand against doctors. Obviously, we do not refuse the intervention of medical science. At the same time, however, we are aware of the part that the medical field has played in us being disabled. By “disabled” in this instance I mean “oppressed”, I do not refer to the impairment. The initial impairment is a separate matter. But if you study the file of a person who has spent twenty years in an institution, his resulting state bears no relation to the initial impairment. Because the impairment of institutionalisation has been added on top.

Several other attempts had been made prior to your intervention and official complaint…

Are you asking why we left it for so long?

No…

I do wish to answer that, nonetheless. We have critically self-reflected on this, on why we left it for so long. Nine of us went there and did something. Why did we leave it so late, why did we not act sooner? We would have made a difference to more people. We looked away, we did not want to face it, we could not face it.

One in two people will project. One of our fellow disabled members, who has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation in the past. His mother had been told the all-too-frequent “Don’t make it harder on yourself. Send him to an institution so you can focus on raising your daughter”. It was hard. I, with my acquired disability, never felt that. I did not believe at twenty-one that my parents would lock me up in an institution. I was already a director; I was working in television. But for other members of the group, who were born disabled, that was one of the turns their life could have taken. We became wiser…

That is what our group is all about, the emancipation of the disabled. The first to become emancipated are the members themselves through this process. We did not want to face this harsh aspect of reality, this prospect that could have been ours. On the other hand, once we stepped outside this individualised perception of disability, once the personal became social, that is when we began to think about what we could do. Could our small band go inside and do something impactful? Not just take a couple of photos and then leave. Would we be taken seriously? Would there be news coverage? Would the ministry take note? Because frustration also plays a part. When you have experienced frustration so many times, over and over, you think it over and wonder, “Should I get involved or will it lead to yet more frustration?” In the end, we burst in and ultimately, some things were put in motion.

Therefore, in terms of a section of society staging an intervention, it was an action worth taking. At the same time, the self-criticism for the delay still stands. We had to fight against our own taboos. That is no small thing. It was a more painful process for our members who had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation at some point than for us. It was harder for them to cope with it. We used to meet, days later, not out of a need to discuss politics or organisational matters, but to talk. To cry, to drink, to cry again… mainly to be there for those who had found it most painful. If you talk to the fellow disabled member I mentioned, he will tell you this: “No matter where I find myself, a cage stands beside me. I carry it with me.” It was an experience that marked people, and I don’t just mean the members of Zero Tolerance. But we are not enough. For deinstitutionalisation to become a demand, for this monstrosity to stop being socially acceptable and normalised, we need to change the way society thinks of disability. We are not interested in everyone’s personal sensibilities. We are interested in mobilising civil society.

What we say applies to all institutions. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism, in living bereft of human dignity in a difficult part of the country, where people perceive disability in the manner stated by Minister of Agricultural Development Makis Voridis,  namely that there are disabled people who have the capacity for understanding and disabled people who do not.((Minister Voridis, during a TV panel discussion, had quipped that children at sixteen "are not disabled", meaning that at that age they have a capacity of adult communication. Video is available (in Greek) here.)) And as a society, we still hold on to the belief that the people in Lechaina do not have the capacity for understanding.

Lechaina must be shut down, the people there must leave. Four years to the day, however, we are still discussing what must be done.

Why do you think that is the case?

It is rotten from the start. Because when a child is born, the first thing the parents, where available, will hear is the medical opinion. It is rotten from the moment the obstetrician enters the room and tells the new mother, “Your child was born faulty.” He will not tell her, “Look, there are difficulties ahead, but you can do this and that.” He will only tell her about the difficulties. He will not offer comfort but launch into the medical script of “he will not be able to think, to see, to hear” and so on. That this child will be bad for her other children, that this child will ruin her relationship with her husband, so “Do not breastfeed, I will interrupt your milk-flow and we will send it to an institution. Your responsibility ends there, you do not need to concern yourself with the course of this child’s life.” That is the classic scenario.

In this instance, we are not talking about broken families, about offenders who are imprisoned, and whose children end up in institutions. We should note here that only fourteen to fifteen per cent of the institutionalised have absolutely no point of reference, in other words, a parent who could potentially take on some responsibilities. Therefore, we are talking about abandonment; about how a couple imagines the stork bringing a blond, green-eyed “normal baby” and then receives a “faulty baby” and decides to bin it.  In those cases, it is the doctor’s intervention that causes the initial damage. Add the way society espouses those same views and the parents freak out. They suffer too, of course, but that does not change the end result.

We saw this in the case of Maria in Lechaina, when we spoke to her mother. The moment her daughter was born, the doctors began to list everything that could happen, medically speaking. But a person is not a medical diagnosis. They are a person. And the problem arises when you start listing all the medical difficulties that lie ahead instead of how they could be dealt with in an organised society.

Does that organised society exist?

Well, people who, despite all these difficulties, make a choice that goes against the medicalised belief that a person who thinks differently ought to be normalised certainly do exist. People who, for example, do not try to normalise autistic children, who do not have a neurotypical brain but an autistic one, and make them be like us. Because that is the beginning of Nazism.

According to Lev Vygotsky, there is a belief that the disabled are a priori unhappy.((Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist. More info available in Wikipedia.)) It is a racist belief, this belief that our lives are lives of suffering, that sometimes they are lives not worth living.

Adriana, who recently passed away, was nineteen years old. I think Adriana’s original diagnosis was glaucoma, meaning she was blind. When we found Adriana, she did not speak, she did not walk, because she lived in a cage. She was restrained when she was around seven years old, because they had no way of confining her and because they could not “nurse” her. So, they put her in a cage because she was active, and no personnel was available to watch over her. The most common question in there is “What are you doing standing up?”. It’s like a regular barracks. Why must they be lying down all day long? Why must they be confined to their bed? Why can they not be outside on the swings?

The standard reply is that the unit is understaffed. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Why are they understaffed? Why are all the residents in diapers? Why do none of them know how to be self-reliant, to use the toilet on their own, to feed themselves? Because they have lost their skills due to institutionalisation and the complete deprivation of every social right. Therefore, the reason the personnel does not suffice is that all these people have been rendered incapacitated.

Is there some kind of logic in what the staff are claiming? There are two people per floor in each shift.

That’s true. But the conclusion depends on your starting point. Do you begin by examining why this happens, or are you only interested in examining the outcome you are dealing with? Two people per floor in each shift are obviously not enough. But why does that happen? How can it be possible for a person with spastic quadriplegia not to be autonomous? Not to be able to eat, drink, use the toilet on their own? How can the rest of us do all those things? They were never allowed to develop.

Or their abilities were “anaesthetised”. A child enters the institution mobile and within a week stops using the toilet. Then the child gets given a bedpan…

A bedpan, really? They soil themselves and then are cleaned with a wipe. They only rarely shower. If a minister is planning to visit, they’ll be given a bath, so they don’t stink. If anyone makes the mistake of soiling themselves after the diaper change, they must wait for the next round. There is no personalised care for this. That means someone can spend hours in a soiled diaper. That is why you end up with that pervading smell in institutions that they can’t wash away.

Have you seen their bodies? Have you seen how many functional deformities have resulted from the repeated adoption of certain postures? Would you like to hear something strange, which also demonstrates the oppression, the torment they have been subjected to? The persons freed by Nikolaidis’ team, unfettered, still slept at night in the same sleeping position they had been restrained in for years. Do you understand what that means? The most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured. That is why, in the early days, almost no one accepted the intervention. That is why it was such an enormous, difficult task for that team.  

Another scene I will never forget is the two young girls, Ellie and Maria, who were eleven years old at the time. When the intervention team arrived at Lechaina, these two girls, being the youngest, were removed to the Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children (PIKPA) in Voula. We used to go and visit them there. One day, they came to our home for a few hours, accompanied by PIKPA volunteers. I remember Ellie in particular, looking for a place to hide. Under the table… always a sheltered spot, away from people and animals. By the end of the day, they were crying because they did not want to leave. It was our understanding that they had never been in a house before. She lay down on our bed, she wanted us to tuck her in so she could sleep there. She saw a dog for the first time, she had never seen one before. She stared at the dog, watched it as if wondering what that strange creature was. We ate together, they had dessert, we danced… same as one would with any other child.

Except that these children had been deprived of love and care. Real love, not the care that an institution’s staff can give. I do not dispute that some of the staff may form emotional attachments with the disabled there, but the way of life in an institution is the very opposite of nurturing care. You spend your whole life being approached by someone in a laboratory coat. Why? They can’t even grasp the fundamental concept of turning up in your own clothes. The gloves, too. Wearing surgical gloves to feed the residents. Why? What are you going to catch? The whole set up of institutions is medico-centric.

You are not only an activist; you are a director too. You are currently working on a documentary about Lechaina…

The two roles are interconnected in any case.

So you enter the occupied building with a camera…

I was not the one holding it, but yes. Two cameras. We went to record what was happening. That’s how it started.

What was the initial purpose of filming? Did you take the cameras as protection?

On the one hand, it was to protect ourselves against anything that might happen, on the other hand, it was to record that moment. Film it and see what was happening there. What we encountered was beyond our worst nightmares.

Did you also take cameras to the occupation of the IKA headquarters you had previously staged?

Yes, small cameras then too, to record everything. As well as for protection, we use the cameras to film material that we can then upload on Zero Tolerance’s social media.  

After the press conference we held at the Lechaina Child Care Centre (KEPEP) on the third day and our departure on the fourth day, the first thing I did was to edit some early material, which is still available online, to accompany the press conference in Athens, to show the journalists and launch the discussion.

When did you decide that you wanted to turn this into a documentary?

I decided during the occupation. I realised that this was an issue I needed to follow up. So, I returned at various intervals, no longer as an “occupier” but first and foremost as a disabled person. And I kept filming. I stayed inside the unit for three, sometimes four days at a time, left, returned, again and again. These past four years, I have made 34 trips to Lechaina if my memory does not fail me. I keep a diary…

This allowed us…

You use the first-person plural?

Not out of politeness, but because I consider this to be a group project, not my work exclusively.

Anyway, this allowed us to observe how things evolved inside Lechaina because one year later, Nikolaidis’ team arrived to implement the interim intervention. The emergency relief intervention for the residents was introduced, and we began to see how these people changed thanks to it.

How their behaviour changed, how the residents we first met, who were uncommunicative, tied up, inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, eyes unfocused, began to blossom in the year and a half that followed the start of the intervention. We watched them develop their skills, we heard them speak, utter words, we heard others express specific requests, “I want a bedside table”, “I want my own clothes”, “I want a TV set”, “I want a remote control”. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving “the prescribed treatment for their own good”.

We saw them step outside. Leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, and that momentous occasion when they saw the front door, stepped outdoors. We witnessed their fears and inhibitions. They did not want to break their routine. For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps; “bed restraint” or “mechanical restraint” as they call it. Some did indeed refuse to cooperate. But that is perfectly normal. Fear was the cause.

But we also saw people suddenly use a spoon and feed themselves, it was incredible! Because up until then they had been bottle-fed, lying down, gulping down liquidised meals in seconds. They did not know how to use their mouths to eat. That is why the teeth of nearly all the residents are in a terrible state. This change took place inside the institution – we did not go to a new space where things were different. It was inside those premises, that place of torture, that the situation changed.

What I had not anticipated in the making of this documentary was filming the dead. People we had met. Attempts were made to remove them from the institution, but they subsequently passed away. I’m not talking about elderly people, they were young.

Take Panagiotis, for example, the oldest resident at fifty years old. It is a miracle he has managed to survive like this, staring at the ceiling. The people who died were much younger: Christos and Ellie and Adriana and Maria.  Ellie was fifteen. Adriana had just turned nineteen. She was the blind girl.

We imagine you have spoken to the staff during your visits. You must have interviewed some of them…

They did not want to be interviewed. Now that they have found out I’m not filming for the sake of it, that I am creating something specific, they might change their mind. I never film with any formality; I do not shout “action!” I prefer things to be spontaneous, a recording of reality without altering the environment so that the actual circumstances remain unchanged. This means that the set up must be minimal. Small cameras to avoid creating a sense of occasion, no boom mics, no lights, no large crew wearing headphones.

So, I met them as individuals first and foremost, learned about their lives, their stories, how they ended up working at the unit since most of them had no previous background, no connection to this field. That did not surprise us, they are locals who found work. Some of them have been working there since the very first day, so we heard about how they were thrown in at the deep end when the institution opened, without any organisational setup. They brought the residents there without any idea of how to deal with them. The staff told us how they ended up organising themselves and creating these conditions, meaning the beds that they enclosed in bars, turning them into cages.

Which they refer to as cots or playpens among themselves.

 Yes. Of course, the term was coined by the former Minister of Health, Katerina Papakosta. “Playpens” then, and that “strapping them down is for their own good” so that “they cannot harm themselves”. Once again, was it the chicken or the egg? When you are enclosed in a confined space for a prolonged period, without any stimulation, no sensory stimulation, no psycho-emotional stimulation, then you begin to hit yourself, to drink your own urine, to eat your own faeces and all the other things you hear about. But this applies to every human being subjected to these conditions, you do not need to have an impairment to reach that point. The institutionalisation makes you impaired. Of course, all behaviours are attributed to their disabilities, it is the easiest narrative to adopt. They tell you, “Can’t you see what they are like?”.

We imagine you have also wondered how these people accept to subject other human beings to this abuse. Do you have an answer to that?

I know that they struggled at first, at least according to their narratives.

Morally?

Morally, I would say yes, they morally struggled with strapping people down. The system is set up in such a way as to render them responsible for some people. But given that this conversation is constantly rehashed, the issue is not whether we can hire more staff so that the torture can go on, so that there is “better monitoring” and residents can continue to be drugged up to the eyeballs. The issue is that no matter how much personnel you hire, you are still running an institution. And the concept of an institution is not that far removed from the concept of a barracks or a prison. Wake up at set times, eat at set times, sleep at set times.

Were these people convinced by scientists that this is the appropriate approach?

Scientists prescribed both “mechanical restraint” and the drug dosages. With absolutely no supervision. In fact, in some cases, they added a new medication to the mix without discontinuing the previous medication. Without anyone ever checking drug interactions or potential side effects. We saw the end result. Zombies. That’s it.

For years the personnel refused to accept the new state of affairs. They did not want to accept that there is an alternative way to provide care. 

Because it meant stepping outside their comfort zones?

I think they did not want to accept that they might be doing something wrong. The prevailing attitude was “Are you here to tell me that what I have been doing for twenty-five, thirty years is not right? How dare you?”

But you are not just telling them this is wrong, you are saying this is inhuman, this is torture.

 “We love these children very much, but there is no other way to manage them. They are monsters. They are unpredictable. If we don’t restrain them, they’ll be climbing up the walls. They could eat the plaster. They could eat their own faeces. They could swallow a large object, choke and die.” These are all actual words we have heard. That is why our position is that none of these people should continue to work in this environment. I don’t mean that they should lose their jobs. I mean that they should go and work in a different environment, certainly not in an institution.

By talking to them, showing them examples from abroad, we managed to persuade a few of them, too few. We were thinking of organising screenings of foreign documentaries on deinstitutionalisation, where the residents themselves discuss life before and after the closure of their institution once they had lived in society and developed their capabilities. The response was, “You are in the Balkans now, this is all too European. Who will fund all this? They’ll run it for half a year and then back to the same old.”

The truth is that we went there having made the conscious decision not to go down that frequent route. Blaming personnel is the easiest thing in the world. That is not to say there is no personal accountability, but the main responsibility lies with the so-called, in our view non-existent, welfare state. It lies with the politicians, who have kept us trapped in a time warp all these years.

And when the issue was all over the news, they would come out with statements. Like former Health Minister Andreas Loverdos in 2011, who stated that he would grant access to any journalist who wished to visit an institution and report on the conditions. And former Deputy Minister of Health Katerina Papakosta, who visited Lechaina following the BBC report and informed us that the situation was not what had been presented, that the “cots” were used for the children’s own protection and that they were standard practice. Then, former Minister Effie Achtsioglou and Deputy Minister Theano Fotiou announced a deinstitutionalisation scheme, and for the first time in Greece, the word “deinstitutionalisation” was pronounced by someone in power.  

What was the reaction at the Lechaina unit?

Their first reaction when deinstitutionalisation was announced and I visited Lechaina was, “It’s going to be just like ERT. They are going to shut it down and fire us all.” They needed to hear reassurances from the ministry that they would not lose their jobs. Very few said, “OK, I can understand why this needs to happen, this situation cannot continue. What will our part be going forward? How will this thing work? What’s the next step?” I told them, “It would be far better to work in a real home in the city of Lechaina or a place nearby and work in more humane conditions.”

Moreover, the professional foster care scheme had been announced, which would enable some of the workers to foster a resident in their home. Some of them had, indeed, bonded with certain residents, bonded with the “children”, everyone is called a “child” there, even when they are fifty years old, so they could opt for professional fostering and work from home.

The SYRIZA-ANEL former government announced professional foster care but did not take the necessary actions to implement it. How did your interlocutors react to the idea, nonetheless?

I discussed this with a worker who calls one of the residents her “daughter”. I told her, “Why don’t you take your daughter home under the professional foster care scheme then?” She fell silent. She just gaped at me. Being in your workplace and having formed a bond with someone there is very different to transferring that relationship into your own home. I imagine that would require discussions with her husband, her children, her social circle. Even without the implementation of professional foster care, the option to take a resident home for the weekend was still there. All it required was the permission of the Board of Directors. No one ever did that.

Or for the holidays, Christmas…

Every Christmas they host an event for “normal” children who are allowed into the lobby, they do not go further inside, and sing Christmas carols.

There are children who have been inside the unit and decorated the cages...

Yes, from the American Community Schools of Athens (ACS), to brighten up the torture of the people kept inside the cages. Of course, the residents were not physically inside the cages while the students painted them.

Small mercies…

That was one of the most vivid contrasts that struck me as I entered the centre. The dystopian landscape. The stench of excrement, fettered residents moaning and groaning and “I love you” painted on the walls, signed by ACS. I really would like to know what on earth the educator in charge had been thinking.

Returning to the subject of the personnel, I have seen the extent to which they have accepted the work they are asked to carry out and the resulting way of life for the residents. It never ceases to astound me, in all the institutions I have visited, be it Crete, the PIKPA in Voula, Thessaloniki, Komotini, Rhodes… This situation is normalised. It might shock those of us witnessing it for the first time, but that is the reality as far as they are concerned. I was also astounded by the fact that few visiting relatives seemed to be astonished by what they saw. They found it normal too.

We have also witnessed an admission being deterred. A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. The reasoning behind the decision was to save her marriage and spare her other children. She was evidently being pressured by her husband to abandon the disabled child, so they could focus on their “normal” children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears.

Did she take the child with her?

Yes.

So at least one child was spared…

Maybe she split up with her husband. Who knows what kind of pressure she was under? The guilt she carried with her for giving birth to a disabled child. The belief that she was being punished by God for some previous sin… In any case, yes, we were glad that the admission was averted.  But they did admit a new resident recently. Various organisations were mobilised, we opposed the decision publicly, the ministry intervened, and the child was brought to Athens because the public prosecutor would not rescind the order. That is also a big issue. I do not know if a decision to prohibit new admissions at Lechaina has been officially made.

There is a Board of Directors decision to suspend admissions.

Only that. Theano Fotiou, Effie Achtsioglou or the General Secretary for Welfare, I do not think they ever issued a decision to ban new admissions when they decided Lechaina would eventually close. Of course, things are no better elsewhere in Greece. Lechaina differed in the use of those “cots”. But I have seen a resident fettered with ropes in another institution, I have seen those tall “cots” with high bars, allegedly to stop people from falling if they stand up on their beds. All institutions operate along the same lines. Even the smell is the same. They all smell the same.

What did you have in mind when you began working on this documentary?

Look, when you start a documentary, you are not in charge, the reality guides you. Going into Lechaina, I decided to do what the documentary title says: From Asylum to Society. In other words, we decided to take what society rejects by relegating it to an isolated building somewhere far away, record it and bring it before its eyes. I wanted to experience it, to go on this journey that I think is gradually coming to its end. I cannot sit and wait to see how the new government will act.  See if it wants to raze everything that happened before to the ground and do something entirely different. Many rumours are going around, some bordering on science fiction, but there are some others which may find us in agreement. I wanted to record this unbearable situation, which is one hundred per cent legalised and imposed by the state itself. A situation that is connected to the perceptions we all have, including the country’s politicians, about the lives of the disabled who find themselves outside the family circle for some reason, and that is the only protection we afford them.

Unfortunately, a documentary cannot communicate the smells, nor what being there does to someone like you or me. But the conditions… the conditions inside an institution. No matter how good you try to make them, an institution remains a place of torture. Torture that has been normalised using the physical impairments of the those confined there as a pretext.

You must have been hoping for something at the beginning of the documentary, however.

Yes, I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. I did…

Do you feel frustrated?

We are used to frustration… Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that Effie Achtsioglou’s announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the birth family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That they would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.

During the four days of the occupation there was tension, our interactions were formal, information would reach us, Theano Fotiou made a statement, we made a statement. In the end, we decided the pressure group must move from inside Lechaina to headquarters, we announced that we expected to be called to the Ministry to discuss everything we had recorded. At the same time, we sent all the material we had gathered abroad to spark a reaction in Europe, the bodies charged with welfare. We sent it to the UN, and they issued a recommendation that we read out during the press conference we held at Lechaina on the afternoon of the third day, inviting local press. The mayor came, along with various others.

 We broke down on the day of our departure. We broke down because we were saying goodbye to our fellow disabled, and we could not grasp that we were free to leave that place, but they would stay behind. We broke down. We wept. We sobbed. We said goodbye and gathered around a bench outside, by the olive trees and burst into tears. An olive tree is planted every time someone dies. All these people, they enter the institution as children and leave when they are adults… by dying. “Deinstitutionalisation” via movement to the great beyond, if you are a believer. We wept because we knew that we were going home and that from that day forth, we would have to find a way to change the reality we had experienced, no matter what.

I also feel great sadness. Because, for us, the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. They have been ready to leave the institution for a year now. Nikolaidis rightly said from the start that you cannot just take people out of a cage and simply transfer them elsewhere, there needs to be a training and transition process. That process has taken place.

So, I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen. But, sadly, society is not mobilising.  And that is the heart of the matter. The issue of deinstitutionalisation is vast, it concerns a great number of people. In 2014, the Roots Research Centre in Greece estimated that approximately 900 disabled persons are held in institutions. They enter as children and depart as olives. That is the Greek version of deinstitutionalisation. It is a massive issue. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.

How did the National Action Plan for Children come about?

The need to draw up a National Action Plan arose long before 2007. According to EU guidelines, Member States were urged to develop National Action Plans for different policy fields, such as healthcare, welfare, exclusion. The National Action Plan for Children was not a top priority at the time, despite our requests and pressing for a national policy for children to be formulated. We were working with a Committee under the General Secretariat for Youth, which was responsible for submitting evaluations on the implementation of the rights of the child in Greece to the UN. It had to submit reports at various intervals, had sent very few, so we were in breach of duty. Anyway, there were other Action Plans in the works. There was some money left over from the NSRF funds and following pressure exerted by The Smile of the Child, which had developed a good working relationship with the Ministry at the time, the plan was set in motion.

I believe there was institutional pressure from abroad, as well as from within Greece, from associations such as the Greek Association of Social Workers (SKLE) and The Smile of the Child. Media publicity also exerted pressure, news reports that shed light on numerous problems: the number of children piled up in institutions was rising, foster care placements in Greece were negligible, and foster care was not being supported as it should be. There was more support given to the adoption of healthy children and institutions accommodating children with special needs were filling up at the same time. The pressure being exerted was significant.

Why was The Smile of the Child chosen?

The Ministry’s Department of Child protection was short-staffed, and of the existing staff, the scientific personnel that could actually do something was limited. Moreover, it was drowning in bureaucracy, so it needed external assistance. The Smile of the Child, enjoying a high profile and exerting pressure, also played its part. That is why I think it was chosen, that and the fact that as a body it stood outside party politics.

Additionally, The Smile of the Child has always had a good working relationship with the various services. A meeting was held about whether The Smile could take on the plan, a budget was available, a very small budget, and I was asked to be in charge of scientific planning. Our communication was excellent, and we agreed on what the priorities for the children should be. I had been assisting them with several matters already. We had also run various activities together. We had trained some of its members.

So, I accepted to do it without remuneration. The Smile of the Child wished to recompense me, but I declined. I believe certain matters should be exempt from any kind of agenda, that nothing should be allowed to cast a shadow on them.

But why wasn’t another state body chosen to bear the responsibility for this?

That is a legitimate question, but which state child agency had the capacity to do so? The Institute of Child Health is one such legitimate state body. Although its staff is not vast, it could have acted as the contracting entity. However, being a public sector entity, the processes it must follow are complex and time-consuming. EU guidelines at the time encouraged the use of NGOs, which are more flexible.

An Institution could have been another option, but even Institutions were drowning in their own problems. Or a Research Institute, a university, but there were no Social Work departments at the university level, only at the level of Technological Educational institutes (TEI). The University of Athens could have taken over, it was producing some noteworthy work in the field of paediatrics at the time, but the work carried out was very specialised and they were not active in the field of welfare as a whole. They mainly focused on children’s mental health.

I think The Smile of the Child suited the state because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided, which led to this result. 

My underlying conviction that NGOs should be evaluated and monitored rather than operate without accountability, especially in matters of financial operation and legitimacy and ethics, aside, The Smile has always been receptive to our feedback. I was impressed by the extent to which it incorporated the training we provided.  Even its President impressed me with how quickly he assimilated the information imparted and how much he respected ethics relating to the handling of various issues. As to the financial aspects, I was never involved in that regard, but the scope of its activities is vast. And The Smile of the Child has always been effective.

There is another issue, which I often raised in my lectures: to what extent can a non-social organisation expand in terms of work volume or structures? In the sense that it eventually becomes too unwieldy and complex. My only issue with The Smile was that the needs were both great and ever-increasing, which presented the risk of bureaucracy and centralisation. However, at least up to and including our collaboration, The Smile had managed to decentralise its decision-making and to dispense with the need for a bloated central organ. It appointed highly trained and capable managers who could operate effectively, be flexible, and who were prepared to go beyond the call of duty. It had cultivated an internal culture that encompassed not only professionalism but also volunteerism and high awareness of what the job entails – because child protection in Greece has always been non-existent, with a few bright exceptions.

Was The Smile of the Child suited to such a task?

The Smile of the Child was useful in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.

It was an enormous task that had to be completed in a short time. We split Greece into Regions and set up scientific teams in each Region to supervise and guide the researchers carrying out the interviews. I drafted the questionnaire with the assistance of Mr Economou, Professor of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. We trained our managers at headquarters and they then trained the regional managers. Our researchers were all Social Science graduates who had been trained in the questionnaire and had been briefed which social welfare organisations to address.

It all happened within a carefully designed framework. They did not just go anywhere asking anything. It was simultaneously very structured and decentralised. We employed a greater number of researchers to speed things up because the questionnaire was long and required time and we also wanted to be able to monitor validity.

Who did your survey address?

It addressed all of the country’s social welfare organisations – state, NGOs and private. It addressed everyone who agreed to participate. We had also approached all the services registered with the Ministry in each Region and some others that our Network had recorded. Most of them responded. We obtained a very good sample, with a high response rate and degree of validity. I do not think many refused to participate, but not everyone was able to respond to all the questions, especially state organisations. Some of them might also not have had the requisite data, but I think that collectively they provided a wealth of material.

Is The Smile of the Child to be credited with this initiative?

Exclusively. But it is of little significance because the Ministry christens it a “Supervised Entity” and the initiative is funded by the NSRF. The Ministry would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.

The study was published in February 2009.

Yes, but it had been completed earlier, in May 2008 if I am not mistaken. The study was delivered six months after its commission. The Smile of the Child was most helpful, a couple of its social workers and other personnel were close to us providing input, and it always paid the researchers and all the other staff on time. At the executive level, everyone worked for free.

What conclusions did you draw about child protection in our country during the preparation of this plan?

That it is non-existent. That there are a few shelters in a raging storm. And that the pre-existing network has no horizontal interconnection. The biggest issue facing Welfare Services is their horizontal cooperation and coordination because, in the absence of such a horizontal interconnection, there can be no effective cooperation. Even if I were to establish ten services in a region, provide plenty of funding and scientific personnel and start offering the services within their remit, their effectiveness would be cancelled out by the absence of cooperation with the other available service providers.

Let me give you an example. Let us take a mother and child who have been abused by the father and left the family home. The services the mother needs are provided by ten different bodies. The problem is that the remit of each service is limited. For example, one service says, “we can cover your rent”, another one says, “we can provide childcare”, another service offers accommodation in a refuge or job training, and so on. If all these services are not interconnected, then the timing of the aid offered can be off, meaning the mother will not be able to assimilate and use these services effectively. You could call and say, “We have found you a job”, but the mother responds, “I do not have childcare”. “This is now available”, “But I have no place to stay.”

How are things in the Healthcare sector?

The same issues face healthcare. We have specialists who attend to an individual, and everyone gives their diagnosis and prescribes medication, but no one attends to the patient as a whole, no one who can say for example, the anti-inflammatory drugs prescribed by the orthopaedic could cause this patient heart failure. This could only be seen by a family GP and a professional who can assess the risk not only to the individual concerned but the whole family. It is not just the individual who is ailing, but the whole system.

It is the same with welfare. The issue is not whether someone committed theft, or a man is being abusive, but that the whole system is ailing. We cannot just look at the symptoms and not identify the causes in order to address and overcome them. Yes, the emergency relief must be provided on the spot, but how do you help someone make the transition from victimhood to independence and self-sufficiency long-term. Without the horizontal interconnection of all welfare services, you cannot do anything.

Which is the decentralised body currently active in the field of welfare? The church. Right now, the church is present in every neighbourhood, is it not? There can even be two churches in each area, with Parish Boards, benevolence funds, women’s charity associations. Unfortunately, until I left Greece, they followed the tenet of ministerial rather than social work. They were providers of alms, which does not help someone escape a situation.

Therefore, churches need to be incorporated into the provision of welfare. Start with the care for the elderly; train them, explain what is going on, in a way that resources can be grouped and shared out. The elderly, too, need comforting, need companionship. These things are costly to the state, yet they could be accessed for free, right next door. Why should the person in question have to get up and go to the Region’s offices so that the Region then comes to the individual to assist in providing companionship? The same thing should apply to the Open Care Centres for the Elderly (KAPI). That horizontal interconnection is of the utmost importance. And it affects the family because child protection is linked to the family. Only in the family’s absence, when the family is missing or unsuitable, do we have some institutions in place.

Look at what is happening at “Paidon” Children’s Hospital now. Children are admitted following the intervention of the public prosecutor. What use is that admission? Is there someone consistently looking after the child, advocating for that child, addressing the child’s ailing network? During my presidency at the National Centre for Social Solidarity (EKKA), for example, we were charged with assisting abused women, domestic violence victims. We held counselling sessions with a psychoanalyst to provide psychological support, we provided legal aid, and we could and did ask to see the perpetrators too, to help the perpetrators. Because when someone commits an error, it does not follow that it is in their nature to always do so. Something has led to that act, there is a confluence of many factors.

They might have been victims of abuse themselves.

Certainly, and you help them, and after you have helped them, you can keep seeing them as a couple. In other words, we do not believe that removing children from their family and then hanging the family out to dry is the answer.  We need to counsel the family and assist it. When the Children’s House in Cyprus came into being, Mr Nikolaidis and I decided to establish one here too. Because the forensic evaluation of abuse is a difficult matter and you cannot take statements from minors in the way that the police does. Lawyers, too, in their attempts to help their client, are abusive to the children. The children must be protected.

I have also spoken with Minors Public Prosecutors, such as Xeni Dimitriou, who was one of the ablest prosecutors in this field. They are not many. Often the post is seen as a stepping stone towards promotion to another post. Minors Public Prosecutors also need to be part of a group fostering a different culture and be supported by doctors, psychologists, everybody else, because it is a complex matter.   

At present, children and adults are vilified on television during court trials and other instances of abuse. I can assure you, based on my own experience, that the truth is not what is being presented. It is not what the children say, nor the truth claimed by the adults. The truth is something else, something that cannot be detected by journalists. The Children’s House in Cyprus came into being because the NGO in charge was able to obtain and implement all the know-how from abroad. They also had access to EU funds, and they were able to set up a commendable Children’s House, which is exclusively run by scientists without the interference of any administrative players.

The state is a player, though.

The state is the supervisory body. The House belongs to it, but state officials act only in a supervisory capacity, they do not provide services. The services are provided by the House’s staff. But the NGO is in charge, they monitor them, they are updated weekly. Ongoing training is provided, it does not stop. They invite people from abroad, receive know-how, publicise, they do many, many things. That is why we initiated more actions. There are other NGOs in Cyprus, too, for example, -------- which addresses the abuse of women. The “Foni” National Strategy Implementation Council is another one. In other words, the failure of welfare to provide the services needed in this field have brought the organisations providing them to the forefront. And the citizens of Cyprus now show greater trust in them, because welfare lost credibility following the publication of articles on the issues concerning benefits and welfare staff.

Through the National Action Plan, you set some guidelines. Were they respected down the line?

I have not made an assessment, but I think the guidelines preoccupied many people. They have been extensively shared, and studies also mention that they have aided research and reflection. At the time, the proposals were subject to certain constraints. They had to be feasible. They had to be incorporable in the Ministry’s plan to receive funding and be implementable. So a number of these proposals is affected by feasibility and the need not to alienate everyone, by claiming that they have no idea what they are talking about and what they are requesting. At the same time, other proposals are more long-term and focus on culture and the general way forward. I do not think these were grasped by the political personnel and the bureaucrats, but they greatly influenced universities and academics. I was impressed by the Democritus University of Thrace Conference on Social Deprivation, Child Protection and Human Rights, focusing on the changes that needed to be made in child protection. An international conference was held, which I was unfortunately unable to attend as I was abroad, at the university’s Department of Social Work, whose President is Charalampos Poulopoulos, whom I had worked with at KETHEA (Therapy Centre for Dependent Individuals).

We do not dispute that the guidelines are a point of reference during conferences, or that they have assisted many scientists and academics. The effort was made, some guidelines were issued, a National Action Plan was formulated. But then, every subsequent government comes up with its own Action Plan.

During the following years, some of our proposals were announced, albeit selectively. They were moves in the right direction and can also be attributed to the influence of managers who read the proposal and whom we had the chance to train. What is missing is for them to say, “Yes, we want to reform the system. Come join us so that we can see what reforms are needed”, but this must be accompanied by a willingness to undertake administrative changes. Administrative changes are also needed, responsibilities need to be reshuffled, scientific protocols and standards must be drawn up and implemented.

When I worked in Healthcare, and we implemented the changes in hospitals, there were specifications, so many beds, so many doctors, so many social workers etc. The personnel of any kind of Service is subject to how many you serve, what services you provide, this affects how much staff you will need. If we copy what is happening at Lechaina, 40 to 50 children and a staff of ten or two, yes you might increase capacity, but still, people are being abused.

So, we need to see first what kind of reforms we seek and take it from there because the truth is that the Welfare Sector is loosely seen as not particularly desirable and the pre-existing models were always reciprocal models. We establish social security and then build a safety network leaving a hole in the middle down which thousands of suffering people fall and then we pretend not to see them and ask for the assistance of volunteers. I do not know if the time has come to see social welfare in conjunction with our social security system, because Greece still has some positive aspects that are absent in other countries. As we speak, state healthcare is free for all, whatever its quality may be. There are gradations, but even then, if you visit a state hospital you will see anyone and everyone, Roma, repatriates, refugees, they all go, wait for their turn and will at some point receive medical care. This is an approach missing in other countries. The same with medication. That is not the case with Welfare.

We have heard terrible reports. About minors with anal warts who simply received treatment and returned home, without any of the doctors administering care wondering how the child came to be infected in the first place. 

But where could they refer the child to? To another Service? In a hospital employing two social workers at most? Go to “Paidon” and talk to the children there. They do not want to receive assistance; they want to leave. The disorder is so serious that hospitals are not always the best place to provide treatment. Neither is an institution. It is as if we are training them to be delinquents and dependent forever.

But you spoke of a Service network.

In the context of redesigning all of these components, I mentioned the need for them to be connected to a single Centre acting as the supervisory or competent body, so that everyone can be aware of and record their needs, their deficiencies, what they require, what they do not require and know that they are solely responsible. Because if I am dealing with it, and you are dealing with it, at the end of the day no one is effectively dealing with it, and we could be spending large sums to no effect because our timing, as I already mentioned, could be off.

Moreover, how is it even possible to announce that Greece has a budget surplus, that a given sum is left over, and then distribute those funds to the uniformed services? By all means, let us allocate them, but the heart of the matter is which needs are you addressing? These are all things that happen, unfortunately. The fact is that, in Denmark for example, which has a comprehensive welfare system, the underpinning mentality is not the mentality we inherited from the Ottomans, namely dealing with things by paying out of your own pocket; the mentality is one of trust in the state. They give more than half their salary to the state and know that everything will be fine because it will respond both effectively and to a high standard. Here, even if you personally have the resources, you still cannot access social services.

I collaborate with therapists, and you have no idea how many prosperous citizens struggle to access services. In other words, it is not only certain social categories that are ailing. The problems are many, the situations are multiproblematic, the whole of society is ailing.

You were the President of the National Centre for Social Solidarity (EKKA) around ten years ago. At present, how do you assess its course?

EKKA should be the Ministry’s executive branch, meaning it should be monitoring everything. The Ministry could have charged EKKA to oversee everything in a scientific manner, without bureaucracy. EKKA could be playing a leading role, although it has not been reinforced with scientific personnel to the extent that it should be. We utilised several NSRF funds effectively and that is how we were able to achieve something, and I tried to emphasise its role as executor and coordinator during my tenure. We have two helplines for adults too, and we also tried to integrate anyone providing related services within Welfare, so that they could have access and their work included, and so that people could find them.

Why is there no political will for reform?

One reason is that the Ministries do not have the requisite scientific personnel. Most politicians are blinded by the short-sightedness of clientelism and are distrustful. They want to ensure they leave their mark in the short-term. That causes problems. Planning policy and implementing policy are two different things. Policies must be implemented by others, and that coordination could be effectuated by EKKA along with the whole infrastructure. We did try this with all thirteen existing Centres of Social Welfare, it is set up and could easily happen provided the Ministry is willing.

Another problem is funding. We need to secure stable funding and not allocate funds willy-nilly, hand them out as if they were alms. We need to have stable funding, and EKKA must be carrying out constant research: How many children are we responsible for, where are they, who cares for them, what resources do we have? We have the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), we have the indices, we have tools which, if allowed to be scientifically coordinated by someone, could work very effectively.

But that work is demonstrably not being carried out. How can anyone hope that the chaos reigning in the field of child protection in this country could possibly change?

As we speak, the greatest means of pressure are the problems themselves, unfortunately. It is not the pressure levied by the scientific community, nor the EU. The scientific and academic community, unfortunately, do not have that kind of influence. It does what it can, it records everything, but movements for change are weak. I attempted to coordinate the NGOs, to make them aware that they are ten bodies facing the same issues, that competing among themselves for visibility is a waste of resources, that we should coordinate by forming an Association, work together, etc. But right now, a single positive step has not been taken. For example, there is no obligation to join the register and elect a Committee that will collaborate with the Ministry so that we can coordinate our actions and receive information.

EKKA had a system under which only bodies that had been assessed could receive Ministerial funding. We had an evaluation system, which was not the most modern of its kind because its contents were determined by the Ministry, but at least we had a register of 200-300 different bodies that also needed the data to obtain the prerequisite approval to receive funds from the Ministry, otherwise the Ministry could not authorise funding because it was institutionally prevented from doing so. In the rest of the world, all bodies are submitted to such evaluations. Tomorrow morning, I could submit my articles of association, rent a flat in Patisia and start accommodating young girls facing various issues and I could be a paedophile and you would have no idea how many children are staying at the flat nor what I get up to.

Could this be happening in our country, Mr Altanis? Is no one checking?

It could be happening; I cannot exclude it.  Because we still live in a society that expresses interest and concern, it would come to light at some point, albeit too late. But it is something that could happen because the institutional framework allows it.

EKKA runs a national helpline for children. But if I were to see someone beating a child right now, who would I call? If we asked any of the people around us right now, they would say The Smile of the Child.

It is the best-known line, we agree on that, although the answer would have to be 112, which is the EU emergency number. There are specific reasons for it: The Smile has many volunteers producing its adverts and it has used the Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television effectively. Because EKKA is a state body it stumbled over certain issues: it would not run its adverts, not promote them, consider them competitive toward The Smile etc. There is no institutional framework allowing the state to ensure it is utilising its structures effectively, and I am not sure whether the financial brains of each government see this as a priority. In the sense that when the demand for a service becomes evident, it will swamp them. I had raised it at the Ministry once, said we need to get out there and inform people about a certain topic, and their response was, “And then what? Leave it as it is, we will be swamped.”

Moreover, consider the fact that welfare rights are not actionable. This means that if a service fails to provide me with welfare, I have no legal recourse. Our model suffers from such legal vacuums. And I should also inform you that even though it was the Ministry of Labour that maintained the financial allocation of welfare funds, there was greater scientific expertise at the Ministry of Health and greater understanding. The Ministry of Labour is still very social security centred and I do not know if they have since fostered the requisite culture. I think there is still some way to go, but there are also some very creative forces at play, such as the Municipalities or the thirteen Centres of Social Welfare in the Regions, but their responsibilities do not extend to that.  

We need to give them responsibility for regional coordination, and EKKA should be made responsible for coordinating the Regions. That could be a swift model bearing immediate results until a more comprehensive structure is set up. Are you aware of how many desperately needed welfare premises collapsed and closed due to lack of funds and personnel, and were then given to NGOs to run their programmes? PIKPA (Rehabilitation Centre for Disabled Children) used to own buildings all over Greece. Where have the buildings gone, the premises? Many premises, whose exact location we do not even know, are demolished, lost. They could not even maintain the Gerokomeion Retirement Home!

How relevant is your Action Plan today, ten years after its publication? Would it need a significant review?

It would certainly need to be updated. Many bodies have changed, some new institutions and organisations have entered the field, but we also need a different approach to the new data. I have already mentioned the creation of the thirteen Centres of Social Welfare in the Regions. The Municipalities have also expanded during that time through the Organisation provided for by the Kapodistrias reform, so we have that too. I don’t know if anything has changed for NGOs in terms of the governing institutional framework. EKKA has been entrusted with new responsibilities. I think that it could, if it wished, utilise them and move in some of the welfare directions indicated, but the bodies involved are different now.  State bodies have decreased, and the number of NGOs has risen.

Would you do it again?

You have caught me in a transitional phase. I stopped my academic activities a few months ago, and I am only interested in research now. The truth is that I have declined many meetings and some proposals to accept administrative-scientific posts because I think it is pointlessly soul-destroying and that once you are an academic, you cannot compromise too much with all the different agendas. But I would always be interested in research, in a study. I think research is the only way we can gain control and be able to say whether we are doing the right thing, but research does not suffice, you need to put assessment systems, evaluation mechanisms, in place. Creating something and leaving it to its own devices is not enough.

I feel very disappointed and frustrated, but I would do it again. If another study were to take place now, I would agree to become involved. But I would not act as the President, as a Consultant, any kind of relationship that encompasses dependence is not an option for me. I cannot accept such conditions anymore; they are too abusive.

Was your experience at EKKA abusive?

Yes, certainly, the political leadership and the Ministries behaved as if we were the enemy.

What kind of resistance did you meet there then?

Ignorance, lack of scholarship and scientific understanding, all kinds of agendas, bureaucracy, lack of empathy. All of it, unfortunately. There were many hardworking people, certainly. But when you are ignorant, you cannot help. Love is not enough; it is necessary but not enough. When I visited the PIKPA Pentelis, I found many volunteers there and asked them what they were doing. They were taking the children to play and when I asked them what exactly they were doing, if they knew the child, the child’s specific needs, all they knew was that the child was fair-haired and blue-eyed. They sat there and played. And I banned everyone, I said: “Go receive training in what you are exactly supposed to do.” Some reacted badly, others accepted. We all need to know what is required and how to do it and act in a coordinated manner. In Cyprus, we began to implement a few programmes during the crisis so we could see how many people were involved. We visited a few institutions and realised that it was the same people who went to two, three different parishes. That is the point, welfare should be aggressive, not defensive.

We have talked with many people active in the field of child protection. Some of them have confessed that there are times when they witness an incident and are at a loss as to who to address because they are aware of the system’s flaws.  But who else can you turn to?

The welfare model should be this: all residents should be registered with and have a general practitioner. It is unthinkable that a person should have a problem and not know who to first turn to, the teacher, a psychologist, a psychiatrist? Someone needs to manage this. I used to jest that in Greece you need a PhD just to figure out the service you should turn to. Without registration, there can be no scientific protocol… Surgeries, hospitals, they all follow a protocol. No one can act as they please. The same must apply to Welfare.

How did the institution of the Ombudsman on Children’s Rights come about?

Over the years, the institution of a Children’s Ombudsman was established in a number of European countries, particularly after the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. Towards the end of the ‘90s or possibly in early 2000, the need for an equivalent institution in Greece was discussed. The office of the Citizen’s Advocate (Ombudsperson) had just been established in Greece, so Parliament and the Greek authorities opted against the creation of another Ombudsman’s office, even though in most European countries the Citizen’s Ombudsman and the Children’s Ombudsman are two separate entities. Here, the Children’s Ombudsman is a Deputy Ombudsman on Children’s Rights.

Giorgos Kaminis became the Citizen’s Advocate in 2003, having served as Deputy Ombudsman for Human Rights. As Citizen’s Advocate, he looked for someone to fill the post of Children’s Ombudsman. He approached me as someone with a legal background and work experience in the field and asked if I would be willing to take on the post. I explained that I was well versed in the European system and told him, “Yes, I accept. Under the condition that I will keep you updated, I will work in full coordination with your office for as long as I remain at this post, but the department of the Children’s Ombudsman must be set up along different lines.”

That was the agreement from the start: to meet regularly, focus on communication and employ a multidisciplinary team. At some point, we had a scientific team of fourteen. I recently saw that that number has shrunk to six.

How was the office staffed?

Mr Kaminis was not familiar with this field. He had an open mind and a broad approach. Initially, he proposed that we begin with an office of “three to four specialists and take it from there”. I explained that I disagreed, that I wanted a strong scientific team so that we could do our job properly, both domestically and internationally, following examples from other countries. For example, the Polish Children’s Ombudsman, the best and most powerful Children’s Ombudsman in Europe, is an independent institution with a staff of forty. Wherever the staff is two to four people, the office genuinely underperforms; much less is done.

So, I pushed for it from the start, and we agreed. We built the office up to a staff of fourteen, that included lawyers, psychologists, social workers, educators, a publicist—an interdisciplinary team. It is a prerequisite if you also want to enjoy a good reputation in society as an institute doing serious work. You can’t cover everything, of course. In some fields, you need to know that other specialised institutions are operating too; but you listen and have a global overview. That is what we tried to do during my fourteen and a half years at the office of the Children’s ombudsman: have an overview and advocate for children.

Why did the staff numbers dwindle?

Some left and their post could not be refilled during the difficult years of the crisis. Some transferred to other departments of the Citizen’s Advocate office, some were seconded to postgraduate courses and so on. It could possibly be attributed to current leadership choices. This field might not necessarily be as visible, as powerful.

What actions did the Children’s Ombudsman undertake during the fourteen years of your tenure?

Firstly, we handled cases, reports. A letter or a person would arrive at the office. Reports by the children themselves are very few, internationally. Worldwide. Children do not easily approach a person in this institution. Where you might receive reports, complaints and so on is after you visit a children’s space, either by post or email.  

The Polish and the Dutch also consider verbal reports made by children, that such and such is happening, as formal reports. The child does not need to put their concerns in writing. Moreover, actions are not confined to written forms of communication and mediation. They can take other forms, like what we used to do regularly. Every year, we would visit around sixty schools. I was often present during those visits. We would visit a school, see one or two grades. By talking with the children, we would get a feel for them.  We would listen to their opinions. Frequently, they would express complaints. Teachers would not be present at these meetings. Children would say things like “this teacher does such and such”. We would tell them to leave it up to us to investigate what is going wrong. We did not confine ourselves to identified reports. Very often, children will tell you what is going on. They will say things like, “When I have a problem at home, who do I speak to?” or “I need to see a psychologist”.

Would they actually tell you that?

Very often. The children would either speak up in public without giving away that it concerned them personally or find us during the break. During those visits, we would have a two-hour break. A child would come up to you during the break and say, “Can I tell you something?” because we had established a relationship of trust during the visit.  

What ages did you see?

We visited third graders to twelfth graders. We would have a general discussion, and through that general discussion, we would broach the topics of children’s rights and abuse. We would ask them, “What do you think? How are things working? What should be done?” I always liked to give examples, short stories during the discussion. “There was a child somewhere, something happened to them, their parents did or did not do something, the child needed help” and so on. When children hear a story, they identify and then they ask you questions, tell you that they too know a child that this or that happened to. Then, during the break, they will approach you to share a personal story. They say, “Please don’t tell anyone, but I need to talk to you about this…”

Therefore, in those situations, you are handling an issue. It is not recorded as a report, but you know it is an issue, which you will address, and which will sometimes call for an intervention.

For example, I remember a child confessing that his family was putting a lot of pressure on him about a sporting activity; he was very good at it, and the family was pressing him to become an athlete. The child expressed that he was under a lot of strain and wanted to speak with someone. With his permission, I immediately informed the teacher and the school addressed the family issues.

I now recall a teenage girl at a school who told me during the break, “What you say about abuse is all well and good, but my father is a policeman, and an alcoholic and nothing will be done about it. I’m just waiting to turn eighteen and leave. I just wanted to tell you that, so you don’t think you are actually solving any problems.” We talked to her and found a way for her first to start seeing one of the teachers and then sought the assistance of the support coordinator at the Ministry of Education, which runs Youth Support Stations, to help her process and manage her feelings. Sometimes it is not possible to escape the abuse but processing the emotions is too much to handle; the belief that “nothing can change and I will keep getting beaten up” or “I will watch my mother get beaten up until I turn eighteen”.

Do you first bring the child into contact with a person of reference at the school?

You enter the school and listen, and then you manage what you hear depending on the situation and its gravity. Sometimes you give advice first; do this or that. Secondly, you may make a connection with a person of reference within the school. Thirdly, you can recommend that the child writes to you, that can also happen sometimes. You tell the children you can write to us at this email address and then the children do write. Fourthly, you can follow an empowerment process; you ask the child, “Do you have a relative or someone you can talk to? How will you talk to them?” In other words, you respond to a request initiated by the child.

I remember that in 90% of the schools we visited and possibly more, children came to us during the breaks to report certain issues. The issues they raised spanned the full spectrum of children’s rights.  From very serious to ostensibly simple incidents, like a fight, for example, which is nonetheless an issue to the child that approaches you. Through this process, you learn, and you gain information about how the support system works. You implement the action at the school. You see how the school community responds and you bring that knowledge back to the office, so you are pooling information. This process might not be a reporting mechanism, but you gain a full picture which allows you to intervene subsequently, allows you to say that this important issue must be addressed.

So, as I said, firstly, we handled reports and, secondly, we made visits, a great many visits. The latter allowed us to gather information, based on which we could intervene and instigate change at various levels. Let me give you an example since we are discussing abuse today. In the early days, during a visit to Kos for a case I was attending, teachers expressed their concern about whether they would enjoy legal protection for alerting the public prosecutor. They wanted the law to state somewhere that they could report to the public prosecutor and be legally covered. That was one of the reasons why I, as a member of the legislation drafting committee, insisted that Parliament Law 2500/2006 include an article covering such reports. This became Article 23, according to which teachers are obliged to inform the school principal if they are informed or realise that a crime is committed and so on. The wording might sound extreme or shall we say, magisterial, but it is there to protect teachers.

In my view, what is needed is for the incident to be put in writing. That is what I tell teachers: if you put it in writing, the responsibility then also lies with the school principal, who might do nothing. There is not a school in the country that has not received information about many, many instances of domestic violence. And still, legal recourse is rarely taken, as you know. What is it that we want? Do we want every school to make reports to the public prosecutors? We do not have a system in place to handle that. No. I am against such an approach. The reason we want the law to state “obliged to” is to legally cover teachers when they need to take this course of action.

But this only applies to teachers who want to take action.

Look, a teacher who hides and fails to address an issue should indeed be held accountable. I totally agree. And that is one of the great challenges facing us: how can we monitor teachers who are informed and do nothing. But, in my view, the biggest challenge for our country is how to handle issues extrajudicially. In other words, for the teachers to have specific instructions, for the system to have clarity and the ability to find solutions of another kind.

That is what a Children’s Ombudsman is for. To spread this kind of message. For example, a teacher, who had attended some of our training workshops, called me about a student, a girl of around thirteen or fifteen. The teacher told me, “I am dealing with an issue at school, related to the training you gave us, and I need advice on how to handle it. This student came to school injured, and I asked her what happened. At first, she did not want to say. Then, in private, she told me that her father had hit her after discovering she had been out with a male friend rather than a female friend as she had told him.” Those were the facts of what happened, which are grounds for making a report to the public prosecutor.

The teacher then asked me, “should I go to the public prosecutor, or should we find another way to help the child and the parent and find out what is going on?” I replied, “Can you try the second option? It is harder but more effective in my opinion.” With our guidance, she did speak to the child, and with the child’s consent, the teacher held a meeting with both the student and the parent. The teacher told me that at the end of the meeting all three were in tears, because the girl said, “Yes, I did lie, but I did it because I know my father does not like me to go out with my male friend”. And the father said, “Yes, I did hit her, but I am unemployed, I have lost my job, I’m having a difficult time with everything and I need help to cope and I need honesty.” The teacher told them, “I am not a psychologist although I am acting as a psychologist right now. Can you promise me that you will seek counselling because I cannot continue to be responsible for this?” They made a commitment and then they were referred to a family therapist. What I am trying to say is that this approach is more appropriate and effective, because the teacher in question decided not to turn a blind eye, not to ignore what is happening, but to do something. I believe that is what teachers must learn to do.  They must learn to make referrals. To know who the psychologist is.

There is also another concern. There are instances where a well-intentioned teacher makes a report about an incident that is subsequently not proven, then got the teacher into a lot of trouble. The teacher becomes involved in a lawsuit, and they are the only ones with any evidence, they do not have another professional who can back them up. I advise teachers, “Do make the report when you feel that the child needs recourse to justice but also gather other kinds of evidence, witnesses. Do not act alone.” It is not enough that the child came and told you something at a given point. Every school should have access to a psychologist and a social worker.

Can the Juvenile Protection Teams help?

They cannot intervene in schools and the provision allowing Juvenile Protection Teams to investigate a matter without a public prosecutor’s order has fallen into disuse, unfortunately. Initially, the ministerial decision stated that they could investigate without the need for an order from the public prosecutor. Some did, but then the parents took legal action against them. Subsequently, a stop was put to this practice because it was considered that the Juvenile Protection Teams did not enjoy sufficient legal protection when undertaking investigations without a public prosecutor’s order.

I have received reports from Members of the Greek Association of Social Workers (SKLE) that, in the early days of the law being implemented, some of the social workers who performed investigations without an order from the public prosecutor as stipulated by the ministerial decision went on to face disciplinary proceedings. The provision may have been enshrined in the ministerial decision, but it was not in absolute harmony with other legislation. In any event, the use of that measure has somewhat subsided.

The Committees for Diagnostic Educational Evaluation and Support (EDEAY) have now been instituted. The EDEAY is an institution comprising an integration department and an interdisciplinary team, with a psychologist, social worker etc. Each Committee is supposed to cover five schools.  Their mandate is to visit the five schools in their area once a week, ask “what cases are you dealing with?” and assist parents or children with the necessary intervention. As announced by the Ministry of Education, the EDEAYs are the ideal tool, but they do not exist yet. They are supposed to provide schools with at least the possibility to access a psychologist, a social worker, once a week.

When were the EDEAYs set up?

They started as a pilot scheme around five years ago, but now their operations are expanding. I am increasingly hearing about some positive outcomes in places where they are in operation. Some, not everywhere. I was visiting a school the other day (hesitates) the school principal knew of them, but the teachers did not. There is still some way to go.

Do teachers receive some training on how to recognise the signs of abuse?

There is the work of the Children’s Ombudsman’s office, which published training material etc. quite a few years ago. The training varies according to the type of abuse. A lot of work has been done on how to handle bullying and violence in schools, and I could tell you a lot about that. That is not the case for domestic violence, or violence outside the school if you like, because the violence could also be occurring elsewhere. There is some material to address that, but training is not systematic yet. That is a fact.

In elementary schools in particular, where children are younger and more vulnerable, and abuse can begin more easily at that age, I would appeal to the teachers to make the following statement during the first parent-teacher meeting, particularly to the parents of first-graders:  “Welcome. Our school subscribes to these principles. Our school is responsible for the children’s wellbeing too. When we see that a child is not doing well, is not having a good time, shows signs of violence etc. you should know that we will notify you and, if there is a serious issue, we might request the intervention of the courts. We do not wish to involve judicial authorities. First and foremost, we want to work with you. However, we have a responsibility. Do not think that the family falls outside the scope of our mandate.” Parents need to hear the school principal state that.

But can they take such action?

One of the problems is Greek law as it stands. Let us say that a child approaches a teacher and insinuates that something might be wrong at home. The teacher might have received training, might be informed, but they cannot address it on their own, and the child says, “I want to speak to a psychologist, a social worker.”

In this instance, the law is flawed because it does not permit a specialist to see a child without the consent of the parent. This must end somehow. One of the things we did, one of the actions we took, after handling several cases, was to address a formal opinion to the Ministries of Health, the Interior and Education. The opinion stated that when a child of any age requests to see a mental health or welfare professional about an issue that preoccupies them and makes the request without the parents’ knowledge, the professional receiving the request must accept to see the child, provided the professional works for a public body responsible for children.

Rather than saying “I cannot see you”, the professional can see the child, listen to them and then decide on the appropriate course. Notify the parent. Ask the child to speak with the parent. Report the matter to the judicial authorities. Or any other option. But it is inconceivable for children not to have access to health and welfare professionals.

The Ministry of the Interior accepted our opinion and distributed it to the municipalities. The Ministry of Health initially rejected it, but we asked the Council of Mental Health to give its opinion on our opinion. The Council was positive, but the Ministry never forwarded our opinion to hospitals.  The Ministry of the Interior forwarded it to the municipalities. The Ministry of Education never replied.

So, a significant flaw in our system is that a child at a Greek school has no third party they can speak to other than their teacher. Unless it is a school for special education, which has psychologists and social workers. Or the school is covered by the EDEAY for some reason. But in all other cases, the children cannot, and that is a problem.

How child-friendly is justice?

One of the great obstacles preventing children from coming forward is the awareness of the possible consequences. Of the number of times that they will need to make a statement to various people on the one hand, and the publicity that will surround their case on the other. Particularly the latter. They do not want others to know. That is why we are fighting for the Council of Europe’s guidelines for a child-friendly justice to translate into concrete measures. I am sure you have also heard this from Giorgos Nikolaidis in the context of our efforts to establish a level of protection, especially for child abuse cases. And the new legislation for the Children’s House is inadequate.

Unfortunately, for financial and organisational reasons, the Children’s House legislation was assigned to the wrong service. It was assigned to the probation service, the Supervisors for Minors. I have great respect for that service, but they are not in the field of victim protection. They are there for perpetrators and those at risk, according to the law, but it is a different kind of approach. The Children’s House should have been set up as it was done in Cyprus, with an interdisciplinary special council including a psychologist, a social worker…

Giorgos (Nikolaidis), Ms Themeli and I had submitted a comprehensive proposal, we had raised these issues in Parliament when the discussion was held, but for financial, organisational and other reasons they opted for this model. I do not want to stand against it. I want it to be implemented, I want us to support it as much as we can. If it begins to be implemented, we will support it. But assigning it to the Supervisors for Minors was the wrong decision.

I gained a good understanding of the Children’s House in Sweden because I visited it there, and I have read about its implementation in many other countries. As you know, it is a place that can also accommodate a child for a few days if need be. However, its primary focus is interdisciplinarity and connecting the interview with the court case underway, reflecting the participation of the public prosecution and the justice system, the police, the social worker, the psychologist, the supporting doctor, where needed. Therefore, it is an all-in-one model that allows you to record and make an assessment through a process where the child does not need to see a multitude of people. That is very important. I do not know yet how it will be implemented here. There is a provision for a Children’s House, and I am waiting to see, hoping that it will be implemented and willing to offer my assistance if it is sought, but the provision is not what we would have liked.

For example, the provision that statements made by minors should be filmed is rarely implemented. Neither the police nor justice has paid sufficient attention to this and there is certainly a deficiency there. As a result, a couple of these cases have become public knowledge, that so and so is being depicted by the child or gossip spreads about who was taken where, and the rest of the children become discouraged.

It is very common for photos of the accused to be made public, especially in child sexual abuse cases.

I disagree with the publication of photos. First of all, these are people who have not been found guilty yet. This gives rise to an ethical issue because the presumption of innocence until proven guilty is a fundamental tenet. Secondly, one must consider the families of the accused. The people whose photos are made public could be parents, and who thinks of their children? Because you can imagine what follows. Thirdly, the act of publishing one person’s photo snowballs to include many other people in their milieu and gossip that follows. I had expressed the view, even back then, that the publication of photos serves other purposes, media voyeurism so to speak and competition among media outlets and is not necessarily the most desirable measure for the protection of children.

Let us return to the training provided to teachers. What did the Children’s Ombudsman do about that?

We did everything we could. We had made a proposal that the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government run some training programmes. They did run one in the past. Another one is currently underway. The ideal scenario would be for all teachers, every single one of them, to be able to attend three-day workshops at the beginning of the school year covering some basic matters. Child protection is one such matter. Another matter is knowledge of the services available and which service should or should not be used.  The third matter is the law and judicial services. In other words, there are some matters that need to be constantly revisited.

In practice, however, it is not so easy. I was recently talking with the president of the Institute of Educational Policy, Mr Kouzelis. I was saying how training programmes on school democracy must be run. About how you approach organisation because that also has an impact on bullying. His response was, “I wish we could. Where will we find the resources needed? How do you organise this for the whole of Greece?” The system for teacher training is very weak. They receive some NSRF funds on specific issues and so on and provide training for groups, not even every teacher.

What is the role of the teacher in your view?

Often, it is the teacher who first hears something and then makes the referral. How do you build this relationship of trust? Unfortunately, the traditional tools at our disposal do not favour such a relationship. It requires greater investment on the part of the teacher. To be open to discussion, be available to students during breaks, inform students that the door to their office is always open, that matters falling outside the scope of education also form part of the school agenda. That the teachers are not there simply as instructors but as life guides. In other words, there are a number of things that must become part of school philosophy.

The same applies to institutions. Child protection institutions, unfortunately, are plagued by a multitude of errors in the way that they operate. But it is also the case that often the people working there do not approach the inner world of the child in a way that builds trust. They stick to the rules of what “must” and “must not” be done. “I am here to make sure you sleep, eat, come, go, do this, do that. Let’s look at your record. What will you do? What did they tell you? What is going on with your family?” And it ends there. There is a whole other, very important, aspect however: how the child feels on an everyday basis, what the child sees, hears, feels. Unfortunately, only a few people touch upon this most important aspect.

We visited many institutions multiple times. In my estimate, we made more than 150-200 visits to institutions of every kind. When you first walk into an institution, whether it is the best of its kind, along the lines of the SOS Children’s Village that is the best model, or the worst kind, which are some large church institutions with too many children and a few ladies who are supposedly looking after them, when you first walk into an institution then, if you care about children’s rights and hence care for the children before you, you are confronted by a multitude of spectres. You see the image of the child standing before you and the spectres hiding behind it.

So, you need to investigate the spectres surrounding the child. In a school, the spectres are not so many. Institutions are haunted by them: the child’s anxiety. The child’s guilt. The absence of the birth parent. Worry about the future. About what is happening in the present. Abuse, neglect. To investigate all that you need a different set of tools. You cannot do it in a visit. So, we need to have more systematic training and regulation, too. There needs to be a mechanism that can enter institutions, stay there and come out somewhat better informed.

In schools too, it is often the case that a teacher is good at instruction but a deficient communicator and misses fundamental things. There was one such instance, a very good instructor, an excellent instructor at an elementary school. The children told us during the break that they were being blackmailed by some other students, threatened to have their money stolen if they went to the square and so on. I asked them why they did not tell their teacher. “Because we are afraid that he will tell the bullies off in such a way that they will take revenge outside the school.” So there was fear in the school. A teacher must not let children be afraid. A teacher must embrace them in a way that dispels fear. That takes work. In essence, that necessitates a change of priorities. A shift where the drive to provide knowledge, to spur children on to distinguish themselves and become somebody in a way that fosters competition and a focus on the future gives way to the present and the community.

However, schools do not appear capable of making that change.

It is a philosophy, nonetheless. Some are making efforts in that direction. I think my ideal situation would be one where we learn from one another as much as possible. Of course, you need further training, you need laws that safeguard those involved. At the school in Kos back in 2004, the staff felt legally exposed, abandoned by the law with regard to actions that could be taken. They were afraid. We need stronger laws that tell teachers, “I have your back. Take action.” Of course, laws need to be accompanied by services that support the legislation, ensure its implementation. I would like there to be a system that provides training on the one hand, that this is what you can do, and the legal reassurance that the persons involved will not get into trouble for doing what they were trained to do. The latter is essential.

I had far too many teachers call us and tell us after seminars we ran during school visits, “Yes, we would like to go ahead, but we are scared. We know of colleagues who did that and then went through hell.”

I imagine that there is also a financial consideration, given the crisis.

Of course. If you don’t have a lawyer to defend you, you have to pay out of your own pocket for something that should be a given. Should not the state be telling you that if you get sued in the course of carrying out duties imposed by the law, the state will provide your legal defence?

During my travels all over Greece, I had some very interesting experiences. I recall one such experience in Larissa, where we were running a seminar for teachers with the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. We ran such seminars elsewhere too, but this is a scene that stayed with me. I gave an introduction on what the law says, what the obligations are etc. and welcomed the public prosecutor. I said that in my view, it was important that they meet the public prosecutor and hear from her how and when you can use her services.

At that point, the public prosecutor rose and said, “You should know that the school principal should call me even if they are afraid. If I sense fear, I will act ex officio without a written report. I am on your side. You should know that we share a common goal to protect the children.” The teachers were greatly relieved when they heard that. They came to me afterwards and said, “That was great. I wish public prosecutors would come to meet us more often, become a familiar face rather than a stranger, and reassure us that they will collaborate in difficult cases and start proceedings.” So many school principals do not act because they know the person concerned has a gun at home or is mentally unstable and could harm them in some way.

Assuming a child is subjected to any kind of abuse in Greece. What steps can they take?

First and foremost, children must know and understand their rights. I always start with a talk on rights. When I was first appointed to the post, I went through the textbooks used in elementary school. The word “rights” appeared in the fifth grade. Now we have started to talk to children about rights at nursery level, thankfully. But the word “rights” was missing from the textbooks. In 2003, you started fifth grade, and the textbook spoke of children in Africa, children… far away.

And at present?

At present, it is increasingly used. It is part of the curriculum, but teachers are also learning how to train the children. Steps have been taken; more schools run theme days on World Children’s day, increasingly raising awareness. Of course, formal education on the subject is provided in fifth and sixth grade when children study ‘social and civil education’.  Children’s rights have been incorporated in that curriculum.

Secondly, you must start with the parent, even where the parent is the abuser. Communication with the parent, both the parent and the child must learn that they are starting to talk to one another. Not that you start by going elsewhere but that they work together.

The next step is the people in the educational environment. School, nursery, elementary and secondary schools and so on. They need a support mechanism to assist them in managing situations, but they are the first persons of trust after the family. Children need to know that.

Then there are the services that can be found in the community, the services close to the schools, the services run by the Ministry of Education and the services run by the community. Municipal social services, mental health services, where available, and so on.

Then there are the helplines. Then NGOs, which substitute the state because of the latter’s deficiencies. According to some, they, or one in particular, have overgrown, but that happens because the state is ineffective, it leaves room for someone else to come and supplant it.  

However, I believe and have stressed vehemently over the years that the work must primarily be done in schools. Schools are the key. That is why we ask for psychologists and social workers inside the schools and for support for schools. Schools must make the parents listen. Tell them that the school has a duty of care under the law and will take legal action if parents do not cooperate with this or that.

And you recommend that this conversation take place when you first meet the parents. You do not need to have an indication that something is amiss. That you also address those who may be excellent parents.

It must happen from the start. Addressing everyone. And it must extend beyond that, the information given to the parent must be that we, as a school, are not only responsible, but we deeply care. Not that we are responsible and fear falling foul of the law, but that we care. That the progress of children must also include progress in their wellbeing. And that if there is a problem at home, an alcoholic, someone with mental issues, we need you to inform us so we can help, not so that we can gossip. That we will not handle issues publicly, but by providing support for the child and understanding. That must take precedence over getting top grades for neat handwriting. What use is neat handwriting to us when the child is emotionally distraught?

What do we do if we learn that a child is being abused or suspect abuse?

First of all, we report it somewhere. We could report it to the public prosecutor. Secondly, because some people might not have easy access to the prosecutor or be afraid and so on, they must seek out the municipal social services in their area. This is where the Juvenile Protection Teams come in. Normally, the municipalities are the service providers. The Region has different responsibilities, it forwards cases to the relevant bodies. But the municipalities, municipal social workers, upon receipt of the report, investigate and assess the evidence.

There are also the relevant bodies and institutions, which should be strong and so on, one of which is the Children’s Ombudsman. The Children’s Ombudsman is not the body where a first report should be filed, although we receive many such first reports, but from people who do not know that, because there are no services in their area and they do not know what to do. In that case, they contact the Children’s Ombudsman. That could be the case depending on which region of the country you are in, for example, if you live on an island with no services then you are obliged to address someone else.

The most important thing is to refuse to tolerate any situation that involves violence and children. In my view, citizens must understand that they have a means of influencing a situation as neighbours. They can act, they can talk, they can say, “Come here, do you need anything? Do you need me to help you as a neighbour? Is there something I can do, someone I can alert, someone we can find together? The child I hear screaming and weeping all the time is a suffering that I, as a neighbour, must address.”

The law does not impose a duty of care on the neighbour, but when the neighbour witnesses a crime that can be prosecuted ex officio, there must be a mechanism that allows them to report it. That is the main function of ex officio prosecution, it does not simply describe a means of action for the prosecution, it calls on any citizen who has been a witness to act.

So, the neighbour goes to their local police station…

Starting with the police makes things harder. The police do encourage people to come forward with reporting incidents in Greece too. “File a report, and we will see how we go about examining the evidence.” However, because of the differences between police stations in each area, I cannot advise citizens to go to the police. There are police stations staffed by officers who have been suitably trained and handle things very carefully. So when you file a report, they will investigate matters and not make the situation worse.

But I am for social services being the first port of call prior to the intervention of the police in all matters that concern the violation of children’s rights. Social services can get the full picture and see where the family needs support, they do not start by focusing on the member prosecuted. Of course, by law, the police can also intervene in an advisory capacity too, not just as an enforcement agency.

You gave the example of the girl whose father was a police officer and an alcoholic. I could not possibly refrain from asking you to expand on that.

The girl came up to me and said, and this is important, “I love my father. I understand him. I would like him not to be an alcoholic, but he is. He is fine when he does not drink. But when he drinks, he beats up my mother and hits me too. I do not think there is anything I can do about that. First of all, the police are already behind him, they are his colleagues. Secondly, I don’t know if I want to report him. Report what? Who can help me? How? It is a dark cloud over my life, so to speak, and I keep it to myself.” When I asked her if she had told anyone, she said that she had not. She might have, but that is what she told me.

So I told her, “I hear you. This is a very serious matter, thank you for sharing it with me. Let us see how you can process it, leaving making a report aside.” She told me she had not spoken to anyone, and I said, “There are people you can speak to.” Then she said, “How can I see a psychologist? I would need the permission of my father to see a psychologist.” I asked her, “Would you be willing to see a teacher at the school, someone you trust a little more? Meet with them once or twice and see how we can take it from there?”

Her initial reaction was silence. “I don’t know”. Then she named a teacher, and we moved in that direction. So she wanted help. Then I spoke to the teacher, I told her, “I would like you to start seeing her. She trusts you. If you think there is some way you can intervene with the family, do so. However, I do not ask you to do that. Also, see if you can get support from the Youth Support Station in your area on how to handle it.” The teacher in question said, “Yes, let us do this, she is a good girl and I want us to help her.”

As far as I can tell, the teacher saw her a couple of times, and, during the school year, she sought support from the psychologist counselling teachers and continued to see the girl. The psychologist did not see the child but helped the teacher in handling the issue. That was a first, moderate step. I could not follow the outcome of the case. I think she was in ninth grade, then she left the school and when I asked, they did not know where she had moved to.

What I am trying to say is that it is an example of how the first step in handling abuse is empowerment. The way for a child to handle the experience is to assume it. To be able to say ‘no’. To be able to say, “I love you, dad, but what you are doing is unacceptable.” Otherwise, it leads to a different kind of outburst. I remember a youth, I don’t know if you remember that case, it must have happened ten years ago—who had killed his father wearing a mask.

He put on a mask and killed his father, and everyone wondered what happened. He was incarcerated, and during subsequent psychotherapy, it came to light that the father would rape the mother while wearing a mask. The boy had told no one and then killed his father one day. He had not processed it at all, had not talked to anyone. He spoke up later. He was an excellent young man; I think he was a university student. What I am trying to say is that if you do not talk about it at all, one day you might suddenly snap.

If someone heard you recount the story about the girl and the alcoholic father who was a policeman, they would say, “I can’t believe she told the Children’s Ombudsman and he did not take her to the prosecutor to make a report straightaway!” Why did you opt for another course of action?

Because a fifteen-year-old teenager has their own personality and you must cooperate with them in any course of action you take. That is my view. If I went and made a report, gathered evidence and used it, and so on, I could have caused more damage to the family, to the girl herself. First of all, the child would feel betrayed. They confided in someone and that person betrayed their confidence. Secondly, the child did not want to be parted from the parent. Thirdly, the investigation might have ended up in a drawer, led nowhere, and the child would neither be freed nor empowered, which was my aim.

My primary concern is for the victim to feel empowered and say ‘no’. That is the number one aim. Criminal justice is there not just to punish but also to heal; not to generally penalise life and terrorise, but also to heal and prevent certain behaviours. For that to happen, the vulnerable members of society must be empowered so that they can assert themselves and have a network of support. Therefore, in my view, what is needed above all is for vulnerable children to always have people who are there for them; that is the underpinning philosophy.  

As you say, what can be achieved when things take a judicial course? The removal of the child? Why?

Exactly. Where? Where would you take the child? Certainly, some children need to be removed from the family home. If only our foster care system functioned better, if only we had emergency foster care… I believe in emergency foster care, an established institution in other countries, where the child resides with a foster family for a month until services sort out what is going on in the family. The foster family is kept informed. They are “professional parents”, who do what in practice? Show tenderness and care. They explain that “We will not be together for a lifetime, but you will stay with us for a while, rather than go to an institution or a hospital. Let us work it out and we will do everything we can to make sure you enjoy your stay with us. But really, we are like replacement parents. You also have to listen to what we say.”  It is very important to put this into practice. There was a lot of talk about foster care recently, but it will be a while before we see these aspects of foster care. New legislation was passed but I do not know what will happen in practice.

How do you see the role of the media in this field?

This year, some of your colleagues at state broadcaster ERT produced a TV show on bullying. It was excellent, I tell everyone they must watch it. But a show that has been carefully prepared is worlds apart from news or current affairs, which are founded on spreading panic and boosting ratings.

Or scandalising the public. Unfortunately, the coverage of sexual violence cases also has a sensationalist aspect.

Anything that includes children, sex, foreigners, blood, and so on, especially in conjunction, is always sensationalised. For me, the greatest enemy for children’s rights these days is the way the media operate. Unfortunately. The impact is great. I feel it all the time, how the media ‘shape ’parenting skills, what kind of role models they promote, how they distort children, so to speak, profoundly distort childhood. Sadly. Nevertheless… We must focus on the battles ahead.

The Unit stands at the exit from the town of Lechaina in the direction of the village of Myrsini, facing the substation pylons of the Greek public power corporation. The building, which belongs to the episcopal see of Elis, is a four-storied, cross-shaped construction crowned by a dome. Its design could hardly be described as suitable for its intended use.

Perhaps that was the reason it was deemed necessary to restrain the seven-year-old blind girl who had been admitted to the institution at the age of three. Fully mobile yet blind, brimming with the energy of childhood, she would have needed someone to watch over her constantly. Lechaina has always been understaffed. “For her own good”, then, someone decided that she should be locked up in a cage. By the time she was sixteen, she could not even articulate her own name.

The Lechaina Unit was founded in 1987 as a "Child Care Centre", or KEPEP, and began operating two years later, with the mandate of caring for disabled children between the ages of six and eighteen. In its initial conception, it was intended for the children of the Region of Elis and the wider Peloponnese. Progressively, disabled children from all over Greece were brought in, either following a request by their parents or a State Prosecutor's order. Formerly an independent institution, since 2013 it is one of the annexes of the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, which is supervised by the Welfare General Secretariat of the Ministry of Labour. As a rule, the care workers at the Unit are unskilled and their numbers insufficient: five healthcare workers, seven assistants and five auxiliary contract staff for 44 residents, at present. The carpenter who fashioned the cages is also considered institution personnel.

Frozen in Time

In the Lechaina Unit, disabled children were strapped to their beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. These practices were hardly a secret.

In 2008, a group of European volunteers who spent some time at the Lechaina Centre, shocked by the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children, drafted a report which they distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations.

In September 2009, a delegation from the Children’s Ombudsman's office, comprised of the Ombudsman himself, Giorgos Moschos, the Ombudswoman for Health and Social Protection, two scientific experts and May Papoulia, a psychologist and wife of the then President of the Republic, visited the institution for the first time. In March 2011, the Ombudsman issued a damning report on the Unit’s inhuman conditions.

Shortly before the publication of the delegation’s findings, in February 2011, the cameras of ERT, the Greek public broadcaster, entered the institution. The news story aired in the main evening news and Andreas Loverdos, the Minister of Health at the time, intervened on air.

After lauding the work of the manager of Lechaina, the minister announced his intention to allow journalists inside all of the country’s institutions to report on the living conditions. When the newscaster observed that journalists should shed light on issues, but it was the Minister's job to solve them, Loverdos promised that five more healthcare staff and an additional three workers would be hired by the end of the year, attributing the torture brought to light by the news report to understaffing. He also promised that new premises would be secured, so that minors could be separated from adults.

Three years later, pictures from Lechaina spread across the world, when the BBC published an article headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. A few days later, Katerina Papakosta, who by then had become Deputy Minister for Health in a new government formed by New Democracy, visited the institution in a move that seemed rather forced, after the outcry that followed the article’s publication.

In her statements to the media, she claimed that the Unit did not fall within her mandate but that of the Ministry of Welfare and stated: “I came here on my own initiative to examine (the situation), because I have been informed by scientific experts that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

Having normalised cages as “cots", Papakosta, too, promised the recruitment of qualified personnel.

It should be noted that the widespread use of chemical suppression through medication, the practice of restraining children to their beds using straps, the use of cages and electronic surveillance, were already condemned in the 2011 report of Children’s Ombudsman as “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions.”

As to the reassurances given to the Deputy Minister by "experts", it should be noted that in the course of the Ombudsman's investigation, which led to the aforementioned report, the Unit’s psychiatrist at the time, Dionysios Tsangos, was asked to submit a written reply. In it, he stated: “I clearly acknowledge that restraining a patient with straps largely violates individual human rights, but they are superseded by the right of life itself. Given the severity of the patients’ mental disability, it is absolutely necessary to restrain them with straps to avert any self-harming acts which the patient will naturally not become aware of due to their condition. The straps will continue to exist for as long as such severe, high-risk level cases continue to exist. As to the matter of the wooden enclosures, a proposal was submitted by the scientific team in April 2008 and a report by child psychologist Mrs Lolou will follow. Certainly, patient accommodation can be improved with the use of more suitable beds, successfully combining the goals of development and security.”

The Ombudsman's report noted that the Unit's psychiatrist had responded without submitting “any medical opinions on specific patient cases, nor any scientific evidence supporting the need for restraint”. It also pointed out that “the Recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture under The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment do not appear to justify physical restraint, with the exception of psychiatric units for adult patients and only under certain conditions. Confinement to beds/enclosures in particular, is considered an unsuitable psychiatric practice and constitutes degrading treatment.” As to the decision to “use means of ‘mechanical restraint’, such as straps, its appropriateness is decided on a case-by-case, mutatis mutandis basis and is used rarely and only when prescribed by a doctor (or following a doctor’s immediate notification and receipt of approval). Recourse to it should be made exceptionally, as a last resort and for the minimum duration necessary, while its long-term use has no therapeutic properties and is considered misuse in therapeutic terms. This practice cannot be excused by staff shortages, as every instance of restraint demands that a member of staff provide immediate personal assistance and constant supervision, while electronic surveillance cannot substitute the constant physical presence needed. At the same time, every such instance should be recorded in a special register and in the patient’s personal medical file with specific details, such as the start and end time of restraint, the doctor’s name etc. Staff must receive ongoing training in alternative, gentler methods of patient control and be educated in the effects the practice of physical restraint has on the patient.  The Authority believes that the practices chosen clearly fall outside the scope of legality and gravely contravene the duty to respect and protect the human rights of residents with serious mental disabilities.”

The situation in the Lechaina Unit, therefore, was not only fairly widely known, but also officially documented, by March 2011.

“From Asylum to Society”

Approximately a year after Deputy Minister Papakosta’s visit, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Mideniki Anohi” ("Zero Tolerance") occupied the Lechaina premises. The occupation, a protest against the abuse of disabled children taking place in the Unit, began on November 4, 2015, and lasted for four days.

We met with Antonis Rellas, a film director, disabled activist, and member of Zero Tolerance, in his apartment. He let us in himself and led us to his studio.

“We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad," he told us. "In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, ‘Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.’ We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, those who are unable to advocate for themselves, have no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present.”

A video can be found on Zero Tolerance’s youtube channel, entitled From Asylum to Society. Rellas put the footage together immediately after the occupation, to be screened for journalists during the press conference Zero Tolerance held upon its return to Athens.

“We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime," he said, "nine people in four cars, with two cameras. We wanted to record what was happening and highlight those that society rejects by relegating them to an isolated building somewhere far away, turning a blind eye to these images. We wanted to highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living. For us disabled activists, there is no such thing as a good institution. Even if Lechaina were the Hilton, it would remain a secure-type institution that violates every notion of human dignity. I have seen people restrained with ropes in other institutions too, not just Lechaina. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism. No matter how prepared we were, the reality exceeded our worst nightmares…”

During the occupation, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the State Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the human rights violations against the disabled children and youths kept at the institution.

“To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify," Rellas told us. In fact, the Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

"There are specific liabilities at stake," Rellas said. "Who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed prolonged chemical suppression?  Not holding anyone accountable is like asking us to accept that the disabled residents are not worthy of living and therefore, no criminal liabilities arise. The UN, who saw the material we gathered during the occupation, says this is torture. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed."

On November 5, 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee publicised its concluding observations after examining Greece’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Regarding the situation at Lechaina, the Committee stated that “the State party should take immediate measures to abolish the use of enclosed restraint beds and systematic sedation in psychiatric and related institutions. The State party should also establish an independent monitoring and reporting system and ensure that abuses are effectively investigated, those responsible are prosecuted, and redress is provided to the victims and their families.” Similar recommendations had been made three years earlier, with specific reference to the institution at Lechaina.

On November 13, 2015, a few days after the occupation staged by Zero Tolerance, the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO human rights watchdog, filed a complaint at the State Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court of Greece. “In view of the fact," the complaint stated, "that the long-term torture of children took place with the knowledge of all authorities, from the Ministry down to the local prosecutor’s office, while the report of the Ministry’s Committee confirms that this is standard practice in psychiatric units across the country, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court is asked to order the judicial investigation of the claims made here, instructing a public prosecutor in Athens to this end, and demanding that the Ministry of Labour immediately cease using these inhumane methods that amount to torture.”

None of this was enough to mobilise justice to pursue those responsible for the fact that disabled children and young people were being kept in confinement, physically restrained in cages of two by two by one metres, not being let outside even for an hour, medicated for psychiatric and other illnesses — despite the fact that, according to the study carried out by the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, out of the 78 people that have resided in the Lechaina unit over the years, only five had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for psychiatric disorders. 

“In Greece today," Giorgos Nikolaidis, Director of the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, told us, "no court has the legal capacity to impose such a sentence on anyone. How is it possible to tolerate that a person be subjected to this confinement and not ask who ordered it and why? Which ministers, general secretaries, which of my colleagues gave instructions that these people be restrained? Who imposed this deprivation of their rights?”

Breaking the Cages

Shortly after the occupation by Zero Tolerance, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by Harry Potter writer J. K. Rowling to promote and advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises.

At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention, with an initial duration of six months. The intervention team would release the patients from their restraints, re-examine the use of medication, and prepare them through appropriate training, so that they could either return to their families, where possible, or otherwise move to smaller hostels, where the effects of institutionalisation would be alleviated. Meanwhile, the government was supposed to form a plan to radically restructure institutions, with the ultimate aim of deinstitutionalisation.

The emergency intervention was launched in July 2016, under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. It was to last six months, because, according to Nikolaidis, "rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?"

"Unfortunately," he said "the fact of the matter is that, after a lot of pressure, they simply gave an approval so that an initiative taken by other people and institutions, with the funding of others, could be implemented. A programme that enjoyed no jurisdictional backing vis-à-vis the unit in question, its personnel, the way it functions. The political leadership just said, ‘Great, you can go to the Unit and do what you think is best’.”

Two summers later, we visited the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health for the first time. Giorgos Nikolaidis had just entered his office and was in the process of transferring a video from his phone to his PC. He invited us to view some of the material.

The first video was shot as the carpenter of the Lechaina Unit dismantled the wooden cage of a twenty-year-old man, who had been confined to it for years. The man's initial disbelief subsides, as joy and relief burst forth in almost ecstatic laughter. The camera turns back to the carpenter and switches off.

In the second video, someone else is holding the psychiatrist’s phone. The scene takes place in the sea. Nikolaidis is holding a pool noodle, the buoyant foam tube used to teach very young children how to swim. He has passed the tube under the waist of another Lechaina resident, stretched him out on his back, and sways him gently from side to side. Another outburst of joy is heard, as a long-suffering body finds relief in the water.

Antonis Rellas decided to follow the course of events from Zero Tolerance’s occupation to the promised closure of the institution not just as an activist, but as the director of a documentary about Lechaina. Having visited the Unit over thirty times these past years, he explained: “I had the chance to watch how behaviours changed. How the residents I first met, who were uncommunicative, eyes vacant as they lay strapped to beds or locked inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, began to blossom. To watch them leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, to develop their skills. We heard them speak, utter words. Some began to express specific requests, ‘I want a bedside table’, ‘I want a remote control’, ‘I want my own clothes’. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving ‘the prescribed treatment for their own good’.”

“I witnessed their fears and inhibitions," he went on. "For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps. Even after the intervention team removed their restraints, do you know how they slept at night? In the sleeping position that they had been kept for years. For them, the most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured.”

One of the many paradoxes of this story is that, despite the admission by the political leadership that institutionalisation must end, and more specifically that the Lechaina Unit must be shut down, a decision to prohibit new admissions to the institution was never officially made.

Rellas recalled such an incident: “A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. She was evidently being pressured to abandon the disabled child and focus on her ‘normal’ children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears. She took her child and left.”

 “That was not the only incident where admission was averted,” explained Nikolaidis. “We had asked for admissions to be prohibited, everyone agreed, but that agreement never translated into a legal act. I used to arrive at Lechaina and be told that the Board of Directors had admitted a new child. Every time we had to rush to right things after the fact. I would meet the parents, explain the implications of such an admission, try to understand why the family was asking for this. Usually, there was a lot of hidden pain, the decision to leave their child at an institution was not sudden.  Therefore, we created the after-school clubs for many of them, activity clubs to occupy their children after special school. The aim was to offer families some respite so that the children did not end up in an institution.”

Most of the stories shared common ground. “These were children," Nikolaidis told us, "with mental disabilities that the family had kept until their preadolescence- adolescence and then found harder to manage. They usually had other children with typical development too and struggled to look after them all. We set up this service at Lechaina and Patras so that the child could stay at a space with qualified personnel who would occupy them, train them, and then be able to return home at night.”

Resistance

The emergency intervention that was intended to last six months ended up lasting for almost three years, after repeated extensions. Experts have pointed out that reintroducing people who had been subjected to extreme and prolonged abuse into humane conditions was always going to be difficult, but their task was continually complicated by the resistance that they met.

During one of our visits to the Lechaina Unit, we met Patty Sotiropoulou, special needs educator and member of the emergency intervention team. As introductions were made, we witnessed the following incident: one of the centre’s residents had undergone surgery following self-injury to his eye. The surgeon had recommended forty-five days of bed restraint to protect the wound. Our arrival at the centre coincided with the end of his confinement and the intervention team was asking staff to transfer him to a bed. The staff resisted this move, claiming that it could be dangerous because the resident had chewed on his mattress… ten years ago!

 “One day, members of the team took a girl outside for a walk in the courtyard," an exasperated Sotiropoulou told us. "The girl fell down and needed two stitches on her chin. Not only did the staff overreact due to their reigning fear of accountability, but the doctor who put in the stitches also instructed that she be kept inside a cage for ten days. Ten days confinement for two stitches! And when you point out the absurdity, you just get told: ‘doctor’s orders’.

Sotiropoulou said she had been exhausted by the constant battle over matters that should be self-evident. "No culture has been fostered," she said, "that it is unacceptable to keep children inside cages in an institution. If we had seen a child with typical development inside a cage in those news reports, the reaction would have been different. In the case of disabled children, both the system itself and, unfortunately, a large section of society accepts all too willingly that ‘there is no alternative’, that ‘the specialists say they need to be physically restrained so they must be right’, and ‘thank goodness there is an institution to house them’.”

The battle over matters that should be self-evident, as Sotiropoulou put it, rages at the Lechaina Unit even when the proposed changes are also intended to benefit the workers themselves. 

“During the intervention," Sotiropoulou told us, "we trained staff in the use of a small crane to lift people from the bed. It is essential that the residents change positions. It might not sound like that big of a deal, but there is a world of difference between spending twenty-four hours a day confined to a bed and getting up, both physically and in terms of receiving some stimulation. At the end of the day, only our team and the volunteers use the crane."

"It's a small example of the resistance here," she said. "You have a goal, to get people out of bed. And it can’t be achieved. You give them a tool that can help the carers, too. And I say this being fully aware that just changing the sheets and diapers of so many people is extremely taxing physically. And yet, they will not use it. So, on the one hand, you see a resistance to change, even when the change is beneficial to them, and on the other hand, you realise that they cannot appreciate the importance of people being out of bed.”

The deinstitutionalisation that never was

In December 2017, the Greek Government announced that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Unit and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future, setting out the transition process, the facilities to be developed, the timetable, etc.

 “Incidentally," Nikolaidis told us, "I should mention that we had already drafted such a detailed plan and submitted it to the government, as well as the board of directors of the Centre of Social Welfare, and the relevant services of the Commission and other bodies both within Greece and abroad. We had also discussed it with the permanent personnel of the Unit. I’m not saying that this was the best plan and should be adopted as the final detailed plan. I’m just saying that the commitment made by the government to form such a plan never materialised. The most disheartening aspect is that this time the funds are there, so that’s not the impediment.”

The emergency intervention ended in February 2019. When we asked Nikolaidis why the Institute of Child Health did not continue with the intervention, as well as why the collaboration between the Institute and Lumos was not renewed, he replied: “Because in February 2019, the representatives of Lumos visiting Greece met with the Minister for Social Solidarity Theano Fotiou and were informed that for as long as they cooperated with us, any cooperation with the Greek government was out of the question. So Lumos interrupted its cooperation with us and began working with NGO SOS Children's Villages, which was recommended to them.”

We went on ask why in Nikolaidis’s opinion the government, through its minister, would do this. 

“I think,” Nikolaidis told us, “it was because we kept raising the need to close down the unit, and for a number of real actions, not PR, leading to the residents’ psychosocial rehabilitation and deinstitutionalisation to be taken. Ms Fotiou had probably decided that she wanted to adopt ostensible rather than true actions. The timing also coincided with the completion of a phase of our actions in Lechaina, with the gradual and progressive transfer of all the residents out of confinement, be it cages, or straps or any of the other inventive methods used by the institution. Our task had been to provide interim emergency relief geared towards the abolition of confinement, pending the implementation of a deinstitutionalisation scheme. Having completed that work, having drawn up a plan for deinstitutionalisation and secured a budget for that purpose, and seeing that no steps were being taken in that direction, we had no intention of remaining at Lechaina to window-dress the perpetuation of institutionalisation.”

Former Minister Fotiou did not comment on these statements by Nikolaidis, despite our repeated requests. Lumos likewise did not reply to our request for comment. SOS Children’s Villages, which signed a cooperation agreement with Lumos in May 2019, replied that “after a request by Lumos and the Ministry, we agreed to become the organisation responsible for dispensing salaries to personnel that was hired for three months, without participating in any way in the scientific work, or observing its implementation on location”. 

In the event, personnel to staff the action team that would implement a three-year deinstitutionalisation programme was hired in June 2019 on twelve-month contracts. Selected by competition, team members have no work experience in matters of deinstitutionalisation. This move provoked the strong reaction of the institution’s staff, who once again reiterated their longstanding request for the recruitment of permanent personnel.

While time was again grinding to a halt in Lechaina, the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity came under increasing pressure to submit a long overdue general deinstitutionalisation strategy proposal, which was an obligation under the terms of 2014-2020 NSRF funding, and should in fact have been submitted since 2014. The Ministry asked for technical assistance from the European Commission and the Structural Reform Support Services (SRSS). A Brussels-based NGO, the European Association for People with Disabilities (EASPD), was awarded a 200.000 contract by SRSS to draw up a deinstitutionalisation plan for Greece.

In July 2019, national elections were called, SYRIZA lost power, and New Democracy found itself in government. Domna Michailidou became the new Minister. 

EASPD presented a draft paper on a national deinstitutionalisation strategy to the Ministry, as well as several experts, in January 2020. Presumably, somewhere at the end of this process, the promise made to the Lechaina residents through the emergency intervention, that they may have a chance to leave institutionalised living behind, might eventually be fulfilled. For the time being, though, they have to wait and endure - again.

When asked about the feelings their experiences at Lechaina have left them with, everyone we spoke to gave the same reply: frustration. Antonis Rellas’ response, when asked about his hopes at the start of filming the documentary, was riveting: “I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that the announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the biological family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That someone would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.”

Frustration, then, and sadness. “For us," Rellas said, "the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen and sadly, it is not mobilising.  That is the heart of the matter. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.”

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Giorgos Moschos

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• Children's Ombudsman (former) • Greek Ombudsman (Citizen's Advocate)
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Modern Greek history has seen its fair share of brutalities, but few among them have been as little discussed as the ways in which children have been mistreated, abused, neglected and institutionalised by the State. From the late 19th century, when a prototype welfare system was first put in place under the Greek Royal Family, all the way to the nationalisation of welfare from the 1970s onwards, one constant has been that children have concerned the State as props in the political game or as potential perpetrators of crime — usually both. This chronic undermining of children’s rights affected most aspects of the public sector; and its traces are still visible today.

A recent video of a policeman beating up an eleven-year-old child in the outskirts of Athens, that surfaced on social media, raised the question of what ideas police and other authorities continue to have regarding the treatment of minors — whether suspected offenders or not. ((The video is available (in Greek) here, from ERT, the Greek Public Broadcaster.)) The Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, took to Twitter to condemn the incident, stating that “whoever hits minors does not have a place anywhere”. ((Tweet is available (in Greek) here.)) The speed of the Minister’s reflexes can perhaps be explained by the fact that the memory of the 2008 murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, shot by a police officer in downtown Athens, is still fresh. 

The consequences of Grigoropoulos’s murder were staggering: Athens, and other Greek cities, burned during spontaneous riots that lasted for weeks. But the mistreatment of children by officials has also been documented in many other, less explosive, instances: some research has shown that children victims of abuse have been made to recount their ordeal to authorities up to fourteen times, in what cleary amounts to secondary abuse in the hands of the State; children who have been removed from their families are kept in hospitals, despite not being in need of hospitalisation, sometimes for years; and at least one institution has been strapping disabled children to their beds and locking them in cages. ((See our detailed report on the Lechaina unit for children with disabilities: "Hell as an Institution".)) Authorities have described such practices as unavoidable, necessary, or “for the good of the children”.

It is impossible to explain the persistence of such practices, at least in part, without considering the way that historical events have shaped Greek authorities’ attitudes toward minors. 

In the Hands of the Lord

Institutionalisation of children had been introduced very soon after the foundation of the Greek State, with the City of Athens already operating an Orphanage for Abandoned Infants in 1838. However, a quasi-system of fostering also existed, with foster families often paid a meagre fee to host abandoned children, and institutionalisation was in part seen as a solution to abuse and neglect within this unregulated framework. 

The Athens Municipal Nursery was founded by the city’s Mayor in 1859, and brought under the auspices of the Royal Family in the 1870s. According to its own data, between its foundation and the mid 1960s, it hosted over 50.000 children. During its peak, it hosted about 600 at one time. As Maria Athanassopoulou and Marianna Drakopoulou write in their Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece, it was within the Municipal Nursery that the first attempts were made to systematically document child ailments and statistically study infant mortality. ((See Maria Athanasopoulou, Mariana Drakopoulou, A Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece (Istoriki anadromi gia ta ektheta vrefi stin Ellada), To Vima tou Asklipiou, tome 9, issue 1, Jan-March 2010, available online (in Greek) here.)) 

As was common in many countries — and remains today — the Municipal Nursery also introduced a vrefodohos, or baby hatch, where mothers could abandon their babies anonymously. On the outside, there was an inscription from Psalm 27: “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.” 

Also on the initiative of the Royal family, the Patriotic Foundation for Social Welfare and Perception, or PIKPA, was founded in 1914, initially as the “Patriotic Association of Greek Women”. Although its initial mandate was to cater for the families of soldiers fighting in the war, after the 1920s it gradually shifted to the sheltering of orphaned and displaced children. 

By the end of the 1930s, even the few progressive ideas about government and lawmaking that had emerged in Greece during the interwar period had been snuffed out — first by dictatorship, then by war and occupation. Civil war followed, then two decades of “feeble democracy” and a military junta, until a tumultuous return to democratic politics finally led to stability and the relative strengthening of public institutions. Only then, near the end of a seventy year period, did a political consensus appear that the State should provide a safety net for children, who had either broken the law or been neglected or abused. 

The Youth Problem

Dictator Ioannis Metaxas ruled Greece from 1936 to 1941, a period known as the 4th of August Regime. Although his legacy of oppression has been somewhat tempered by the fact that he denied fascist Italy’s demand to allow Italian troops to occupy Greek territory, his regime was totalitarian and he was an admirer of fascism. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had reciprocated Metaxas’s admiration in his official visit to Greece in 1936. Although the 4th of August Regime was not in the strictest sense fascist, and Metaxas personally was more influenced by Portugese dictator António Salazar, it did have common traits with fascism and nazism, including the targeting of youth for indoctrination. In 1936, Metaxas created the National Union of Youth, or EON, the Greek version of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio and the Hitlerjugend, which sought to shape minors into future supporters — if not functionaries — of the regime.

As was the case with every other fascist government in Europe, Metaxas’s policy choices often attempted to counter the voices pushing for progressive reforms, inspired by European Social Democracy that had bloomed in the beginning of the century. In her 2013 book “Youth in Peril: Supervision, Reformation and Justice for Minors after the War” ((«Νέοι εν κινδύνω»: Επιτήρηση, αναμόρφωση και δικαιοσύνη ανηλίκων μετά τον πόλεμο», Polis publications, 2013)), Efi Avdela, a Professor of Modern History in the University of Crete, has written about a number of progressive sociologists, legal theorists, feminists and socialists in the interwar era, who advocated among other things in favour of introducing welfare instead of penalisation for minors. According to Avdela’s account, the “criminalisation vs. welfare” debate would go on for decades after the war, although the scales would always tip heavily towards the former.

Two laws by the Metaxas government would cement the idea that children in peril should be treated as criminals (with all the implications that this word entailed at the time) to be reformed, instead of more progressive approaches to welfare. In December 1939, a law introduced Judges and Prosecutors for Minors. A year later, after Greece had entered the war against the Axis, a concise plan on operating reforming institutions was made into law, introducing two new entities subject to the State Prosecutor: the State Prefect for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors. They were both mainly tasked with guiding minors through the justice system, whether that meant carrying out social research on a minor’s background, or providing support for the minor that went through the system. They were mostly staffed by volunteers.

A month after passing the 1940 law, with Greece on the brink of Axis occupation, Metaxas died. But conservative conceptions of juvenile delinquency were crystallised in his laws, and the newly founded entities began working on minors, although their practices were modified to also address the humanitarian crisis caused by the occupation. According to Avdela’s findings, 4.600 minors went through the justice system in 1941 alone, but most of the volunteers’ work was focused on gathering and distributing food and clothing.

From 1947 onwards, some Societies for the Protection of Minors began operating their own institutions, which provided an interim shelter for rehabilitation between the time a minor was released from a reformation centre and the time they went free back to society. Until the fall of the Military Junta, in 1974, when Greek state institutions would gradually become more “liberalised”, the Prefects for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors would deal with all sorts of “moral panics” that focused on youth cultures: “teddy-boyism”, rock ‘n’ roll, sexual liberation and leftism — all filed under “anti-social behaviour”.

War, Children

During the Greek Civil War, the issue of child protection took a darker turn for both competing sides, and the particulars of what actually happened are subject to debate until today. In 1947, the United States of America began providing military, technical and financial assistance to the Greek government and its National Army against the Democratic Army of Greece, formed by the Greek Communist Party and former resistance guerrillas. The scale of U.S. military assistance meant that the government could now launch air attacks against guerrilla strongholds, which included the first documented use of napalm bombs. 

From 1948, when the war scales started tipping in favour of the government, the guerillas began transferring children away from the conflict zones of northern Greece that were being bombed, to countries of the Eastern Bloc. Pro-government voices named this paidomazoma (literally, “child-gathering”), after the much older practice of Devshirme, or “child levy”, in which Ottoman authorities abducted children from among their Balkan Christian subjects, converted them to Islam and trained them for military or civil service. Pro-Democratic Army voices, in turn, countered by calling the practice paidososimo (“child-saving”) or sotiria (“salvation”). Up to this day, left-wing and progressive historians have been debating with conservatives, as well as the far-right, on whether this was a humanitarian operation or recruitment.

A year earlier, Paul I had ascended the throne of the Kingdom of Greece and his wife, Frederica of Hanover, had become Queen. More than any of her predecessors or successors, Frederica was actively involved in politics and was often in the public spotlight.

Τhe Royal Family of Greece had patronised all sorts of high-society philanthropic societies since the 19th century, among which several devoted to children, with a special focus on juvenile delinquency. Frederica combined the Royal Family’s tradition of philanthropy with her own penchant for politics, and began an operation parallel to the guerrillas’ paidomazoma, thereby removing children from conflict zones and placing them in special institutions that she founded, called Paidopoleis (“Child cities”). 

This operation, introduced by Royal Decree in 1947, was named the “Charity Drive ‘Welfare for the Northern Provinces of Greece’ Under the High Authority of Her Majesty, the Queen”, although everyone would refer to it simply as Charity Drive (Eranos in Greek), or after 1955 as Royal Welfare. It was carried out by the National Army. Fifty-two such Paidopoleis were opened all over Greece, all working under a similar model: a strict upbringing, and a daily military-style regimen that would inscribe “proper values” to children.

During her youth in Hanover, Frederica had been a member of the Hitler Youth, and in Greece she was considered sympathetic towards the Nazi regime (as well as the United States). In his book on the children of the civil war ((Λουκιανός Χασιώτης, Τα Παιδιά του Εμφυλίου, Βιβλιοπωλείο της Εστίας, 2013)), historian Loukianos Hasiotis claims that the Charity Drive was at least partially modelled after the Franco regime’s Auxilio Social, which employed similar messages. 

Since the Greek Civil War is now widely accepted as the first episode of the Cold War, it should come as no surprise that the conflict over children was also played out on an international level. The Greek government branded the removal of children from conflict zones by the guerrillas as a “genocide”, a position accepted by the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) in its 1948 report. The idea was also promoted by officials with prominent positions on the international stage, like the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul. The United Nations Committee was tasked with investigating what the guerrillas were doing — but, naturally, not what was happening in the Paidopoleis. 

Thus, until historical research caught up, what is known about the Paidopoleis of the era mostly came from oral narratives of the children that grew up in them. In 2007, when a popular historical programme on Greek television, The Time Machine, aired two episodes about the children of the Civil War, the testimonies of people that had lived in the Paidopoleis during their childhood were divergent even within the same episode. This disagreement in testimonies of the children, now in their old age, persists in the popular press to this day.((See, for expample, Marina Karpozilou, “Growing up in Frederica’s Pedopoleis: The ‘Guerrilla-striken children of the ‘Big Mother’” (in Greek: “Μεγαλώνοντας στις παιδουπόλεις της Φρειδερίκης: Τα 'ανταρτόπληκτα' παιδιά της 'Μεγάλης Μητέρας'”), News247.gr, 9/1/2016)) Some reminisce about their time in the Pedopoleis with nostalgia and others with a more critical view, even sparking literary debates: in his 2009 book, The Blurry Deep ((Γιάννης Ατζακάς, Ο Θολός Βυθός, Άγρα)), author Yiannis Atzakas recalls his time in a Paidopoli as trauma haunting him well into his middle age, while Antonis Venetis, in his 2014 book Letters ((Αντώνης Ν. Βενέτης, Επιστολές, Αρμός)) considers Frederica’s Drive beneficial to children and states his belief that “the ‘blurry deep’ can only be found in fixations, prejudices and obsessions”.

Under Frederica, the PIKPA became the second pillar of childcare, a sort of supplement to the Paidopoleis, housing children that had been orphaned in the war. PIKPA structures followed a similar regiment of strict, military-style upbringing and carried out adoptions, as well as absorbed some of the prominent figures of Frederica’s Charity Drive. Lina Tsaldari, the widow of former Prime Minister Panagis Tsaldaris, was one of the aristocratic “Appointed Ladies” who actively participated in the Charity Drive. Ιn 1950 she became the President of PIKPA.

The third pillar of Frederica’s childcare initiatives was the “Houses of the Child”. These were small daycare centers in the villages of rural Greece (mainly in the north) that after 1950 started taking in children while their parents were working. Without a public education system in place, especially in these remote areas, the Houses of the Child, 140 in total, acted as a nursery or elementary school — with a twist. In them, children would be taught farming and technical skills, while also being indoctrinated with “religious and patriotic values”.

The Eranos might have been Frederica's personal project, but its funding was very much public. Royal Welfare was funded by special import taxes, tariffs on cigarettes (two cigarettes in every pack), percentages of cinema tickets, a part of workers’ wages, and other measures. Researchers have calculated that between 1949 and 1956, the Royal Welfare Foundation took in more than 186 million drachmas — and a lot more after that.((More information on relevant activities by the Greek Royal Family is available (in Greek) in research by the Ios journalistic outfit.))

For the majority of children that were taken to Eastern Bloc countries, it wasn’t until the 1980s and the campaign of the centre-left PASOK government for the right-of-return of political refugees that they would see Greece again.

Leftists and progressives have been claiming for decades that the Charity Drive was the real paidomazoma. In any case, after the Democratic Army’s defeat and the end of the Civil War, only 14 of the paidopoleis continued to operate. Nowadays, four of them are still working as institutions for children without families.

Searching for Roots

Mary Theodoropoulou runs “Roots”, an NGO, from a small apartment in Kesariani. Historically known as the place where in 1944 the Nazis executed 200 communist political prisoners that had like many others been handed over to them by the collaborationist authorities, Kaisariani is a working class neighborhood in Athens, where the Communist Party still gets one of its highest percentages. 

Abandoned as a newborn in the Athens Municipal Nursery baby hatch, Theodoropoulou has often appeared in the media talking about her quest to find her biological parents, after she discovered in her twenties that she had been adopted. Her efforts to date have not been successful. She and seven others, all of whom had also stayed at the Municipal Nursery as children, founded the NGO in the late 1990s, to help people search for their biological parents.

Theodoropoulou has done extensive work on institutions. Not only did Rizes produce the only comprehensive study that looked into the state of Greek institutions for children in 2015, but her work on tracing the roots of adopted children means she has heard a massive amount of personal stories about what has been happening inside these institutions.

After World War II, according to Theodoropoulou, there was a further, major shift towards institutionalisation. “The practice of trofoi, foster mothers that were paid to breast-feed and take care of babies, had been in place since the late nineteenth century,” she said. “A shortage of milk and absolute poverty meant that babies would die otherwise”. State institutions mostly acted as halfway houses that would assign a newborn to a trofos after a short stay. Later, after the War, the trofoi acted as a means to relieve the institutions from the strain caused by the huge numbers of children.

Theodoropoulou told us how, after the war was over, the trofoi framework was expanded. PIKPA, which took care of many of the orphaned or abandoned children, would now hand them over to families, some of whom took in numerous children. “But there was no framework,” she said. “There were no rules on hygiene, no supervision and the remuneration of foster parents was low and infrequent. A trofos would bring back the body of a baby she had taken in and say to the Nursery staff that ‘this is frozen’ — meaning dead. In other cases, foster families abandoned children all over again. There were also cases of abuse, even rape. All these things undermined foster care and institutions gained ground.”

The suffering of children that went through the foster care system unsupervised could be prolonged even after they were out of it. Theodoropoulou told us the story of a boy who tried to report that his foster parents had sexually abused him. He was deemed mentally ill and forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution. In other cases, disabled children, and children with mental illness or developmental problems, would end up in the PIKPA of Leros, founded in 1963 to take in children from the Public Pediatric Neuropsychiatric Hospital “Daou Pentelis”, as part of the overall project of transferring — and isolating — the mentally ill from all over the country to Leros. The PIKPA of Leros formed part of the so-called “Psychopath Colony”, established on the island in 1957, and now known as the infamous kolastirio (“hellhole”). Many of those committed to the kolastirio would not leave until an international deinstitutionalisation initiative in the 1990s, funded by the EU, after a series of stories in the international press and a documentary had revealed the horrible conditions to which patients had been subjected. ((Deinstitutionalization in Leros has been documented in various sources. Psychiatrists who participated in the process like Ιοannis Loukas, Ιοannis Tsiantis, Theodoros Megalooikonomou and Felix Guattari, among others, have all written their own accounts and commentaries on it.))

Since 1939, when it came under the authority of the Ministry of Health, PIKPA has gone through a great number of changes in administrative structure and oversight, but by the 1950s and 1960s, it expanded almost to the size of a full healthcare and welfare system for minors. At its peak, its services included everything from schools for medical personnel and mobile medical units to clinics, hospitals and nursery schools. Since 1925, it had also been operating summer camps from June to the end of September for quality time and healing for children suffering from tuberculosis. The “exoches”, as they were called, stopped during the war, but began operating again after 1945. In 1948, their mandate was expanded to accept impoverished children with problems in development, or any chronic disease, and in 1951 to include working children, and all children monitored by doctors. In 1956, PIKPA put together its first structure for disabled children in Voula. Gradually, it would end up running most of the institutions for disabled children in Greece. 

Institutionalisation in the Paidopoleis, the orphanages and the nurseries gave rise to a different problem that haunts families until today: illegal adoptions. In her memoirs, Frederica had claimed that communist women had been abandoning their children and even that she witnessed a woman literally throwing her baby away, which was supposedly picked up by an army officer and handed over to her. After the military junta of 1967-1974 fell, communist guerrillas that had been exiled in camps in the islands reported that their children were abducted from there. In fact, the children were taken to the Paidopoleis or the PIKPA, and were then sold to foster parents in the United States, often assisted by officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, as well as Greek-American Organisations ((The Greek-American Organization AHEPA was found to have been involved in a trafficking ring for children - see, for example: The adopted Greek children of the Cold War, Margarita Pournara | Kathimerini)). Although the Greek press had published stories on the issue since the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1996 when U.S. media would start digging into the story and get to the bottom of it, that the full extent of what had happened would be revealed.

Discovering the Victim

After King Constantine’s failed counter-coup attempt against the Military Junta, in December 1967, the Royal Family was forced to flee the country. So, in a strange twist of fate, it was the dictators who brought welfare, including child protection, under the purview of the State. With a Law Decree, in 1970, all the Royal Foundations and Charities — along with their funding provisions — were absorbed into the National Welfare Organisation. Their role did not change significantly for the next decade, although Greece’s evolution into a more advanced economy, after the long and tumultuous process of post-war reconstruction, meant that the numbers of children in peril would gradually start to decrease.

It wasn’t until 1981, when centre-left PASOK came to power, that the welfare system would advance into the next phase. One of PASOK’s most important and enduring achievements was the creation of the National Healthcare System, or ESY, in 1983, which put in place a concise framework for healthcare that also included aspects of welfare. The Ministry overseeing it was now renamed the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The first eight years of PASOK in power, from 1981 to 1989, included many decisive progressive reforms in worker’s rights, civil rights and education, but welfare was still mostly understood as benefits, and were lagging behind the drastic changes overtaking Greek society. Not only did the National Welfare Organisation go through no significant change in the 1970s and 1980s, but especially with regard to child protection, the idea of preventing victimisation and abuse, although gaining traction in Europe, was not present in any sector of the Greek state.

Xeni Dimitriou, the former Chief Prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court, has served three tenures as a State Prosecutor for Minors over three different decades. She has gone through thousands of pages of legal theory on children, attended hundreds of conferences and exchanged opinions with dozens of other prosecutors all over the world. When we met her, shortly after her recent retirement, she spoke to us about her firsthand experience of what Greece’s long refusal to acknowledge the victimisation of children had led to. In her early days as Prosecutor for Minors in the 1980s — ”an unprivileged position, almost a punishment back then” — she witnessed time and again policemen marching into her office with arrested children that had been severely beaten. One boy came in with massively swollen ears. He told her that they had put clothespins in his ears to interrogate him and had hanged him upside down from the precinct’s balcony to scare him into confessing. In other cases, following the letter of the law, she was forced to put six and seven-year-old kids on trial, or send underage lawbreakers away in institutions that were practically prisons.

Dimitriou referred to Kalliopi Spinelli, a well-known criminologist as her “teacher, the teacher of all of us”. Spinelli is credited, among many things, with proposing the replacement of the term “juvenile criminals” with “juvenile offenders”, and with advocating for a pedagogical instead of a penal approach to justice for the underage. A few other prominent legal theorists and professionals gradually began to advocate for a different relation between the children and the State.

Modern international ideas on children’s rights speak only of “victims,” Dimitriou insisted. “We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking,” she said. “Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who took that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world. The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold aspect. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold aspect. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim. Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.”

In a conference speech Dimitriou gave in 1991, in-between her tenures as Prosecutor for Minors, she said that a bill for “Units of Care for Minors” had been drafted since 1984. The purpose of the plan was to set up a structure so that “juvenile offenders until 12 years of age would not be involved in any way with suppression mechanisms such as the police, the Prosecutor and the Court for Minors, but would be taken care by welfare services instead”. She then went on to describe best practices found in existing institutions — stopping at one point to wonder whether “it’s time to legislate that juvenile delinquents could be placed into foster families. The society responds positively. Why delay any more?”

Dimitriou’s 1991 speech echoed the ideas that would start to shape new concepts of child welfare. In 1985 and 1990, the UN had published guidelines on handing justice to juvenile delinquents and the prevention of delinquency in minors respectively. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was also signed at the time.

Things were changing, but in the case of Greece, the pace was and remains slow. The Greek governments of the 1990s made a few attempts to modernise the welfare system, or rather to establish one, since throughout their evolution the various services had operated independently. In 1992, a law practically dissolved the National Welfare Organisation and the PIKPA, in an attempt to create a unified system that was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. 

Another law, in the same year, introduced legal procedures for foster care and was amended in 1996, by adding a stricter framework for the role of social investigations in adoption and foster parenting procedures. That law also took an important step by changing Metaxas’s laws to introduce social services in the courts and the State Prosecutor offices, although their mandate remained to handle the delinquency of minors. 

Probably the most important step at the time was taken in 1998 by another PASOK government, this time under Prime Minister Kostas Simitis, when the creation of a National System of Social Care was attempted. In the following years, the former PIKPA units were successively centralised, then decentralised again. Generally under the oversight of regional administration, these units followed divergent courses. One post-PIKPA incarnation, the Lechaina unit for disabled children, achieved world-wide notoriety for its horrific conditions.

The new system gave explicit roles to regional governments, but also cleared up the terms under which private NGO’s could carry out welfare programmes. Thus, the 1990s was also the decade when NGOs would increasingly start to step in and cover for the shortcomings in child protection. The Greek branch of SOS Children’s Villages had been active since 1975, but now non-government care for children would diversify. The Smile of the Child was created in 1995 and The Ark of the World would follow in 1998. All three of these organisations would grow in the years that followed and actively supplement state welfare. 

The decade ended with a presidential decree in 1999 that attempted to contain illegal adoptions by also giving all oversight responsibilities to regional welfare services — Regional institutions and Directorates of Social Care. With an amendment in 2003, even more welfare responsibilities would be directed to the Regional Health Services that had been created a year earlier. According to the explanatory report that came with the draft of the bill, this would allow for “better coordination, monitoring and evaluation” of social welfare services. The UN Committee overseeing the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child noted this attempt, but still found it fell short of a coherent Child Protection System. Some of the problems highlighted by the Committee included the lack of a clear mandate between authorities and a central body that would coordinate all services, problems that are still partially present to this day.

Xeni Dimitriou’s 1991 speech ended by saying that “maybe it is time for juvenile law to grow up”. It marked the beginning of a period of intense pressure by child protection professionals for a proper children’s welfare system to be designed and implemented. But in the 1990s, a welfare system that would address problems that could not be solved with benefits was still a challenge. Also, the word deinstitutionalization had just been popularised for the first time after the attempts to change conditions in Leros, but that programme, which continued for the best part of the decade, would suffer setbacks. Voices of experts speaking about the need to address different vulnerabilities or how institutionalised child welfare could actually be harmful, were only just beginning to be heard.

As it happens, the regressive character of children’s welfare was officially, albeit mostly symbolically, challenged in 2010, by an amendment to a law of the Metaxas regime, mandating the Societies for the Protection of Minors to not only deal with “delinquency”, but also the “victimisation” of minors.

However, just as the need to shift the focus of the child protection system was becoming obvious to policy-makers, Greece found itself in the throes of a terrible financial crisis. Successive governments have since then introduced a variety of “plans” for children’s welfare, which have one thing in common: almost none of their provisions have been implemented.

Municipal Nursery of Athens

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Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

National School of Public Health

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When did the National Centre for Social Solidarity (EKKA) become involved in child protection?

It has always been involved, in the sense that we are here to serve children. Before the current helpline, there was the 197 helpline, and we used to receive child abuse reports there too. Our refuges have always provided shelter to mothers with children who are victims of abuse. We were no strangers to this field. Our systematic involvement, however, began in 2010, when the attempt to create a network with the municipalities unofficially began. At the time, we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.

Back then, there was no Social Welfare Centre, all the welfare institutions were independent. In other words, the Mitera Center for the Protection of the Child of Attica was an independent body, as was Pedopolis “Agios Andreas” (St. Andrew Children's Town) and so on. We held meetings and partnership meetings with the then managers and proposed a system providing ad hoc updates on accommodation availability. We also proposed the creation of a committee made up of representatives from all those bodies that would directly manage accommodation requests, to deal with the problem of children’s prolonged accommodation in hospitals. Our efforts were unsuccessful, there were objections on the part of the institutions.

In 2011, the ministerial decision establishing the Juvenile Protection Teams (OPA) at many municipalities was issued. That is when our systematic involvement with the Juvenile Protection Teams began. We ran training sessions for them, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.

What responsibilities did EKKA have until that time, in the field of child protection?

We were responsible for carrying out the orders of the public prosecutor for a start. For example, here in Athens, EKKA would carry out the prosecutorial investigations for suspected abuse. Since 2011, the Juvenile Protection Teams have been responsible for these inspections. In Thessaloniki, EKKA continued to perform this role because some of the municipalities had not set up a Juvenile Protection Team. There were times when we had up to six public prosecutor orders to investigate.

Did you have the staff needed to do so?

There has been a gradual decline. We had staff losses in general, and, from 2010 onwards, our numbers diminished even more because many people resigned, and recruitment was frozen. We are no different from other bodies in this respect, everyone was faced with the same problem. I just wanted to point out that we carried the burden of prosecutorial investigations for many years.

EKKA is different from other organisations in an important aspect: its intervention department is staffed with highly qualified personnel. In other words, many of our colleagues here have two degrees, postgraduate degrees, doctorates. When we were hired, because this new staff was highly accredited and qualified, they stood out in comparison with other bodies whose scientific personnel might comprise a couple of people. Moreover, our teams worked well, no incident was handled by a single professional on their own.

At the time, we ran a study in hospitals, which we repeated in 2015, to see how many children were being accommodated in hospitals in Attica, pending their placement in other forms of accommodation. In 2015, we recorded 67 children in both children’s and maternity hospitals, residing there from four to six months on average.

What was Mr Altani’s involvement in the creation of the Juvenile Protection Units?

It was his initiative as president of EKKA. Efforts to set up a network had begun in 2010, and one year later, a great number of municipalities, nearly sixty per cent, had responded to the ministerial decision establishing the Juvenile Protection Teams. That’s when we saw that there is a need to act in a coordinated manner.

The new law did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service. But it placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.

It is important to have front-line teams dealing with such a serious matter. I will not say that they are needed in all municipalities. I think we have the flexibility and a flexible structure could be found and configured accordingly. For example, take adjoining municipalities where the frequency of incidents may be low or some mountain municipalities, where the ratio of the population is different, say three children in a community of five hundred people. In these cases, you may not need a team dealing exclusively with juvenile protection. In the municipality of Athens, however, the team is rushed off their feet dealing with prosecutorial investigation orders. There are just two people assigned to this task.

In 2015, when we collected the data for the previous year, around 50 municipalities responded. That is one-fourth of the municipalities: 50 municipalities out of the 235 and 84 professionals out of a little over 400. But theoretically, we had one fourth. It could be considered a representative sample of a quantitative survey. At the time, the professionals surveyed replied that they had carried out approximately 583 investigations in matters of child protection concerning 886 minors. We had 73 instances of child removal. That says something. It says that they cooperated, that they tried to support the family. Of course, a small percentage is attributable to false reports.

Are false accusations common?

Yes. Usually, they arise in the context of family disputes. Or neighbour disputes, say one tenant in a block of flats being spiteful because a neighbour did not allow them to lay a pipe under his parking spot. It could be an argument over an inheritance, a dispute about anything. Sometimes we can tell that’s the case from the call. When you receive a report, you try to filter it. To understand. But it is not always easy over the phone, and the public prosecutor is always, always, ultimately notified whenever an accusation is made. We must make certain that a child is definitely not being abused.

There is a basic numbers problem. Some areas are understaffed, I suspect there is a surplus of public prosecutor recommendations. There are municipalities without a social worker, and public prosecutor orders are carried by the Region, or sometimes the hospital might take charge. The issue is not the surplus. The issue is that if the prosecutor marks the order “urgent”, our colleagues charged with executing it will do everything in their power to at least make the first visit to the family to see what is happening. No order goes unexecuted. It cannot, child protection is at stake, you do what you must. But when you use the same staff to deal with five hundred different objectives, you end up burning them out.

What are the registers that were established at the time?

The adoption register pre-existed them and had been fully operational since 2004. A ministerial decision of 2011 established the national child protection register, where everything relating to minors would be recorded. In other words: reports of abuse, investigation results, accommodation at a care unit, whether they will go into foster care or up for adoption. In theory, it described a register where you would be able to follow the child’s course through the welfare system.

 “In theory” as you say.

Yes, because attempts with the Greek Supreme Court public prosecutor’s office to issue a circular to all public prosecutors requesting them to notify EKKA of prosecutorial orders and their outcome failed. That would have allowed us as a country to have data about how many children have been reported as at-risk, how many are abused. To this end, we only have the results of the latest BECAN study, an exceptional study by the Institute of Child Health. Beyond that, we only have the data that the various bodies collect separately. For example, how many incidents are reported through the EKKA helpline, how many through The Smile of the Child helpline or other helplines. We have the data from the 2014 Juvenile Protection Team study, but we don’t have data yearly, even though the ministerial decision stated that all bodies involved in the handling of these issues must share the data they collect.

Of course, the ministerial decision made no provision for penalties. It did not say that if an organisation failed to share data there would be consequences. Many of the municipalities that we cooperate with via the helpline send us this data. But that only happens because we cooperate on the reports that we receive. As to the reports made to other bodies that reach the municipalities via the prosecutor’s office… we have no idea. As a country, all we can possibly rely on are records from the public prosecutor offices. Find out in how many instances the Athens prosecutor’s office issued an investigation order. Or all the public prosecutor offices in the country. But even then, we would only have data about the cases that reached the public prosecutor’s office.

Respectively, there is also the register for children in institutions. In 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to inform EKKA the following: which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and ask them to complete our documents concerning each child. Even then, not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond. Consequently,  where the latest Roots Research Centre study estimates that 3000 children reside in institutions, this register and the attempt made in 2015 record 984 or 985, in any case, less than 1000 children, which means we have records for 1/3 of the population estimated by the study.

Do you raise this issue with the country’s political leadership?

They are informed, and I think that is why penalties were introduced in the latest legislation. Because that was a weakness in the law. At some point, the legislation must be complied with and a register needs to exist. Not so that EKKA knows, we are an executive body of the ministry. The ministry must know how many children live in institutions, how many are in foster care, so that it can plan policy. Without that information, it can’t plan policy. We, as an executive body, are called upon to execute that.

But all this is currently under construction. In the summer, when the legislation was passed, all the relevant bodies were calling us because the law included a provision that if they failed to forward the information concerning the children in their care within ninety days of the law being passed, there would be serious repercussions on their operation. The phones were ringing off the hook. We reported to the ministry that the institutions were anxious about what would follow. It is an indication that the penalties caused concern and exerted pressure to move forward with this. I prefer to be optimistic that it will work.

How does the 1107 helpline work?

Firstly, the calls are anonymous, no personal details are given unless someone calls and tells us “I can hear a child being abused next door”. In that case, obviously, we will ask for the family’s details; otherwise the public prosecutor cannot issue an order to investigate. Another circumstance where this confidentiality might be superseded is when we are called by a child or a parent. Or if there is a suicide threat. In such instances, confidentiality does not apply, and we ask the caller to give us details. We try to obtain that information in every possible way so that we can send the relevant bodies there on the spot. And we have done so, there have been cases, thankfully not many, where an ambulance was dispatched, or the police in another city in Greece was alerted and responded.

The helpline also provides counselling. Parents, children, teachers call us. Especially during university-entrance exam time, there is a spike in phone calls. But it is not a very well-known helpline.

Supposing someone calls and says, “I suspect my neighbour is abusing his children”. What happens from that point onwards?

Initially, you try to investigate the content of the accusation as much as you can, to verify that it is not a false accusation. You ask how they know, what they hear, if the child appears to attend school regularly. The caller might say they noticed bruises on the child or describe incidents that only someone inside the home would know.

In many instances, a relative will call and make a report and be reluctant to reveal the relationship, fearing that the abuser might find out. There, I will reassure them that we will respect confidentiality but that it is important to understand how they have such detailed knowledge. This is most difficult in sexual abuse cases, because when someone tells you something, evidently their knowledge comes from inside the home.

Of course, we also receive phone calls where the caller might say, “I heard shouting in my neighbourhood ten days ago.” You can’t move ahead with just that. Going back to the other cases I mentioned, we examine how the caller knows, if they can go to the public prosecutor themselves. If the caller refuses or says they are afraid or something along those lines, we inform them that we will ask the public prosecutor to instruct municipal social services, the Juvenile Protection Team, to investigate. Often, they will call again to find out what happened. We tell them that the public prosecutor has been informed, but we cannot give them any details because of confidentiality. That is the process.

Our next move is to contact the municipality to see whether they are aware of the case or not. In some instances, they will tell you, “Yes, I am monitoring the case, I have already made a couple of visits following a public prosecutor’s order,” because another report has already been made to another helpline. In that case, we simply send a notification to the public prosecutor that we have also contacted the municipality, so that the case file can note the existence of a second report. Such details must be shared. Maybe the municipal workers have not yet picked up the case, maybe it has not come to their notice. So, we tell them that we received this report, here is what the caller said, this is the information that we investigated and that a public prosecutor’s order is on the way.

It has its uses because often the public prosecutors do not send a copy of the report to the municipalities. They simply address an order: please carry out a living conditions investigation into minor X residing at Y. The social worker does not know the reason for the investigation, nor is the prosecutor, who is permanently busy, on-call to explain.

And they are all overworked, especially here in Athens. In the rest of the country, many places do not even have public prosecutors for minors. There is no reason for all this to be happening. If you have the content of the report and the chain of transmission, you can contact the recipient of the initial report, where the abuse was first alleged. We ask public prosecutors to forward our initial report to the municipalities, but it does not always happen.

The documentation concerning allegations made to EKKA is usually forwarded. But if the abuse has been reported to another line, the prosecutors tend not to forward the details, but it is essential that they do. We had a case where the young girl called us and said she was being sexually abused by her mother’s partner. If we had not informed the colleague charged with the investigation that it was a sexual abuse case, they would not have known. 

If the abuse victim calls and states that they are being sexually abused, what is the process followed?

The same intake process that takes place at every social service, but at the same time, you will give the child counselling support. You will inform the child of the process. Meaning you will ask if they have any questions about the process, anything they wish to ask—this is all part of counselling. Nevertheless, all allegations are passed on. Every single one of them, because you never know. Because a child is involved. You try to understand because there is also a basic evaluation process to assess the risk level of a situation. You must understand precisely what the caller is trying to tell you.

How many people work at the EKKA helplines?

The same people answer calls to both helplines, 1107 and 197. Right now, there is a staff of nine, if I am not mistaken, all social workers and psychologists. The combined number of calls is recorded, so we do not know how many calls each helpline receives. But it is not just a case of counting the number of calls. We do receive prank calls. Same as the police, or the ambulance service or the fire brigade, or radio stations. You might end up receiving a sexual harassment call and you have to answer the phone. Obviously, you can’t curse anyone, that’s a given. You answer the phone and you hear what’s at the other end of the line, but you might end up having to repeat this for the next two hours until the harasser calms down and stops calling. That means someone can tie-up the helpline, one of the helplines. As we speak, there is a shift of three colleagues handling calls.

You also get psychiatric incidents, people who may call 150 times, that number is no exaggeration. In some instances, they make repeated calls, and they could be people receiving treatment, they have no reason to call the helpline. But they keep calling, again and again.

I remember once incident when I came in for my shift at 6:00 am and the phone rang non-stop until 8:30, a sexual harassment call. It is an important issue because it demands that the professional remain calm enough to handle the harassment they are receiving so that the next time they pick up the phone and it is a genuine call they can respond with the presence of mind needed, unshaken by what previously happened.

We try to keep the functions of the two helplines separate. We ask people to call 1107 to this end. Calls to 197 are free by ministerial decision, but 1107 is not a free helpline yet. A decision needs to be made, someone must pursue this end, demand it. The phone companies need to agree too, it does not just rest with the ministry. Obviously, we will not refuse to take down details and the report if the caller wishes to use 197, regardless of whether the call concerns a reported abuse or any other matter.

Are nine people enough for both helplines? And if they are enough now, will they continue to be enough when the helpline becomes more widely known?

It's a complex answer. Say the ministry decides it wishes to give greater support to this helpline. This would translate into constant publicity and promotion, which in turn would lead to a vast surge in calls and informing the public what the helpline actually does, and it can do for them. What I mean is, you will also get that kind of calls, from people who will not have something specific to report but request information. That always happens with helplines.

So there, when you burst into society, to put it another way, you will need the staff to handle it. When the social solidarity income legislation was passed, 197 was flooded with calls. When the weather turns bad, when there is a sharp drop in temperature, we get calls from citizens to inform us that they have seen a homeless person at a given spot, and the call centre dashboard turns bright red with all the calls on hold.

So, you may be so rushed off your feet for five days, during the bad weather spell, that you don’t even have time to catch your breath. Obviously, there is not enough staff. Also, we need to realise that we are talking about shift-work, all year long, even during public holidays and at some point, the staff need to take their leave.

Does 1107 operate in a complementary or competitive manner towards the helpline operated by The Smile of The Child?

Not in competition. In fact, we get referrals from them because EKKA does not just run the helplines but the refuges too. Some people tell us that they have been told by the Smile helpline to call us. I don’t see it as being in competition. There is just this paradox that both the EKKA and the Smile helplines are national helplines by ministerial decision. So, people don’t just call the Smile of the Child arbitrarily, they are guided in a manner of speaking. And they are right to call, in any case. It did not happen in a vacuum, there was a time when all of welfare fell under the Ministry of Health. The then Minister of Health, this was many years ago when 1107 did not even exist, decided that the national helpline would be the 1056 helpline set up by the Smile of the Child, which is competently run by colleagues.

Besides, there have been collaborations. I recently participated, along with colleagues from the Institute for Child Health, at a training workshop we held for Smile employees. We have exchanged know-how. Relations between us are not competitive.

But there could be a single, merged line, which would fall under EKKA, be nationalised in a way.

I do not know if they would consent to it, in the sense that as an organisation, they have a strong presence in people’s consciousness, whether we like it or not. In any case, these are political planning decisions, it is a legal entity, it promotes its helpline. And it does not just run this helpline, it also runs the helpline for missing children. Again, it’s not like they woke up one day and said, “The missing children helpline, that should be us.” They took all the legal steps to set up and run the line. You can’t turn around tomorrow and say, “close it down”. It is a body that forms part of our national social welfare system. In fact, EKKA has granted it two of its buildings under programme agreements; that is state support in some form. 

What effect did the helpline publicity campaigns have?

For a start, on television, all public awareness campaigns, not just for the EKKA helplines, were broadcast after three or four in the morning, even on public television. On private TV channels, in particular, they aired after midnight. Whenever they are asked to air this kind of social message, they do it very late at night, at three or four a.m. — followed by adverts for phonelines of another kind.

So, the fact that the Smile helpline is somewhat better known than the EKKA helpline has to do with how much promotion it received?

There is an age difference for a start. I think that the Smile of the Child helpline has been in operation for around 25 years. The EKKA child protection helpline has been around for just six years. Of course, it also has to do with the extent to which it was publicised. But I want to stress again that greater publicity means having the capacity to handle the increased volume of calls. I remember that every time a politician, for example, said “call 197 now”, we were flooded with calls. You need the personnel to man the lines because if a citizen calls a line and is kept on hold for an hour, you’ve lost them. I might be dealing with a suicidal caller at the time, or a panic attack, I cannot instantly hang up. I have to give the caller time. But what happens if there is a second and a third such caller?

How much staff would the helpline need to be fully operational?

I think the initial planning called for sixteen to seventeen people. Moreover, every incident necessitates contact with the municipality, the public prosecutor, the police and others as needed. We had instances where we cooperated with the school the child was attending and the teacher was telling us that they would be lodging a complaint with the public prosecutor, as teachers have a duty of care. But we also had to keep it in mind and follow up to check that she did indeed lodge the complaint, find out when it happened, to know what followed. It extends beyond receiving a call. Especially in abuse cases, we bear in mind that a follow up is needed to see how it is progressing.

In other instances, an order arrives at a municipality where the worker handling the case is not very experienced. In that case, we will act in an advisory capacity, there will be cooperation and constant feedback. It’s the only way forward. If you have the know-how, why not support a colleague in handling a case?

Most calls for such instances are from the victims themselves or…

Mostly from their entourage. From neighbours, relatives, not many cases arrive at 1107. We do not get many of these reports. More are made to 1056, as I said. Mrs Demetriou recently reported that the Athens Public Prosecutor’s office handled around 1000 cases in 2018, not counting the cases of unaccompanied minors. We realise that very few of these arrive at the public prosecutor via the EKKA line.

You mentioned “service chauvinism” among professionals in this field. Is EKKA’s recent collaboration with Lumos, the Institute of Child Health and the Greek Association of Social Workers (SKLE) the first cooperation of this kind?

No, it is not the first. As I already mentioned, when the Juvenile Protection Teams were starting out, we ran educational cooperation meetings with the Team personnel, also with the collaboration of the Institute and the Ombudsman. There was also the first training programme for foster parents organised by the Region of Attica, which we also ran together: the Region, EKKA and the Ombudsman. The networks in existence, such as the network against corporal punishment or BECAN, are the collaborative actions of various bodies. It’s just that as far as agreeing to cooperate without the bodies entering into conflict or becoming territorial, “this is mine, I do it better”, we have some way to go. The failure of the registers in the past is proof of this attitude. But they will succeed this time around, I believe that.

There is this sense that most professionals in this field are unanimously in favour of deinstitutionalisation. How did this unanimity come about?

It's not recent, I think that in the past two or three years there is more talk around the subject. But there were always voices advocating deinstitutionalisation. EKKA had spoken about it in its attempt to collect data from institutions in 2010. Preceding research also spoke of it as a necessity.

You cannot be a social worker and be pro-institutionalisation, it goes against the grain of the very profession. You have seen and studied the research that demonstrates the harm institutionalised life does to a child’s development, so what has happened in recent years is that these voices have grown louder. And they have become more of a mass demand.

We are in the 21st century now. It is also a natural evolution, in my view. When you have seen how other neighbouring countries, countries whose economy is similar to ours, removed over ten thousand children in ten years from institutions and into foster care, they act as an example to follow. You tell yourself, they could do it, so can we.

Do you believe it will happen?

If I did not believe it, I would have to resign and go home. I should not be doing this job. If I did not believe something will change, I could not carry on. I just think it needs time. Besides, past gaps in the law are being covered by the new legislation. I am not saying the new law is perfect, I have expressed reservations on some matters. In many aspects, it is a return of the previous statutory framework, but I cannot disregard the fact that we are finally talking about penalties for institutions failing to provide data. The way I see it, it is an indication that the state is saying enough, no more kidding around, I want to know what is going on, and I want it done properly. 

The register of prospective adoptive parents is being established for the first time. It is an attempt to control private adoptions, because things were not good as they stood. Professional foster care is being established for the first time. I am not saying that we will wake up tomorrow and have fifteen, twenty, five hundred professional foster parents who could provide care to disabled or delinquent children. I am not saying that will happen but going from a place where you could not see it ever happening to being able to foresee it is a huge step.

For the first time, foster care benefits are being regulated and will be given to all foster parents. Until recently, the benefit was given only to foster care arranged through the Centre for Social Welfare of the Region of Attica, meaning the Child Care Service “Anarrotirio Pentelis”, the Pedopolis “Agios Andreas” and Mitera. But we had instances of foster care being arranged by the Regions for the children in non-state institutions, and those foster parents received no benefits. We had a two-tier foster parent system. The issue is not the actual benefit, it is the inherent symbolism, namely the acknowledgement by the state that it bears the responsibility for those children that cannot be looked after by their families.

So, it is important to see the upside too. I repeat, if I believed the landscape could not change, then I would leave. I would not be fighting for it. I would turn into a civil servant waiting to punch out. In other words, I would be dead, and I would not even know it.

There does seem to be a lot of activity around this issue these past two years.

Although I have pointed out existing gaps and shortcomings, I want to be fair. In recent years the state has indeed given weight to issues of child protection. For example, it passed the law for the guardianship of unaccompanied minors, for which we had no framework as a country. That is important. I will not go into an overall evaluation of the legislation, every stature has its pros and cons and you must see how it works in practice and evaluate it, see if it needs any amendments, but the fact is that attention has been paid and I cannot disregard that.

And it happened when we had a huge surge in demand for child protection. In the year 2018 alone, EKKA handled more than 5900 demands for the accommodation of unaccompanied minors. That is a massive volume. At the same time, requests addressed to social services concerning the protection of children not due to abuse or neglect, but due to parental incapacity also increased, because the families went through a crisis, because the parents could no longer provide care. They were unemployed. They had no money to feed their child. Psychological issues have always been present, but now they have intensified. We receive requests to support families and children, which we did not get in previous years.

So, with demands rising, you see that an effort is being made to deal with a large number of issues. At the same time, we have been dealing with the understaffing of services. Many colleagues retired from 2010 onwards, their posts were not filled, so all the services are understaffed.

The protection system for unaccompanied minors has been described by professionals in this field as a “parallel system” to the child protection system in place.

That is not always useful, and everyone says the same thing: having a system that is deficient and creating a parallel system, I don’t know how useful that can be. The goal is to merge the two. 

Are we moving in that direction?

Of course. But change does not happen overnight. The system for unaccompanied minors, the services and institutions, was created out of necessity. How? It was set up because the procedure for refuges was fast-tracked and they could be set up. Because we received funding from abroad; because the European Union gave money to set them up. To receive the funds, a ministerial decision was issued stating that all requests will be handled by EKKA. EKKA will know on any given day what the accommodation availability is, EKKA will decide which child goes where. We don’t have an equivalent legislative tool for the mainstream child protection system like we do for unaccompanied minors.

How did the decision for the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance" to occupy the Lechaina Unit in November 2015 come about?

Zero Tolerance was formed in 2010 with a view to building a disability activist movement, a movement for the emancipation of disabled subjects, alongside the Movement of Disabled Artists. We began implementing actions, publishing articles, occupying premises, staging all kinds of interventions. And then came the time to emancipate ourselves so that we could deal with the grave issue of institutionalised life and deinstitutionalisation. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, unable to advocate for themselves, having no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present. So, we, their fellow disabled, began to advocate for their rights.

A two-day festival was held at the self-managed theatre “Embros” shortly before the occupation, a solidarity festival for the children and adults of Lechaina as well as all the other institutions. There were discussions, documentary screenings, plays. The groundwork for the occupation was laid there.

What was the aim?

To highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living.

What was the plan?

To occupy the premises in question and invite civil society to join us in becoming many. It did not happen. The response was not there. The cameras were there, in that there was widespread media coverage at the time.  All the TV channels, both public broadcaster ERT and private broadcasters, aired reports, each in their own manner. A lot of the coverage took on an anti-government bias. We were not focusing on that aspect at all, at the time. Besides, the SYRIZA-ANEL government had only been in power for two months. Our focus was to highlight what was a chronic situation. Lechaina had not been happening for two months, it had a history of 37 years.((For an in-depth account of the Lechaina Unit, read our case study: Hell as an Institution))

We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad. In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. In other words, we were not doing anything new, something that had never been done before. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, “Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.” We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside.  

Were you afraid?

No, no, no. Not at all. We were in the right, I had nothing to fear. None of us was afraid. We had already occupied the Social Insurance Institute (IKA) in 2011. When Syntagma Square was packed with half a million people, we went and peacefully occupied the IKA headquarters for four days. We stayed in Lechaina for four days, too; apparently that is how long our bodies can withstand being exposed to these conditions…

We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime, a total of nine people, most of us disabled, in four cars. We explained who we were. The Chairman of the Board of the facility said we needed a permit to enter – the police conveyed the management’s request to us. We were prepared, ID cards in our pockets. We told the policeman that the violations taking place here were far greater than any violation our presence might give rise to, that we had no intention of hindering the staff in their work but had no intention of leaving either. We went inside knowing what awaited there, but the reality is always much harsher than anything you could have imagined.

Did you have any run-ins with the authorities after the occupation?

We are the ones who went to the Public Prosecutor. Four of us left the unit and went to the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada and filed a complaint. To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify.((The Prosecutor's office archived the complaint in 2016. See our case study on the Lechaina Unit: Hell as an Institution))

The complaint was filed officially, not anonymously. There are specific liabilities at stake: who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed the medication? Specific criminal liabilities are pending, and, to date, they have not been investigated. Unless we are to accept that the disabled persons at the unit are unworthy of living, in which case no criminal liability arises.

The fact that no one is held accountable for this conduct, the fact that nobody seems to wonder about who is to blame for these people’s torture–it is just not possible that no one is to blame—is indicative of the treatment  of disabled subjects in institutions. Is the psychiatrist responsible? Did she prescribe by fax? Was she contacted at two in the morning and told “so-and-so is hitting themselves,” and did she reply, “I’ll fax you a prescription”? Did she do that? If so, is it allowed? Is it a punishable offence? Are prolonged physical restraint and/or prolonged chemical suppression scientifically accepted practices? Are they torture? The UN says they are. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed.

We met the psychiatrist, too, she came to the premises while we were inside. We wanted to speak to her. She did not.

Ideologically, we stand against doctors. Obviously, we do not refuse the intervention of medical science. At the same time, however, we are aware of the part that the medical field has played in us being disabled. By “disabled” in this instance I mean “oppressed”, I do not refer to the impairment. The initial impairment is a separate matter. But if you study the file of a person who has spent twenty years in an institution, his resulting state bears no relation to the initial impairment. Because the impairment of institutionalisation has been added on top.

Several other attempts had been made prior to your intervention and official complaint…

Are you asking why we left it for so long?

No…

I do wish to answer that, nonetheless. We have critically self-reflected on this, on why we left it for so long. Nine of us went there and did something. Why did we leave it so late, why did we not act sooner? We would have made a difference to more people. We looked away, we did not want to face it, we could not face it.

One in two people will project. One of our fellow disabled members, who has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation in the past. His mother had been told the all-too-frequent “Don’t make it harder on yourself. Send him to an institution so you can focus on raising your daughter”. It was hard. I, with my acquired disability, never felt that. I did not believe at twenty-one that my parents would lock me up in an institution. I was already a director; I was working in television. But for other members of the group, who were born disabled, that was one of the turns their life could have taken. We became wiser…

That is what our group is all about, the emancipation of the disabled. The first to become emancipated are the members themselves through this process. We did not want to face this harsh aspect of reality, this prospect that could have been ours. On the other hand, once we stepped outside this individualised perception of disability, once the personal became social, that is when we began to think about what we could do. Could our small band go inside and do something impactful? Not just take a couple of photos and then leave. Would we be taken seriously? Would there be news coverage? Would the ministry take note? Because frustration also plays a part. When you have experienced frustration so many times, over and over, you think it over and wonder, “Should I get involved or will it lead to yet more frustration?” In the end, we burst in and ultimately, some things were put in motion.

Therefore, in terms of a section of society staging an intervention, it was an action worth taking. At the same time, the self-criticism for the delay still stands. We had to fight against our own taboos. That is no small thing. It was a more painful process for our members who had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation at some point than for us. It was harder for them to cope with it. We used to meet, days later, not out of a need to discuss politics or organisational matters, but to talk. To cry, to drink, to cry again… mainly to be there for those who had found it most painful. If you talk to the fellow disabled member I mentioned, he will tell you this: “No matter where I find myself, a cage stands beside me. I carry it with me.” It was an experience that marked people, and I don’t just mean the members of Zero Tolerance. But we are not enough. For deinstitutionalisation to become a demand, for this monstrosity to stop being socially acceptable and normalised, we need to change the way society thinks of disability. We are not interested in everyone’s personal sensibilities. We are interested in mobilising civil society.

What we say applies to all institutions. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism, in living bereft of human dignity in a difficult part of the country, where people perceive disability in the manner stated by Minister of Agricultural Development Makis Voridis,  namely that there are disabled people who have the capacity for understanding and disabled people who do not.((Minister Voridis, during a TV panel discussion, had quipped that children at sixteen "are not disabled", meaning that at that age they have a capacity of adult communication. Video is available (in Greek) here.)) And as a society, we still hold on to the belief that the people in Lechaina do not have the capacity for understanding.

Lechaina must be shut down, the people there must leave. Four years to the day, however, we are still discussing what must be done.

Why do you think that is the case?

It is rotten from the start. Because when a child is born, the first thing the parents, where available, will hear is the medical opinion. It is rotten from the moment the obstetrician enters the room and tells the new mother, “Your child was born faulty.” He will not tell her, “Look, there are difficulties ahead, but you can do this and that.” He will only tell her about the difficulties. He will not offer comfort but launch into the medical script of “he will not be able to think, to see, to hear” and so on. That this child will be bad for her other children, that this child will ruin her relationship with her husband, so “Do not breastfeed, I will interrupt your milk-flow and we will send it to an institution. Your responsibility ends there, you do not need to concern yourself with the course of this child’s life.” That is the classic scenario.

In this instance, we are not talking about broken families, about offenders who are imprisoned, and whose children end up in institutions. We should note here that only fourteen to fifteen per cent of the institutionalised have absolutely no point of reference, in other words, a parent who could potentially take on some responsibilities. Therefore, we are talking about abandonment; about how a couple imagines the stork bringing a blond, green-eyed “normal baby” and then receives a “faulty baby” and decides to bin it.  In those cases, it is the doctor’s intervention that causes the initial damage. Add the way society espouses those same views and the parents freak out. They suffer too, of course, but that does not change the end result.

We saw this in the case of Maria in Lechaina, when we spoke to her mother. The moment her daughter was born, the doctors began to list everything that could happen, medically speaking. But a person is not a medical diagnosis. They are a person. And the problem arises when you start listing all the medical difficulties that lie ahead instead of how they could be dealt with in an organised society.

Does that organised society exist?

Well, people who, despite all these difficulties, make a choice that goes against the medicalised belief that a person who thinks differently ought to be normalised certainly do exist. People who, for example, do not try to normalise autistic children, who do not have a neurotypical brain but an autistic one, and make them be like us. Because that is the beginning of Nazism.

According to Lev Vygotsky, there is a belief that the disabled are a priori unhappy.((Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist. More info available in Wikipedia.)) It is a racist belief, this belief that our lives are lives of suffering, that sometimes they are lives not worth living.

Adriana, who recently passed away, was nineteen years old. I think Adriana’s original diagnosis was glaucoma, meaning she was blind. When we found Adriana, she did not speak, she did not walk, because she lived in a cage. She was restrained when she was around seven years old, because they had no way of confining her and because they could not “nurse” her. So, they put her in a cage because she was active, and no personnel was available to watch over her. The most common question in there is “What are you doing standing up?”. It’s like a regular barracks. Why must they be lying down all day long? Why must they be confined to their bed? Why can they not be outside on the swings?

The standard reply is that the unit is understaffed. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Why are they understaffed? Why are all the residents in diapers? Why do none of them know how to be self-reliant, to use the toilet on their own, to feed themselves? Because they have lost their skills due to institutionalisation and the complete deprivation of every social right. Therefore, the reason the personnel does not suffice is that all these people have been rendered incapacitated.

Is there some kind of logic in what the staff are claiming? There are two people per floor in each shift.

That’s true. But the conclusion depends on your starting point. Do you begin by examining why this happens, or are you only interested in examining the outcome you are dealing with? Two people per floor in each shift are obviously not enough. But why does that happen? How can it be possible for a person with spastic quadriplegia not to be autonomous? Not to be able to eat, drink, use the toilet on their own? How can the rest of us do all those things? They were never allowed to develop.

Or their abilities were “anaesthetised”. A child enters the institution mobile and within a week stops using the toilet. Then the child gets given a bedpan…

A bedpan, really? They soil themselves and then are cleaned with a wipe. They only rarely shower. If a minister is planning to visit, they’ll be given a bath, so they don’t stink. If anyone makes the mistake of soiling themselves after the diaper change, they must wait for the next round. There is no personalised care for this. That means someone can spend hours in a soiled diaper. That is why you end up with that pervading smell in institutions that they can’t wash away.

Have you seen their bodies? Have you seen how many functional deformities have resulted from the repeated adoption of certain postures? Would you like to hear something strange, which also demonstrates the oppression, the torment they have been subjected to? The persons freed by Nikolaidis’ team, unfettered, still slept at night in the same sleeping position they had been restrained in for years. Do you understand what that means? The most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured. That is why, in the early days, almost no one accepted the intervention. That is why it was such an enormous, difficult task for that team.  

Another scene I will never forget is the two young girls, Ellie and Maria, who were eleven years old at the time. When the intervention team arrived at Lechaina, these two girls, being the youngest, were removed to the Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children (PIKPA) in Voula. We used to go and visit them there. One day, they came to our home for a few hours, accompanied by PIKPA volunteers. I remember Ellie in particular, looking for a place to hide. Under the table… always a sheltered spot, away from people and animals. By the end of the day, they were crying because they did not want to leave. It was our understanding that they had never been in a house before. She lay down on our bed, she wanted us to tuck her in so she could sleep there. She saw a dog for the first time, she had never seen one before. She stared at the dog, watched it as if wondering what that strange creature was. We ate together, they had dessert, we danced… same as one would with any other child.

Except that these children had been deprived of love and care. Real love, not the care that an institution’s staff can give. I do not dispute that some of the staff may form emotional attachments with the disabled there, but the way of life in an institution is the very opposite of nurturing care. You spend your whole life being approached by someone in a laboratory coat. Why? They can’t even grasp the fundamental concept of turning up in your own clothes. The gloves, too. Wearing surgical gloves to feed the residents. Why? What are you going to catch? The whole set up of institutions is medico-centric.

You are not only an activist; you are a director too. You are currently working on a documentary about Lechaina…

The two roles are interconnected in any case.

So you enter the occupied building with a camera…

I was not the one holding it, but yes. Two cameras. We went to record what was happening. That’s how it started.

What was the initial purpose of filming? Did you take the cameras as protection?

On the one hand, it was to protect ourselves against anything that might happen, on the other hand, it was to record that moment. Film it and see what was happening there. What we encountered was beyond our worst nightmares.

Did you also take cameras to the occupation of the IKA headquarters you had previously staged?

Yes, small cameras then too, to record everything. As well as for protection, we use the cameras to film material that we can then upload on Zero Tolerance’s social media.  

After the press conference we held at the Lechaina Child Care Centre (KEPEP) on the third day and our departure on the fourth day, the first thing I did was to edit some early material, which is still available online, to accompany the press conference in Athens, to show the journalists and launch the discussion.

When did you decide that you wanted to turn this into a documentary?

I decided during the occupation. I realised that this was an issue I needed to follow up. So, I returned at various intervals, no longer as an “occupier” but first and foremost as a disabled person. And I kept filming. I stayed inside the unit for three, sometimes four days at a time, left, returned, again and again. These past four years, I have made 34 trips to Lechaina if my memory does not fail me. I keep a diary…

This allowed us…

You use the first-person plural?

Not out of politeness, but because I consider this to be a group project, not my work exclusively.

Anyway, this allowed us to observe how things evolved inside Lechaina because one year later, Nikolaidis’ team arrived to implement the interim intervention. The emergency relief intervention for the residents was introduced, and we began to see how these people changed thanks to it.

How their behaviour changed, how the residents we first met, who were uncommunicative, tied up, inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, eyes unfocused, began to blossom in the year and a half that followed the start of the intervention. We watched them develop their skills, we heard them speak, utter words, we heard others express specific requests, “I want a bedside table”, “I want my own clothes”, “I want a TV set”, “I want a remote control”. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving “the prescribed treatment for their own good”.

We saw them step outside. Leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, and that momentous occasion when they saw the front door, stepped outdoors. We witnessed their fears and inhibitions. They did not want to break their routine. For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps; “bed restraint” or “mechanical restraint” as they call it. Some did indeed refuse to cooperate. But that is perfectly normal. Fear was the cause.

But we also saw people suddenly use a spoon and feed themselves, it was incredible! Because up until then they had been bottle-fed, lying down, gulping down liquidised meals in seconds. They did not know how to use their mouths to eat. That is why the teeth of nearly all the residents are in a terrible state. This change took place inside the institution – we did not go to a new space where things were different. It was inside those premises, that place of torture, that the situation changed.

What I had not anticipated in the making of this documentary was filming the dead. People we had met. Attempts were made to remove them from the institution, but they subsequently passed away. I’m not talking about elderly people, they were young.

Take Panagiotis, for example, the oldest resident at fifty years old. It is a miracle he has managed to survive like this, staring at the ceiling. The people who died were much younger: Christos and Ellie and Adriana and Maria.  Ellie was fifteen. Adriana had just turned nineteen. She was the blind girl.

We imagine you have spoken to the staff during your visits. You must have interviewed some of them…

They did not want to be interviewed. Now that they have found out I’m not filming for the sake of it, that I am creating something specific, they might change their mind. I never film with any formality; I do not shout “action!” I prefer things to be spontaneous, a recording of reality without altering the environment so that the actual circumstances remain unchanged. This means that the set up must be minimal. Small cameras to avoid creating a sense of occasion, no boom mics, no lights, no large crew wearing headphones.

So, I met them as individuals first and foremost, learned about their lives, their stories, how they ended up working at the unit since most of them had no previous background, no connection to this field. That did not surprise us, they are locals who found work. Some of them have been working there since the very first day, so we heard about how they were thrown in at the deep end when the institution opened, without any organisational setup. They brought the residents there without any idea of how to deal with them. The staff told us how they ended up organising themselves and creating these conditions, meaning the beds that they enclosed in bars, turning them into cages.

Which they refer to as cots or playpens among themselves.

 Yes. Of course, the term was coined by the former Minister of Health, Katerina Papakosta. “Playpens” then, and that “strapping them down is for their own good” so that “they cannot harm themselves”. Once again, was it the chicken or the egg? When you are enclosed in a confined space for a prolonged period, without any stimulation, no sensory stimulation, no psycho-emotional stimulation, then you begin to hit yourself, to drink your own urine, to eat your own faeces and all the other things you hear about. But this applies to every human being subjected to these conditions, you do not need to have an impairment to reach that point. The institutionalisation makes you impaired. Of course, all behaviours are attributed to their disabilities, it is the easiest narrative to adopt. They tell you, “Can’t you see what they are like?”.

We imagine you have also wondered how these people accept to subject other human beings to this abuse. Do you have an answer to that?

I know that they struggled at first, at least according to their narratives.

Morally?

Morally, I would say yes, they morally struggled with strapping people down. The system is set up in such a way as to render them responsible for some people. But given that this conversation is constantly rehashed, the issue is not whether we can hire more staff so that the torture can go on, so that there is “better monitoring” and residents can continue to be drugged up to the eyeballs. The issue is that no matter how much personnel you hire, you are still running an institution. And the concept of an institution is not that far removed from the concept of a barracks or a prison. Wake up at set times, eat at set times, sleep at set times.

Were these people convinced by scientists that this is the appropriate approach?

Scientists prescribed both “mechanical restraint” and the drug dosages. With absolutely no supervision. In fact, in some cases, they added a new medication to the mix without discontinuing the previous medication. Without anyone ever checking drug interactions or potential side effects. We saw the end result. Zombies. That’s it.

For years the personnel refused to accept the new state of affairs. They did not want to accept that there is an alternative way to provide care. 

Because it meant stepping outside their comfort zones?

I think they did not want to accept that they might be doing something wrong. The prevailing attitude was “Are you here to tell me that what I have been doing for twenty-five, thirty years is not right? How dare you?”

But you are not just telling them this is wrong, you are saying this is inhuman, this is torture.

 “We love these children very much, but there is no other way to manage them. They are monsters. They are unpredictable. If we don’t restrain them, they’ll be climbing up the walls. They could eat the plaster. They could eat their own faeces. They could swallow a large object, choke and die.” These are all actual words we have heard. That is why our position is that none of these people should continue to work in this environment. I don’t mean that they should lose their jobs. I mean that they should go and work in a different environment, certainly not in an institution.

By talking to them, showing them examples from abroad, we managed to persuade a few of them, too few. We were thinking of organising screenings of foreign documentaries on deinstitutionalisation, where the residents themselves discuss life before and after the closure of their institution once they had lived in society and developed their capabilities. The response was, “You are in the Balkans now, this is all too European. Who will fund all this? They’ll run it for half a year and then back to the same old.”

The truth is that we went there having made the conscious decision not to go down that frequent route. Blaming personnel is the easiest thing in the world. That is not to say there is no personal accountability, but the main responsibility lies with the so-called, in our view non-existent, welfare state. It lies with the politicians, who have kept us trapped in a time warp all these years.

And when the issue was all over the news, they would come out with statements. Like former Health Minister Andreas Loverdos in 2011, who stated that he would grant access to any journalist who wished to visit an institution and report on the conditions. And former Deputy Minister of Health Katerina Papakosta, who visited Lechaina following the BBC report and informed us that the situation was not what had been presented, that the “cots” were used for the children’s own protection and that they were standard practice. Then, former Minister Effie Achtsioglou and Deputy Minister Theano Fotiou announced a deinstitutionalisation scheme, and for the first time in Greece, the word “deinstitutionalisation” was pronounced by someone in power.  

What was the reaction at the Lechaina unit?

Their first reaction when deinstitutionalisation was announced and I visited Lechaina was, “It’s going to be just like ERT. They are going to shut it down and fire us all.” They needed to hear reassurances from the ministry that they would not lose their jobs. Very few said, “OK, I can understand why this needs to happen, this situation cannot continue. What will our part be going forward? How will this thing work? What’s the next step?” I told them, “It would be far better to work in a real home in the city of Lechaina or a place nearby and work in more humane conditions.”

Moreover, the professional foster care scheme had been announced, which would enable some of the workers to foster a resident in their home. Some of them had, indeed, bonded with certain residents, bonded with the “children”, everyone is called a “child” there, even when they are fifty years old, so they could opt for professional fostering and work from home.

The SYRIZA-ANEL former government announced professional foster care but did not take the necessary actions to implement it. How did your interlocutors react to the idea, nonetheless?

I discussed this with a worker who calls one of the residents her “daughter”. I told her, “Why don’t you take your daughter home under the professional foster care scheme then?” She fell silent. She just gaped at me. Being in your workplace and having formed a bond with someone there is very different to transferring that relationship into your own home. I imagine that would require discussions with her husband, her children, her social circle. Even without the implementation of professional foster care, the option to take a resident home for the weekend was still there. All it required was the permission of the Board of Directors. No one ever did that.

Or for the holidays, Christmas…

Every Christmas they host an event for “normal” children who are allowed into the lobby, they do not go further inside, and sing Christmas carols.

There are children who have been inside the unit and decorated the cages...

Yes, from the American Community Schools of Athens (ACS), to brighten up the torture of the people kept inside the cages. Of course, the residents were not physically inside the cages while the students painted them.

Small mercies…

That was one of the most vivid contrasts that struck me as I entered the centre. The dystopian landscape. The stench of excrement, fettered residents moaning and groaning and “I love you” painted on the walls, signed by ACS. I really would like to know what on earth the educator in charge had been thinking.

Returning to the subject of the personnel, I have seen the extent to which they have accepted the work they are asked to carry out and the resulting way of life for the residents. It never ceases to astound me, in all the institutions I have visited, be it Crete, the PIKPA in Voula, Thessaloniki, Komotini, Rhodes… This situation is normalised. It might shock those of us witnessing it for the first time, but that is the reality as far as they are concerned. I was also astounded by the fact that few visiting relatives seemed to be astonished by what they saw. They found it normal too.

We have also witnessed an admission being deterred. A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. The reasoning behind the decision was to save her marriage and spare her other children. She was evidently being pressured by her husband to abandon the disabled child, so they could focus on their “normal” children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears.

Did she take the child with her?

Yes.

So at least one child was spared…

Maybe she split up with her husband. Who knows what kind of pressure she was under? The guilt she carried with her for giving birth to a disabled child. The belief that she was being punished by God for some previous sin… In any case, yes, we were glad that the admission was averted.  But they did admit a new resident recently. Various organisations were mobilised, we opposed the decision publicly, the ministry intervened, and the child was brought to Athens because the public prosecutor would not rescind the order. That is also a big issue. I do not know if a decision to prohibit new admissions at Lechaina has been officially made.

There is a Board of Directors decision to suspend admissions.

Only that. Theano Fotiou, Effie Achtsioglou or the General Secretary for Welfare, I do not think they ever issued a decision to ban new admissions when they decided Lechaina would eventually close. Of course, things are no better elsewhere in Greece. Lechaina differed in the use of those “cots”. But I have seen a resident fettered with ropes in another institution, I have seen those tall “cots” with high bars, allegedly to stop people from falling if they stand up on their beds. All institutions operate along the same lines. Even the smell is the same. They all smell the same.

What did you have in mind when you began working on this documentary?

Look, when you start a documentary, you are not in charge, the reality guides you. Going into Lechaina, I decided to do what the documentary title says: From Asylum to Society. In other words, we decided to take what society rejects by relegating it to an isolated building somewhere far away, record it and bring it before its eyes. I wanted to experience it, to go on this journey that I think is gradually coming to its end. I cannot sit and wait to see how the new government will act.  See if it wants to raze everything that happened before to the ground and do something entirely different. Many rumours are going around, some bordering on science fiction, but there are some others which may find us in agreement. I wanted to record this unbearable situation, which is one hundred per cent legalised and imposed by the state itself. A situation that is connected to the perceptions we all have, including the country’s politicians, about the lives of the disabled who find themselves outside the family circle for some reason, and that is the only protection we afford them.

Unfortunately, a documentary cannot communicate the smells, nor what being there does to someone like you or me. But the conditions… the conditions inside an institution. No matter how good you try to make them, an institution remains a place of torture. Torture that has been normalised using the physical impairments of the those confined there as a pretext.

You must have been hoping for something at the beginning of the documentary, however.

Yes, I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. I did…

Do you feel frustrated?

We are used to frustration… Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that Effie Achtsioglou’s announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the birth family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That they would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.

During the four days of the occupation there was tension, our interactions were formal, information would reach us, Theano Fotiou made a statement, we made a statement. In the end, we decided the pressure group must move from inside Lechaina to headquarters, we announced that we expected to be called to the Ministry to discuss everything we had recorded. At the same time, we sent all the material we had gathered abroad to spark a reaction in Europe, the bodies charged with welfare. We sent it to the UN, and they issued a recommendation that we read out during the press conference we held at Lechaina on the afternoon of the third day, inviting local press. The mayor came, along with various others.

 We broke down on the day of our departure. We broke down because we were saying goodbye to our fellow disabled, and we could not grasp that we were free to leave that place, but they would stay behind. We broke down. We wept. We sobbed. We said goodbye and gathered around a bench outside, by the olive trees and burst into tears. An olive tree is planted every time someone dies. All these people, they enter the institution as children and leave when they are adults… by dying. “Deinstitutionalisation” via movement to the great beyond, if you are a believer. We wept because we knew that we were going home and that from that day forth, we would have to find a way to change the reality we had experienced, no matter what.

I also feel great sadness. Because, for us, the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. They have been ready to leave the institution for a year now. Nikolaidis rightly said from the start that you cannot just take people out of a cage and simply transfer them elsewhere, there needs to be a training and transition process. That process has taken place.

So, I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen. But, sadly, society is not mobilising.  And that is the heart of the matter. The issue of deinstitutionalisation is vast, it concerns a great number of people. In 2014, the Roots Research Centre in Greece estimated that approximately 900 disabled persons are held in institutions. They enter as children and depart as olives. That is the Greek version of deinstitutionalisation. It is a massive issue. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.

A few years ago, the Institute’s Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare created certain tools to link the various services dealing with child abuse. Can you tell us more about that?

We had created a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. The necessity for such a tool arose from previous studies, as well as the widely acknowledged experiential findings of professionals working on the front-line that, in Greece, from the moment the suspicion that a child is being abused arises, a number of different professionals usually become involved, looking into it and doing different things at different times, depending on a number of random factors, such as where the suspected or reported abuse is initially lodged. This is unacceptable because the process of evaluating the credibility of such a report cannot depend on subjective or random factors.

So, we set up the national protocol, actually following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice. It is like an algorithm of steps covering every type of suspected abuse, physical, sexual, psychological, neglect, and determining which professions must intervene and what they must examine so as to reach a reliable conclusion. Back then, we trained 400 professionals in all 13 Regions of the country on how to use the protocol and have since provided further training, because we are asked to do so by various bodies, so the protocol must have been received as a useful and rather comprehensive tool.

We notified the state, the relevant ministries, because the protocol was inherently intersectoral, in other words, it was intended to be used by professionals working in the welfare, health, justice, law enforcement and education sectors.

When did you notify them about the protocol?

In 2014, when the work was completed. At the same time, within the framework of this project, we had created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered and various professionals from different bodies, sectors and specialisations could all have access to this computerised system, their access adjusted according to what the law stipulates. What I mean is, in the Greek legal system, for example, public prosecutors may have access to any information, but other professionals may have access to restricted data, for personal data protection reasons. So, the system we set up could provide varying degrees of access to the different professional categories. We also produced the accompanying material, training guides, user guides. And we trained, once again, 400 people from all areas of public administration and non-governmental organisations in their use. We informed the state about these tools too, in 2014.

What became of these tools?

They remain inactive. The state never adopted them. They have not been granted any institutional status. The irony is that at the same time, our institution, heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.

What must the state do in order to adopt it?

It needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present. In some way, the actors involved must receive a sign from the state that they need to use it and that this data will be utilised in some way.

Is it a case of lacking a culture of intersectional cooperation?

In Greece, the tradition of intersectoral cooperation is certainly limited. And experiences in the field of child protection are often traumatic because intersectoral cooperation is always necessary, there is no way any sector or any profession could ever adequately deal with an incident on their own.

However, the truth is that it has not been at all easy in several European countries, too. The inflexibility that arises from being confined in one’s sector is not a uniquely Greek characteristic; it was also found elsewhere. A systematic effort was needed to overcome or bypass resistance, to shatter given preconceptions and practices and reframe practices on the basis of the child being victimised. We had to rethink our processes, not based on what suits us, the professionals, the adults, on what comes most naturally based on the way our service operates or the traditions of our practice, but based on how we should all work together to serve the interests of the population that they benefit, the child victim.

Is the financial crisis to blame for the lack of progress in Greece?

Look, there is a poverty of resources, although that was also the case before the crisis as far as the field of social and child protection is concerned. And yet, we can apparently afford the luxury of no less than four or five parallel service networks, fragmented and inefficient. There is a social services network under first-level local government authorities, a network under Regional authorities, which also has different statutory powers, another network under the Ministry of Labour’s General Secretariat of Welfare, another one under the Ministry of Justice and its legal entities, a health network under the Ministry of Education and the Community Mental Health Centres for Children and Adolescents, and so on and so forth.  We indulge in the luxury of maintaining them all as separate parallel networks despite the poverty of resources and keep them as is, despite the crisis and the even greater poverty of resources. So, you see, there is indeed the problem of funding, but there is also the issue of how we use the resources at our disposal.

Then how do you explain what is happening?

Social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve. Take local government, for example, go to the social services of a municipality and ask the staff how often municipal leaders interfere in what they do, in the priorities and planning of their service. Sometimes, in extreme cases, especially in smaller communities, they even interfere in the work itself. Or take justice. Obviously, the services there are subject to the priorities of the prosecutorial or the judicial mechanism. What I mean is, everyone set up their own thing, with the embroilment of politicians from various posts too, but each of those things began to develop an autonomous existence and then everyone began to defend its particularities and self-existence. The fact remains that all of those things do not constitute a system.

So, the most pressing need is the unification of services?

I have already mentioned the fact that which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises. This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things. I must confess that when I first arrived at this post, I found open cases where the revelation had been made in 2002 and the final judgement was ultimately delivered in 201. In other words, a child found the courage to reveal something when they were four or five years old and justice was delivered when that child was on the verge of adulthood.  

You can understand how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. I can also give you more examples of how harmful this chaos can be. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, “I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.” That’s not how it should be, though…

Isn’t there procedural immunity for health professionals who report such incidences?

Yes, there is, and the fact that it was legislated for social services too, extending the immunity of professionals, was a positive step. For many years, others and I were constantly called to testify as witnesses for the defence of colleagues who had been sued for defamation or breach of duty by those named as perpetrators of crimes against children.

Are not professionals who fail to report such incidents subject to criminal liability?

They are, but that is not the point. It is often the case that the law merely provides for penalties without any provision for support. In other words, the law says you must do this, and if you don’t, you will be prosecuted, go to prison for so many years, but without giving you any backing, without providing the support that will allow you to do what you need to do, leaving you to your own devices to that end.  If a teacher reports a case and the alleged offender then sues, who in Greece will provide the teacher with institutional support? Let me tell you that the experience of people working in this field, be they doctors, or psychologists, or social workers, or other professionals in the mental health or social welfare sectors, is that at least until the latest legislation, whose impact in practice remains to be seen, there were people who were dragged through the courts for six, seven, eight years as defendants. No one paid for their lawyer, no one recompensed them for the fact that they had to appear before the court every six to eight months, no one supported them on how they were supposed to do what they are being instructed to do.  

Legislation on its own does not resolve all issues, as a great many instances show us. The point is, what mechanism would actually allow us to agree in this country that a given professional was doing their job in good faith and lege artis? The right of the alleged offender to take legal action, because their reputation was damaged for example, is understandable and inviolable. Although less frequent, instances of accusations being made frivolously do arise. So, the accused must have some legal recourse.  

The problem is that we have no reliable system in place to ensure that if, for example, Nikolaidis sends 100 cases to court and not one results in a guilty verdict, a body will find this practice unacceptable. There needs to be some reliable way for the authorities to review me, if I am doing my job properly. In Greece, this is not a given, because traditional monitoring bodies are not universally accepted, because politics, interpersonal relationships and the like also come into play.

But even when a report is made, it does not necessarily follow that the state will respond appropriately, does it? In the notorious child sexual abuse case of Rethymno, in 2011, approximately a year passed between the report being made and the suspect’s arrest…

Yes, and there was much talk, many questions about the time gap between the initial report and the arrest.

Were there answers?

Look, I can’t say whether the answers were satisfactory or not. In the first press release by the Greek police, there was a triumphant tone about the systematic surveillance that led to the perpetrator’s arrest. Of course, the counterargument to that is that in a city like Rethymno, which is a small community where everyone knows everything, surveilling someone is not so difficult as to require such a long time. Nonetheless, it is open to debate…

How did you come to be involved in the Rethymno case?

In the spring of 2011, we were running the BECAN study on child abuse and neglect. One of the areas of Greece, where we took a random sample of 15,000 children, was Crete. In the summer, as we were processing our first results, we observed a paradox, an anomaly in the results from the Region of Rethymno: we had an extremely high rate of self-reported sexual victimisation of boys and almost a complete reversal of the boy to girl ratio, contrary to what we had expected. We could not explain it. We speculated it must be due to a technical error.

Then, on 1 December 2011, coach Nikos Seiragakis was arrested, and the largest paedophilia case in Greece came to light. By coincidence, we had already planned an open event to take place in Heraklion, Crete, a few days later, on the protection of children against sexual abuse, implementing the “One in Five” campaign of the Lanzarote Committee and the Council of Europe. So, I arrived in Heraklion and, as you can guess, the Rethymno case was all everyone talked about. I went to Rethymno the following day, and because of my occupation, I attended a meeting with the municipality, the region and the local authorities. I was then asked to make a proposal, which I submitted both to the local authorities and the relevant ministries at the end of December 2011. It was a proposal on the actions that needed to be taken, given the scope of the case, whose extent we did not know, but it appeared to be a mass case.  However, we said that we, as an institute, could not support the initiative because we lacked the necessary funds; if you remember, this was at the end of 2011. Then, after a meeting between the ministries involved and local authorities, we were informed that they would like us to implement the actions we had proposed. They found the necessary funding through the NSRF for us to begin.

When did you begin?

A year later. This is indicative of how unwieldy the Greek public sector can be, even when it comes to projects it funds and the political will is present. There were other obstacles later, of course, there was inherent resistance, in a manner of speaking…

What kind of resistance?

One of the criticisms we received was that the personnel employed in our intervention did not come from the local community, did not come from Rethymno. But I believe that was a very intelligent choice if anyone involved in the events back then recalls the mood of the local community at the time.  In every new incident, our personnel, the psychologists, the social workers, the child psychologists who worked with us, were asked by those they saw whether they were from Rethymno. The moment they heard, “No, I’m from elsewhere,” there was a huge wave of relief and then they shared their suffering, which they would probably not have done had the personnel been local. So, let’s just say there was some discontent that we did not support local employment. But we chose to make communication for the beneficiaries easier and more effective.

One must bear in mind that in western Crete at the time there were no structured free public mental health services for children and teenagers—even today there are very, very few. So, we set up this unit in Rethymno and saw around 450 children, not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs. At the same time, we ran a widely accessible health promotion campaign on the subject of child abuse, children’s sexuality, the children’s right to their body, and so on, at all levels of education in the whole of the Region of Rethymno, that is to say, primary and secondary schools, students, parents and teachers. We also trained personnel at various services, we held educational actions for coaches and sportspeople. Because we were immediately visited by the coaches’ association and told, “We don’t dare touch the children, you can’t coach children and be afraid to touch them at the same time.” Therefore, we had to impart all the international know-how about how it is possible to have both child protection processes in place and still function as a sports space. We also held educational actions on child protection and domestic violence for priests, with very strong support from the metropolitan bishop of Rethymno. Both he and Mrs Lioni, the Vice-Prefect of the Region, greatly supported us back then, fully understanding what was at stake.  

How long did your intervention last?

Until the end of 2014, when the resources at our disposal ran out. This program was normally supposed to last for twelve months, but we somehow managed to extend it to 22 months, carefully managing our resources, with the agreement of the managing authorities of course.

Why did you stop?

The decision of the political leadership of the time was to not extend the operation of the unit there, despite the fact that both other actors in the community and we had requested an extension, given the absence of other units, other facilities for children and teenagers in the region. Talking of resistance, I believe that at least some of the local actors preferred to forget this incident had ever happened rather than work to enable the local community to get over it. There was a fairly strong tendency to sweep everything under the rug.

Anyhow, we were informed by the political leadership that their decision was to shut down the unit permanently, which was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field. There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.

Were you asked to contact anyone succeeding you?

No, nothing, nothing. We did not speak with anyone. They did not even seek our opinion about anything.

What became of those children?

Many of them were obviously unable to continue receiving treatment at services elsewhere. And I imagine that at least some of them will find it very hard to recommence using such services again, the way things were handled…

However, at the end of 2014, during Charalambos Athanasiou’s tenure at the Ministry of Justice, the “National Action Plan for the Rights of Children” that was put to public consultation included the continuation of the psycho-social intervention programme in Rethymno, with new funding under the NSRF 2014-2020…

The truth is that when that day, I think it was a Sunday lunchtime, 24 September 2014, Katerina Papakosta, the then Deputy Minister of Health, announced during a broad meeting between various actors that the unit would be permanently shut down, we were surprised. Because until the very last minute, so to speak, people close to the political leadership of the time, the political actors in Rethymno, were reassuring us that an extension would be granted, as there was evidently no other solution. I cannot know what could have possibly happened overnight to change that decision. But it is true that all the signs, which were also present in documents as you rightly note, pointed to the state continuing this action because what had been done until then was certainly not enough.

Evidently, the repercussions of such a massive paedophilia case in such a small community have a continuous, negative effect on the psychosocial life of the children’s families. It is not something that can be dealt with in a year, a year and a half.

All I know is that any efforts made in the immediate aftermath for questions on this matter to be tabled in Parliament by SYRIZA, the main opposition party at the time, ultimately failed. Incidentally, SYRIZA’s health coordinator in opposition was Andreas Xanthos, who subsequently became Minister of Health in the following government, and who is also the local MP for the Region of Rethymno.

Are you implying that the side that wished to sweep the case under the rug won?

I can’t say that with any certainty. I’ve told you what I know.

Did the visit to the Lechaina unit also take place on your initiative?

In the summer of 2015, following a report that had been made and some coverage by the international press and Greek broadcaster ERT, a visit to the site was organised, headed by Georgos Moschos, the Children’s Ombudsman, with the participation of Ioanna Kouvaritaki from the Circle of Children’s Rights and Aimilia Panagou from Social Welfare, and I was asked to also attend. It was a shock. I saw people in wooden cages, a space of two by two meters. Permanently locked up. I saw people with both hands and feet shackled. Continuously. Following this, yes, we submitted a plan…

On your initiative?

Yes. The Institute at the time was beginning a partnership with British NGO Lumos, which works towards deinstitutionalising child protection around the world. Allow me to remind you, however, that the summer of 2015 was a very turbulent period. At the same time, the Centre for Social Welfare management changed. We submitted a proposal again. In November of the same year, the unit was occupied in protest for four days by the Greek Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Mideniki Anohi” (Zero Tolerance), which also drew publicity to the situation. At some point during the following year, our partnership with Lumos was finalised for the development of an emergency relief intervention in the Lechaina Unit to put an end to these extreme forms of restraint and confinement. In the spring of the following year, the management and the Ministry of Labour gave their approval for our emergency intervention to be implemented.

So, you enjoyed the support of the new political leadership, after the change of government in 2015?

I often hear or read that the leadership of the time took the initiative to change the situation at the Lechaina Unit. The truth is that, after a lot of pressure, they simply gave an approval so that an initiative taken by other people and institutions, with the funding of others, could be implemented. So, if the political leadership of the time can lay claim to anything, it is that after a lot of toing and froing, they gave us the go-ahead to implement our programme, a programme that enjoyed no jurisdictional backing vis-à-vis the unit in question, its personnel, the way it functions. They just said, “Great, you can go to the unit and do what you think is best…”

The experience of this intervention, of course, was life-altering for me personally. It is truly incredible to watch people who have only existed as objects regain their subjectivity. For a person to extend their hand and choose who they want to caress, to choose which top they want to wear or pronounce words after ten years of silence, these are all concrete evidence of their subjective desires and choices.

How does a child end up in such a unit?

Unfortunately, as is the case for too many state and non-governmental welfare institutions, the decision to admit someone is taken by examining the case file without anyone coming into direct, face-to-face clinical contact with the beneficiary or their family. For example, one day, I was checking in with our own people in Lechaina, and they told me that the board of directors had decided to admit a new child. I asked them, “Who has seen the child in question?” And I found out that no one had. They only saw the supporting documents.

Had these supporting documents been submitted by the family?

Yes, because in Greece, by and large, the admission of a child with disabilities at an institution is still viewed, at least by some, as a boon to the family. And sometimes, it is also handled as political favour towards the family. This situation is not confined to Lechaina, but also exists in other institutions, both state and non-governmental, or run by the church or other organisations.

The same situation?

Not identical as such, but the fact that there is a country within the country, so to speak, where other rules apply, or the provisions of the law do not apply. For example, we met an adult in Lechaina who had entered institutionalised care as a child. For many years, both at Lechaina and the previous state institution where he had resided, his father’s wish for communication concerning the child to be confined to his work telephone numbers was respected. This was because the father had lied to the child’s mother that the child had gone into intensive care for two days after birth and then died. For seventeen, eighteen consecutive years, two state institutions had hidden the existence of a Down’s syndrome child living there from its mother. You understand that such events violate every notion of a legal or moral code.

Is there no disciplinary investigation or a criminal law procedure for all this?

When Zero Tolerance occupied the space, the police were called. The activists went to the prosecutor’s office and said we wish to report that there are people there whose rights are flagrantly violated. Did you see any charges being brought against the management? The ministers? The general secretaries? Any charges pressed for the fact that people are still restrained against those that restrained them?

What is needed for the prosecutions to go ahead?

Nothing. In the Greek legal system, the public prosecutor can instigate proceedings. There have been repeated press reports in this instance. Is there no one who could be held accountable for the fact that a person was held in a cage for 21 consecutive years, without leaving the cage for even an hour? I wonder, in Greece today no court has the legal capacity to impose such a sentence on anyone, so how is it possible to tolerate that a person be so deprived of their rights and for this not to raise the question: who subjected them to this deprivation? Why?

After the “emergency intervention” in Lechaina, what followed?

The most disappointing aspect of the whole story is the following: in December 2017, the then government announced that it would allocate a sum from the super-surplus, within the framework of a programme with a budget of fifteen million euro to be shared between the Centres of Social Welfare of Attica and Western Greece, for the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Unit. This is also stated in the joint ministerial decision signed at the end of 2018. The same decision also states that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future, setting out the transition process, the facilities to be developed, the timetable, etc.

Two years previously, in partnership with Lumos, we had already drafted such a detailed plan and submitted it to the government, as well as the board of directors of the Centre of Social Welfare, and the relevant services of the Commission and other bodies both within Greece and abroad, and had also discussed it with the permanent personnel of the unit. We had also notified the municipality as extensively as possible. It was extremely detailed, with a budget, timetables, and so on.

I’m not saying that this was the best plan and should be adopted as the final detailed plan. I’m just saying that absolutely nothing has happened since then. The most disheartening aspect is that this time the funds are there. So, the issue is not funding, the lack of resources we were talking about. It is the fact that, even when the resources are there, nothing happens other than general rhetoric endorsing deinstitutionalisation.

But isn’t this absence of organisation and concrete planning typical of the entire child protection system?

Yes. Greece was the first country to ratify the Lanzarote Convention, an action that is in keeping with a long tradition of the Greek state, ever since the time it ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992, again one of the first countries to do so, to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented and if they will be implemented. In other words, we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.

Do you know how many things should already exist? Sexual education at all levels of formal and informal education. Have you ever seen anything like it in Greek education? And as to the provision of services to child victims…

Shouldn’t there be some kind of specialised training for professionals, especially those in health and education, who come into contact with children and act as the first “filter”, outside the family, in the identification of child abuse?

Yes, there should be. There should also be training for public prosecutors and judges trying such cases. Because, let me remind you, in Greece, there are no family courts, not as a dedicated institution that can acquire the expertise and sensitivity needed to approach children. So, alongside property disputes and homicides, the court tries sexual abuse of minors cases, as best it can.

So, historically, Greece just speculates on the various initiatives of different bodies, one of which is our Institute sometimes, and then claims, “We held a training programme,” for instance, just because one of those bodies did so. No systematic efforts have been made to comply with the implementation of the conventions we ratified as a country. What has happened is that a number of people involved in the field in any case and motivated to put various initiatives into action, and raise the funds needed (usually from abroad), did so and the state just said, “Look at all the actions we have taken!”.

But all these efforts bring about results, don’t they?

Yes, but they do not constitute a strategy that can cover the whole sector. An organisation takes the initiative and says I will train thirty, three hundred, three thousand professionals. How long can this last without institutional backup? A social worker in the Region, let’s say, will go to the Children’s Ombudsman’s offices and receive training. That’s fine, but the social worker’s superior is not the Ombudsman, their superior is usually a doctor because the Region still keeps the administrative structure of social services under a single Directorate of Health and Welfare. In some cases, and I have met people who are very attuned to social issues, the social worker will be given autonomy and support. However, in other cases, if the Prefect or the Mayor is holding a bazaar and wants to host a municipal fete, the social worker will be told that there are other things to attend to.

Why do any attempts to coordinate this system, for example, the reform introduced during Harris Kastanides’ tenure at the Ministry of Justice concerning the Central  Scientific Council for the Prevention and Combating of Victimisation and Criminality of Minors (“KESATHEA”) and the Juvenile Protection Teams, fail?

Look, from the moment that this institution was founded, I had reservations as to whether the introduction of an administrative nomenclature would actually lead to anything. I think the experience until now has been that, firstly, KESATHEA, which, as stated by the ministerial decree, was supposed to coordinate the Juvenile Protection Teams, does not coordinate them. They are coordinated by the National Centre for Social Solidarity (EKKA) because KESATHEA does not have the resources to do so. Secondly, the Juvenile Protection Teams the ministerial decree provides for, are not teams. They are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.

The fact is that municipal social services, whatever name we give them, after nearly a decade of memorandums and restrictions in public sector recruitment, have ended up consisting of a single person. And that person is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team…

When the Juvenile Protection Teams were introduced, I was asked by the state to train the social workers who would participate in them and discovered that it was just the social workers as individuals, no teams. Georgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training, and I asked them, “Who is permanent and who is contract staff?” More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, “When does your contract expire?” “In three months.” “How about you?”  “In five months.” I turn around and tell them—Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there—what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?

For some years now, for example, NSRF programs have been running, under which psychologists and social workers are hired in the education sector. How effective is this measure, beyond supporting employment? I understand that supporting employment is no small thing, but a social worker, a psychologist, visits three schools, is responsible for 15-20 classes, and by the time he gets to know them he has to leave in three months because the contract expires, and then there is a gap in the system until his position is filled by someone else the following years…

The system does not fundamentally improve with such actions. In terms of strengthening its functionality, it would be better to say let us use the resources at our disposal to employ half the people but within a unified system.

I do understand that given the domination of the most neoliberal public administration policies across Europe, concepts such as networking the services, complimentarity of services, targeted programmes and so on, have been all the rage these past two decades. I, personally, consider anything beginning with the word “networking” a scam. I’m sorry to be so blunt. We do not need networks here, we need institutions. We need a service. We have no service in this country, so we what, talk about making a network out of a non-existent service?

In a reality such as the Greek reality, which does not have a social services structure like most other European countries, the issue at hand is how to set up an autonomous sector. Then we can debate how it can function better to our heart’s content.

How did you start work at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors?

The Greek Code of Criminal Procedure provided for the existence of Public Prosecutors for Minors, and they were already in place in Athens, Patras, Thessaloniki and Piraeus, but they were not functioning as an office. In the summer of 1983, when I was a young Deputy Public Prosecutor, having joined the public prosecution service in 1978, I ran into my supervisor, Mr Toumpanos, in Omonia. He told me, “Xeni, would you like to join the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors in September?” I knew what the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors was, but I had no idea of what it entailed, no relation to the various bodies and services, nothing other than the articles of the Penal Code pertaining to juvenile offenders. But I did not hesitate to accept. My agreement was driven by my love for children. I was already a mother of two and at an age where I was becoming more sensitised to issues affecting minors, in part due to motherhood.

At the time, the Public Prosecutor’s Office was housed in the Ambassadeur Hotel, an old hotel next to the IKA on Socratous Street, pending our move to the Evelpidon court complex. We were waiting for the construction of Evelpidon to be completed and office space to become available, so the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors was located there in the meantime. An office with a single secretary, who used to send summons and subpoenas to juvenile offenders. The incumbent Public Prosecutor for Minors would study the case briefs and then go try the cases at the Minor's Court, which was located on Feidiou Street at the time.

As soon as I received the proposal, I began my research. Whenever I am faced with a challenge in life, I want to get a firm grasp on the situation, to know what the new job entails. During my career, I have been called to serve at other posts too, and you don’t just turn up. You must look into things, research the field or the object of the post you have been called to serve. I did the same in anti-terrorism, where I worked for ten years. I tried to do the same when I was informed that I would be joining the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors.

Was there material available for research at the time?

I visited the Institute of Greek and Foreign Law because there was no internet at the time, or at least we did not have the skills for that kind of research. I went to the Institute and asked them to give me the international literature on the subject. They even had to order some of the books. Also, when I was officially appointed in September, someone else was appointed as my supervisor at the same time. I was a Deputy Prosecutor, so a Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance had to be appointed Supervisor, and I would be second in command. The Public Prosecutor appointed resigned. He did not want to be involved in such mundane matters, he wanted something more high-profile, he was not interested. Another prosecutor was appointed then, and our collaboration was excellent.

So, when I was appointed Deputy to the Public Prosecutor for Minors as a Deputy Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance, I went to the office to get a feel for the situation. There, I met the secretary I mentioned, who is now retired and lives in Thiva. She was very aware of the issues involved; a lot of things had registered on her radar during her time there…

Let me tell you the first thing she told me. I asked her, “What does the Public Prosecutor for Minors do here?” She said, “That is two separate questions. One question is, what does the Prosecutor do? The other question is, what can the prosecutor do?” I asked her to explain. She said, “This is what he does: here are the case briefs, theft, rape, juvenile homicide and the trial court dates for Minors' Court. But a Prosecutor can do a great many things here, Mrs Dimitriou, if they are so inclined.” A light bulb went off inside my head as I listened. In fact, while we were talking, a child entered carrying a suitcase, like a duffle bag. He had been sent to the Public Prosecutor for Minors. He walks in, the secretary asks him what he wants, and the child says, “I’ve left home, I’m not going back there, the police told me to come to tell you.” I do not remember the exact reason; he was beaten by his father or had a dispute with his father. He was a young child around twelve years old. The secretary then turned to me and said, “There you go.”

So, the secretary planted the idea of how active a role a Public Prosecutor could play for victims.

Not quite. I was cognizant of it thanks to the international literature on the subject. We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking. Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who taken that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world.

The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold mission. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold mission. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim.  Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.

Addressing the juvenile exclusively as an offender dominated at the time?

Yes. Child abuse began to be viewed as a syndrome in 1962. “Syndrome” means a condition; it now means a pathological condition with multiple repercussions. It is not a one-off event that ends with the act, its consequences extend into the future. This is what I had in mind at the time: Janus with his two faces. They are the two sides of the same coin, perpetrator and victim, and my subsequent experience showed me that such was the reality. No juvenile offender, even a juvenile traffic offender, has not previously been victimised in some way by family, friends, school, classmates etc. No one goes suddenly from being a "good kid" and so on to become an offender. They have previously been the victim of certain circumstances themselves.

You mentioned that the Public Prosecutor for Minors used to try cases in an office on Feidiou Street at the time. Why was that the case? Was it to protect minors, to avoid exposing them in a courtroom?

That was part of the thinking behind it, which persists in many provincial towns to this day. Minors' Courts inside office premises, meaning that the juvenile defendant is physically on the same level as the judges, there is no judge’s bench. That is what we saw at the time, Minors' Court Judge Maria Vasilakis and me. She was a Judge at the Court of First instance and is also a friend; we have always had a good understanding on these matters that so passionately concern us. We agreed that we did not like those premises; that it was better if the child understood that they were in a space which, while being friendly, was also a special kind of space, that they were an offender. We often tried homicide cases, children who had robbed elderly ladies or killed them, we tried murders. You cannot have the offenders in an office, the lawyers in an office, everyone sitting around a table casually, it needs to look like a courtroom.

So we made sure to move the Minors' Court to Omonia, to the building that housed the District Civil Court. The District Criminal Court and the District Civil Court, before its move to the Court of First Instance, were housed there. We requested the use of a floor and succeeded in getting it. We remodelled a room, installed a low judge’s bench, unlike other courtrooms where the judge and the prosecutor and the secretary look down on everyone. Then we moved the whole service from 8, Feidiou Street to that floor. Staff found offices where they could interview the children whose case briefs they were preparing for court or supervise them afterwards, and a more concrete service came into being. The Minors' Court became more respected and more concrete.

The courtroom, then, had a low judge’s bench, had places for the juvenile offenders, seats for the parents and the Prefects for Minors, the juvenile probation officers who assisted the minor during the trial.

We also tried to implement what the literature had taught us, namely, to have a female Public Prosecutor - male Judge on the bench and vice versa. In other words, not to bring the child before an all-male or all-female bench, to have both sexes present, because we were often dealing with a child that had a very bad relationship with their father or mother, and the child would react negatively by judging you. The child would personalise the relationships of the people judging it there and then.

Or fear on the other hand, if the parent had been abusive…

Indeed, often the parent had been abusive. We had a mother who used to beat her children mercilessly. If the child saw a female judge, they would have a terrible reaction, so we always ensured that the ratio was present. Also, after we set up the new offices in late 1985, we managed to set up a Juvenile Police Service, as we used to call it. Ultimately, it was a Subdivision in Athens with two units. There were two units in Thessaloniki and Crete respectively too, one for juvenile victims and one for juvenile offenders. In Athens, the Subdivision eventually became a Division.

So we did not confine ourselves to the Minors' Court. We were fully aware of the need to open up to other bodies and services, that a Public Prosecutor or a Judge cannot deal with delinquency or victimisation on their own. We were aware of our weaknesses and the fact that we were insufficient to handle these incidents, that we needed the assistance of people from other sectors.

In this context, we also visited the General Secretariat for Youth many times, asking it to allocate us programmes that our children from the Minors' Court could be enrolled in. 

There we met General Secretary Anna Diamantopoulou. When the opportunity for an exchange with Germany on juvenile matters arose, she called us and asked us if we wanted to participate. Of course, we wanted to go, no question about it.  She would also provide us with an interpreter because we did not speak German. The interpreter was always with us. There were five of us altogether: two of us from the judiciary corps and the rest from the General Secretariat for Youth.

That trip was a turning point. We began with a visit to the Ministry of Justice of Land Nordrhein-Westfalen and then toured all the facilities for minors in the Land. We stayed there for several days. We visited juvenile prisons and saw how they operated. We attended juvenile courts, visited “reformatories”, other detention facilities. First, we met with professionals active in the field. We saw the training they received, particularly judicial and non-judicial personnel—social workers, psychologists and child psychologists naturally, but also correctional officers, workers inside the institutions. Anyone who came into contact with the minors. Because you cannot have one service building something up and another service tearing it down. Everyone must have the same training about behaviour towards juvenile offenders. They must understand what it means to be a minor, to understand the minor’s profile, to show self-restraint.

I remember one of the workers would teach a group of children house painting. For the Germans, that is a science. There was another team learning meat cutting, the Germans see that as science too. You don’t just go to a butcher and learn to cut meat there, you have to learn the theory first, what kinds of meat there are, what beef is, the parts of the animal, how to carve it, what products you can manufacture. So, there is a science to it.

All these people had been trained in how to treat the children in question. They could be interacting with volatile children, who came from families with no boundaries, so they had to be tolerant, to be educated on juvenile issues.

To know how to set boundaries in a healthy manner?

Of course. The same applied to the correctional facility staff we met at a juvenile prison we visited. They had all received training for the specific demands of their job, it was not just a case of "you’re hired, get on with it". It was done for the juveniles concerned.

Another eye-opening experience, for me at least, was that we used to believe that this was a matter for us State bodies to deal with and no one else. There, we learned that there is room for other actors in this field, for NGOs, for private entities and individuals that can do the job well and are certified. That there is room for other bodies that can help you in the matters that arise during the handling of cases, whether they concern victims or perpetrators.  

I remember arriving in Frankfurt during the evening and being driven to Cologne. We arrive at night, and we have our first working dinner. We meet at the hotel where our German colleagues from Cologne are already waiting. We have a light dinner and the Germans instantly set to work. We almost had no time to eat, there was an agenda stating that matters were scheduled to be discussed that evening. At the hotel, as we dined, I hear them announce the schedule for our visit and find out that we will be visiting an organisation working with juvenile offenders, offenders who have committed serious acts at that. They tell us what services the organisation provides. What was that organisation? Today you would probably call it an NGO, they were called something different back then. Actually, it was a private organisation that had been set up by a former Prosecutor upon retirement.

Then they tell us that we will visit a Catholic institution that cares for victims and provides such and such things. I was in shock from the start. I used to think these were matters for the State, and I suddenly saw that they did not have to be, that we needed to open up more. And we did, my colleague and me when we returned to Greece. We said, “that’s it, we are reaching out.” We contacted universities, hospitals, private individuals and entities, institutions; we began to expand the reach of protection and come into contact with other professionals.

Up until that time, the child would come into contact with just the police officer or the judicial or correctional officer...

The correctional officer, the Prefect for Minors. Anyone who fell within the public sector would either be sent to a state institution — a place would be found if they needed protection — or to the educational institutions which existed at the time. They were akin to detention centres, one step below a detention centre if you will. There were many at the time and later they were shut down, again following our initiative.

The detention centres were the juvenile prisons, the equivalent to the current special juvenile detention establishments. At the time, there was the Korydallos Correctional Centre, and there were the reformatories. They used to be called educational institutions, and they were intended for younger children and juveniles committing minor offences. There was one for minors over sixteen at Korydallos; one for minors under twelve, situated in a building that has now been taken over by the Municipality of Korydallos. There was another educational institution, as we used to call them, for children under twelve at Kaminia. There was also the Educational Institution of Papagou for girls and the Volos Educational Institution for Minors for boys.  The Volos institution is the only one still open today, although its philosophy and the age of its inmates have changed.

How is it called today?

It is still called an Educational Institution, back then it was called the Volos Elementary Education Institution because children below the age of twelve were detained there, elementary school children. Now its orientation has changed. I visited it in 2015 because the situation was at breaking point, and I found youths up to the age of twenty-one there. The ages spanned from twelve to twenty-one. The Paraskevopoulos law rectified that.((The so-called "Paraskevopoulos law" is Law 4322 of 2015, introduced by the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Nikos Paraskevopoulos. The law provided for, among other things, changes in the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure regarding minors (Article 7). It was also controversial, because of Article 12, which provided for the "decongestion of detention facilities" through the release of prisoners who had served portions of their sentences. The latter provision was a major point of contention between the SYRIZA-led government and the major opposition at the time, New Democracy, as well as their respective friendly media. Conflict over the provision persisted until the July 2019 national elections, which were won by New Democracy.))

Consider the age-gap, imagine the sexual and all kinds of abuse taking place there. Most importantly, some of the children were held there because the investigating magistrate had imposed their stay at the institution as a restrictive condition.  This means that the magistrate had imposed a restrictive condition on youths under twenty-one, the obligation to stay there. In other words, it had been turned into a prison. A closed prison at that, nothing like I had known it in the old days when it was open to the community, just a simple institution for children under the age of twelve.   It was nothing like it, the conflicts inside were nonstop.

By then it housed 110, 120 inmates, an inconceivable number if you are talking about providing any care, no one could provide anything for them. At the time I was Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court and Mrs Koutzamani had made me responsible for minors, so with great effort and repeated visits and meetings and talks and so on, we changed the law.

For a start, no investigating magistrate can now place such a restrictive condition, it is prohibited. All the restrictive conditions placed on children detained at Volos were revoked, and the children left, except for a few cases aged 16-18 that concerned very specific offences. So an end was put to this situation, which had become a breeding ground for violence.

Were these children orphans?

They are children without a family, without a real family. They are not orphans in the sense of parental death, they are children with an inadequate parental environment. I found two brothers who had been there since the age of eight because the age range for juvenile offenders was six and a day to twenty-one years old, up until 2003, I believe. Then it became six and a day to eighteen. I tried children aged six and a day when I was the Public Prosecutor for Minors between 1983 and 1990, my first tenure at the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. I tried first and second graders because one had blinded the other with a pen or hit them. You cannot imagine what ensued, it was a real battle to change this. My belief, which I fought for, is that ten should be the lower age limit; ten to eighteen. Anyway, there was a vehement reaction, so the minimum age was raised to eight. As we speak, the age range is eight to eighteen. For those aged eight to fifteen, only reformative sentences are passed, which exclude sentences to the Volos Educational Institution for Minors. Thankfully we have shut down the other educational institutions.

What you have just described is the recurring issue: the penal management of minors. Following your return from Cologne, where the way forward became somewhat more evident, who did you start speaking to about this issue?

We addressed the ministries, the Ministry of Justice; they grew tired of seeing us all the time. We brought it to everyone’s notice, including our Supervisors. Let me give you an example. The Public Prosecutor’s Offices were moving to Building 16 of the Evelpidon court complex, where they are still housed. I campaigned for a coveted slice of the new offices to be given to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. They are the Offices of the Public Prosecutors for Minors to this day, three rooms which used to fit us all back then, I don’t think they fit everyone now. I don’t know if you have seen the premises, but to secure three rooms in such a coveted part of the building was no small feat. When the Prosecutor in charge of allocating office space to the various services managed to give me those premises, I grabbed a mop and bucket, so happy was I. At last, we would be housed in a respectable environment, we could set it up so that it was accessible to children, we could have it decorated in a way that made it accessible to the ages that would reach out to us.  That was probably one of the best moments of my life.

I remember saying, “No one touch this! I’ll clean it.” I’m not renowned for my housekeeping skills, I might ignore my own house, but I cleaned the office bathrooms, I scrubbed the windows until they sparkled, before our staff moved in. I was also given staff. Before 1990, we had grown to four Public Prosecutors for Minors, two of whom worked in juvenile justice full time. There was no such thing until then.

The other step we took was to start keeping social case files, using index cards. There was no computerisation at the time. The first approach to computerisation then was using index cards, to keep your case files referenced, as in the old movies.  The police must also keep the cases similarly filed and then, once the data can be processed, you have a computerised system. We, at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors, were the first prosecution service to implement this system. The other Public Prosecutor’s Offices, the other Departments, would not do it. We were the first to implement this kind of record-keeping, and we began to keep social case files.

What are social case files? Social case files are briefs that have nothing to do with juvenile offenders or juvenile victims. They are usually files of children in danger of either becoming offenders or being victimised by families facing problems. Children that are brought to our attention via anonymous or identified reports to various helplines, or sometimes identified reports made by neighbours, relatives or one of the parents, where the conditions at home are such that the child is led to one or the other direction.

I have to say that it was us, in Athens, who hesitatingly began to terminate parental responsibility and take children into care. Up until then, parental responsibility was never terminated. The children continued to reside with the abusers, various welfare interventions would then take place, and that was all. Parental responsibility termination by a court was implemented by us for the first time. Now it is widespread, and all the Public Prosecutor’s Offices in the country do it. They might not be experienced in these cases, but they will call Athens or Thessaloniki and ask, acquire templates, find out how this or that is done.

This happened with great difficulty over the years. To terminate parental responsibility was unthinkable at the time. The home was considered sacrosanct, the mentality was “I will do as I please in my own home, I lay down the law in my home, my child belongs to me and is not subject to rights, I will do as I please with it, I will discipline it as I please.” Let us not kid ourselves, discipline meant and still means bodily harm and demeaning conduct towards the child, verbal violence, emotional and psychological violence. Even as we speak the best families, not the families that first come to mind when you think about child maltreatment, do not know how to behave towards children.

So, you gradually start to reach out to other services.

I had done that even before 1990, before my initial seven-year tenure at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors ended. I had reached out. It was a huge step toward openness. My colleague Mrs Vasilakis and I used to visit the Korydallos Correctional Centre every week. On Wednesday or Sunday afternoons, we would go to Korydallos, without our families even knowing. We used to joke that if anything happened to us along the way, they would wonder, “How did they end up in Korydallos?” Once a week without fail, we would go to the Correctional Centre and talk with the juvenile detainees who were aged between twelve and twenty-one at the time. In fact, the talks would take place without the presence of correctional officers.

The Korydallos Correctional Centre was one of the wings of the Korydallos prison. It had a large room where the children gathered to eat all together, unlike the Avlona Special Juvenile Detention Establishment today, where every child eats in their cell, where the food is delivered to the cells. There was just a single dining space. Other than that, it was a correctional facility with terrible conditions, which we used to observe and of course, advocate for changes. We kept going to the ministry and changes were indeed made at the time. I remember the cells had a toilet in full view, there was not even a curtain to hide it. One child could be using the toilet while another child was in their bed or sitting at the table, the conditions were appalling. We could not believe it and, after a lot of pressure on our part, they placed screens at first and then doors, so that at least the children could enjoy some privacy.

We also used to visit the Correctional Centre of Kassaveteia and Volos too; mostly Kassaveteia. There, we were really disheartened, disappointed. By some stroke of luck, Kassaveteia had been operating on the German model. In other words, there were cells, each cell housing one or two children. Suddenly, during one of our visits, we saw them demolish cells to convert them into dormitories. Just when we were saying that we have at least one correctional facility that is tolerable – because being in a room with eight to ten people and being in a room alone or with another child makes a big difference to the children—we saw that that facility had deteriorated. That institution, too, had failed.

During our visits then, we used to talk with the children, some of whom we might have sentenced that very morning or most of whom we had possibly sent there. They never harmed or bothered us. Not only were they welcoming, not only were they hugging us, children who are now grey-haired, middle-aged adults, parents themselves, still come see us. I think our visits were a boost, a spark of hope. We gave them hope: “do this, enrol in that program.” There were a few programmes run by the Regional Committees for People’s Education (NELE), who ran various actions in prisons. There were no schools in prisons like there are in juvenile and youth prisons today.

We had also continued the education of police officers for several years and that, too, was a very important step.

How did the juvenile police units come into being?

Around 1983, 1984, we had instances of abused minors coming to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors from the police stations. I will never forget one child, a young boy named Fotis. When Fotis came, I looked at him and noticed his ear lobes were swollen, like red spheres. I took a closer look; the child looked like an alien. I asked him, “Fotis, what happened?” The police had brought him in for theft, detention in flagrante delicto. For a small child. I asked him, “What happened to you?” “The police,” he said. I asked him what the police did to him. He told me the officer had pinned his ears with clothespins to make him confess to other thefts. Then, he said, they grabbed him by the feet and suspended him from the balcony. I listened to what they had done, the slaps and the suchlike, and I could feel my rage mounting.

The memory of that boy has never left me. There was another juvenile, too, whom I will always remember. He was a minor who had appeared often before the Juvenile Court in the past. We used to let him go because you do not incarcerate a minor for a first offence, you help them find their way through the Supervisor of Minors. You don’t immediately send them to juvenile prison.

So he arrives, accompanied by the police, and a part of his body is wrapped in bandages. I ask him what happened. He would not speak before the police officers. I take him aside, we were in our Evelpidon offices, just the two of us, and I ask him again what happened. He tells me he has been shot, that the bullet came out the other side but did not harm any organs, but he was injured. I sent him to a forensic physician, and he did indeed have a bullet wound because the police had chased him for thefts, you can imagine the kind of theft we are talking about, nothing significant. It’s just that the child was a repeat offender.

When you become a witness to such incidents, you realise something must be done, that the police force must also be sensitised. It’s not enough to raise the awareness of judges or prosecutors. So, in the summer of 1985, we began to visit the Ministry of Public Order. We met with the Minister at first, then he referred us to the General Secretary, Mr Morphopos, who was ex-military. I will never forget his name because he was the one who agreed to our proposal for a police corps for minors made up of trained policemen. He agreed despite the objections of the police as a whole, the Chief of Police and his deputy chiefs who believed it was an impossible objective, that it would never materialise, that it was unnecessary.

At a meeting with Juvenile Court Judge Mrs Maria Vasilaki, who is currently with the Supreme Court, Mr Morphopos sat us down and said, “I am not asking you whether a juvenile police service will be set up. We are gathered here to figure out how it will be set up.” He had already made the decision, in other words. The meetings we had previously held had convinced him, and this great step forward was taken. Initially, a ministry circular was sent to all Police Departments and Services in Greece for the first time. It advised police officers how juvenile offenders should be treated, following our input too. After that, the space that would house the Division for Minors, which was a Subdivision back then, was chosen. At the time, we demanded that it contain two units, one for juvenile offenders and an equally important one for juvenile victims, who also required a specialised approach.

Back then, it was not a given that victims needed special treatment too and that you needed specialised training to avoid revictimisation through the procedure and secondary abuse during the collection of evidence. Two units were also set up in Thessaloniki and in Heraklion in Crete respectively. These still exist today, and special training was provided following the request of the police officers who wished to join those units.

Was that also your proposal?

Our proposal was that the officers should not be chosen by the police force. That the hierarchy should not appoint the officers, but that the officers themselves should express interest in joining those units first. Then, a selection could be made if the number expressing interest was greater than the number of posts.

Also, we trained police officers from all over Greece on matters pertaining to minors in the three to four years that followed. We held week-long training workshops. We used to go and teach them—myself, Mrs Vasilaki, Supervisors of Minors, psychologists and Mrs Spinelli, Professor of Criminology at the University of Athens, who is our teacher to this day. She was not only highly sensitised to issues affecting minors, but extremely knowledgeable too.  

You said that the juvenile police units were founded in 1986. That leaves another four years until the end of your first tenure at the Office of the Public Prosecutor for Minors in 1990. During those four years, then, an autonomous Police Service for minors came into being. Did you see any progress?

Yes, of course. First and foremost, the abuse of juvenile offenders stopped. Juvenile offenders used to come to us having been slapped, punched; they had black eyes. It was a noticeable change because up until then, anything involving minors, offenders or victims, in Attica, used to end up at the General Police Directorate of Attica (GADA). Nowadays, minors still get taken there– of course, there has been an increase in the number of incidents too – but they only send the most serious offences to GADA.

However, both during my first tenure until 1990 and during my second tenure between 1995 and 1998, I handled juvenile victims, particularly sexual abuse victims, myself. I did not send them to the police. I used the police as my assistants, to remove the children from the abusive environment where needed, to visit them in institutions that would subsequently accommodate them or at Children’s Hospitals where they would often be temporarily accommodated. The police would help us with all that. But, particularly in cases involving the sexual abuse of minors, I would take their statements following the example of the Germans. The international literature on the subject also informed us that that was the procedure followed in the USA too.

The only thing we did not, and should not, follow was the Code of Penal Procedure, which stated that when you question a juvenile witness – the victim is also considered a witness by the Code – you should ask a question and get an answer, ask a question and get an answer and so on. But that is not appropriate in cases of child sexual abuse. You must allow the child to narrate. Closed-ended questions are prohibitive. Questions must be open-ended, or you should allow the child to narrate and only interrupt in a very specific manner if you need to ensure that you have understood what is being said correctly. “You are telling me such and such, did I understand correctly, is that what you are telling me?”

When did you first encounter the idea of the House of the Child?

By 1989, I had received the whole text of the “Procédure MELANIE” which a colleague from the island of Réunion had forwarded. By late 1998, early 1999, I had completed my second tenure as Public Prosecutor for Minors and was Deputy Public Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal of Patras. Around that time,  I attended a conference for professionals in the field which was co-organised at a very high level – suffice it to say that the meetings were held at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the session was opened by the Prime Minister himself. The participants were Greece, France and Italy, and it was a conference on child abuse. I spoke about Greek Law and how it approached and dealt with abuse.

Talking of that conference, I just remembered something that shook me. They had drawn up a comparative table for the three countries. There, the legal provisions concerning violations of children were listed to allow a comparison between the laws of the three countries. Mostly violation of their bodies, their life, neglect, but also other provisions, such as labour law, administrative law and civil law provisions in each country’s codes and statutes. My turn to complete the comparative table comes; France and Italy had already completed it. It was my turn to complete whatever provisions the Greek law made. That was when I realised the poverty of our system in legislating to protect children.

I saw that most of our rules and laws applied to both children and adults. Be it bodily harm or rape or anything of that nature, whatever provisions applied to adult victims applied to juvenile victims too.

The child did not exist as a legal subject.

No, nowhere. I still have that table somewhere. I was so ashamed for my country when I saw it. The undisputed fact is that if you do not come out of your national shell, you cannot see your weaknesses, you cannot become aware of the steps that others have made. You think everything is fine and what goes on here is happening everywhere.

That was when I saw the deficiencies of our system. Labour law? I had no idea what to write in that box. If you see the table, I filled the box with “same as provisions applying to adults”, when the other countries had already incorporated provisions that we eventually passed in 2006, as part of the law on domestic violence.

What had changed in your absence, between your departure in 1990 and the beginning of your second tenure in 1995. When you left in 1990 the foundations had been laid, something was beginning to materialise.

When I left there was juvenile police, a public prosecution with its own offices, the social case files I mentioned ready to be computerised, we were the first service to be computerised. All of that was working, those that came after me moved things forward. We held hearings for minors every day. Currently, that is not the case. Now they have diminished; the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors has declined. It has suffered a decline.

I will tell you what changed then, what we did during my second tenure. Actually, let me go back to 1990 because it illustrates a point. In 1990, I left the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors because I was promoted to Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance and posted to Chalkida. At the time, Chalkida was an industrial zone, full of factories, poultry plants, and so on, cement plants, shipyards, anything you can imagine. It was a difficult post and I would also be the Supervisor as I was the Public Prosecutor at the Court of First Instance. At the time, the Office there had a Public Prosecutor at the Court of First Instance, and the rest were Deputy Prosecutors and an Associate Judge. It was a large service that dealt with two felonies a week, usually sent by Athens. The trials had to be attended by the Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance, no one else can attend these trials. The same applies today.  So, the post was very demanding.

As a result, I dreaded it a little. I wondered how I would cope. Well, let me tell you that compared to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors, my work in Chalkida felt so light. For the first time, I realised the pressure I had been under at my previous post, the psychological damage I had suffered. I did not feel it while I was there, I was unaware of it, but once I left, I understood what the Germans had told us, that professionals in this field, dealing with these matters, can end up being burned out.

Remaining a good professional and mentally healthy in this field to avoid burnout is a delicate balancing act. I was supervising the whole of Euboea, dealing with two serious felonies a week, I often slept on a couch at the office rather than return to Athens, I was commuting, arriving at the crack of dawn and being the last to leave, literally locking up the Chalkida Public Prosecutor’s office and still, it all felt easier than my time at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors.

The incidents I had been seeing there, especially the sexual abuse cases which I had opted to deal with on my own. The Germans had warned us, “You need to look after yourselves. In this field, it is essential to have outlets, to do things for yourself, to have a hobby, a sport, something that takes you outside the job, that clears your head.”

They had taken us to a room where Public Prosecutors for Minors, Supervisors of Minors, Juvenile Judges had group therapy every month. I remember they all sat in a circle, and everyone aired their grievances about the other: In such and such case I told you to do this, but instead, you did what you wanted to do or in this or that instance you were wrong. Everyone aired everything they had bottled up inside.  We had also joined the circle, all five of us and our interpreter, and watched the session. At the end of the group therapy session, they picked up pillows and flung them at each other. They had a pillow fight to vent their anger and be more effective afterwards.

What did you do after you saw these examples?

When I returned from Germany, I did the following. I made a deal with the Institute of Child Health, which was headed by Eleni Agathonos at the time and is now headed by Giorgos Nikolaidis. I made a deal, like a memorandum of cooperation.  I told them, “Whenever I get a sexual abuse case, one of you, a social worker or a psychologist or a psychiatrist, whoever is available at the time, will come to my office before I initiate proceedings and talk with the child. That way, I will learn something, and the procedure will be easier for the child.”

So I used to notify the Institute, because I had child abuse cases, involving victims of both sexes. I would notify the Institute and keep the child there, give it a glass of juice, sit it down to draw or do something suited to their age. Also, if the child was accompanied by the mother, I would allow them to sit together in my office. In other words, I would give children time to become familiar with the environment they found themselves in. These were approaches used by the Americans and the Germans, which I was trying to implement on my own in Greece.

But we know that Greece is not just Athens – that’s what used to bother me the most. If something is not institutionally enshrined, it is pointless. People come and go; you can’t rely on individual actions. Of course, things depend on people too, but that is not the point. There have to be laws and institutions that both oblige you and train you how to act.

So, the people from the Institute would come and talk with the child and so on, and this way I would get a first impression. Then, my examination would follow. I always used the same secretary, who was very aware and very intelligent. She now works in Piraeus. We used to carry out the examinations together, in the presence of the people from the Institute. By then, I would have a rough idea of whether what was said was true or not. Usually, children do not lie, but there is a small percentage that might. I have had instances of Munchausen syndrome, of lying, but there was an explanation for the lying too. You need to find that reason; you must identify that, too.

We have heard professionals speak of “service chauvinism”, i.e. that the services are so confident that what they are doing is right that they are incapable of listening to criticism. Systemic abuse, however, is occurring to this day.

That is the case, unfortunately. It still occurs because we have not decided who does what, we have not acknowledged that some professionals think we are better than others. Even public prosecutors have an attitude that they are superior to the child psychiatrist, superior to the social worker. We are overweening, Judges too.

The other reason is that we have not learned to cooperate from a young age. We are not taught how to cooperate in school. Everyone gets tested individually, does homework on their own, reads out their assignment, does this and that on their own. They have not been taught to cooperate the way it is done abroad.  I experience Germany through my grandchildren, who are in German schools, and I see what they are taught once they are enrolled in the schooling system. The first thing they learn is how to cooperate. Group projects, group activities. One person looks this up, another person looks up something else, they pool their work and present it together as a team.

We are not even aware of the concept of inclusivity. As we speak, inclusivity is possibly the uppermost concept in child protection, the uppermost concept in child-friendly justice. In other words, the child must participate, even in the Juvenile court’s sentencing of the juvenile offender. You must include the minor; the minor should make that decision with you. You can guide them in deciding what the right thing is, but first, you must persuade them or choose the measure that would suit the offender best. You don’t get to decide just because you are the judge, just because you say so, that the sentence should be conciliation or compensation or something else. You will pass the sentence that you will jointly reach with the juvenile offender. The same applies to victims and everything else.

So that is the one thing we lack as professionals, we are incapable of sitting around the same table, or we think we are superior to the doctor or the medical examiner or the police officer. It will not happen unless we understand that interdisciplinarity is essential in caring for minors at any level, both for victims and offenders. You cannot stay holed up in your own bastion….

The Public Prosecutor cannot replace the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist cannot replace the social worker.

And yet we make that mistake. I see well-intentioned colleagues of mine who appear to be sensitised to issues affecting minors, but they meddle in what should be the work of others. And that is a mistake. I cannot draw a conclusion; the child psychiatrist will do that. I should stay within my area of expertise; stick to the area I know. I will not intrude in another’s field; I will respect them.

Let us broach the subject of the legal duties of other professionals. Shouldn’t the state encourage professionals whose work brings them into contact with children to report their suspicions?

When I was Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court responsible for Minors, we held a meeting at the Department of Child Psychiatry of the “Agia Sofia” Children's Hospital. It was attended by child psychiatrists, social workers etc. from other hospitals that have children’s units, such as the Tzaneio Prefecture General Hospital of Piraeus, The Panagiotis & Aglaia Kyriakou Children's Hospital and the General Hospital of Attiki “Seismanoglio”.

These people stayed for a whole morning, and we spoke about many things. About how they, the psychologists, the psychiatrists and the social workers, could be protected. In many instances, they are dragged through the courts, sued for libel, for false accusations etc. because they were obliged to submit a report stating which parent is to blame or if both parents are to blame. They face years of litigation, legal fees, it is terrible.

Following that meeting, I went to the Ministry and asked it to legislate a provision that would grant them immunity. The law was passed, but it only applied to social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and child psychiatrists working in public hospitals, child protection institutions etc.

However, other professionals are involved in this field too.  For example, municipal social workers who carry out investigations following a public prosecutor’s order. Medical-educational centres also carry out investigations and submit reports to the public prosecutor. Then, there are the professionals who carry out psychiatric evaluations. The teachers also came to see us. Then, the Hellenic Association of Social Workers (SKLE) too, came to see us. I was Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court at that time. The social workers visited my office, the Children’s Ombudswoman Mrs Koufonikolaou attended too. We agreed that as we were considering expanding the provision to include teachers, then it might as well be expanded to provide immunity for professionals working for municipalities and social workers etc. working at medical-educational centres. This would mean that no one could bring a lawsuit against them unless they could establish wilful misconduct. If I am acting deceitfully or with malice and it is proven, for example, that I was related with the person initially filing the report or I was the school principal, but I also had something to gain from filing a report, then we have wilful misconduct.

We submitted it to the Ministry, but it has not been passed yet. The government changed too, and at present, the expanded provision has not yet been passed into law.

Mrs Koufonikolaou told us that the Minister, Mr Kalogerou, had made a commitment back then.

Yes, he was on board but did not have enough time. The previous government had also been on board for the initial provision; it got passed into law by Mr Athanasiou, so then it just needed to be extended. Mr Kalogerou did not have enough time to address the matter, so it is now pending. It would act as a safeguard for teachers, a guarantee of legal protection that would make them more open to coming forth. At the moment they are reticent.

They should also receive training.

On Saturday, we held a Conference in Aigio. The conversation that followed went on until two, three am. They could not get enough of the conversation, they had questions, they wanted answers. They want us to return and continue the conversation. It is natural that they have queries. These are things they are hearing for the first time. They had not even heard of the Convention on the Rights of the Child before. Can you imagine that? Aigio is not an isolated spot in the mountains. So imagine what the situation must be like in more distant places… in Orestiada, in the islands.

In 2014, I asked the National School of the Judiciary to introduce a course on the powers and responsibilities of the Public Prosecutor for Minors. That way, upon graduating the School, everyone would have some knowledge on these matters. I taught that course until this July, without remuneration, of course. I refuse to accept payment for anything that I willingly offer our country and our community. I consider it part and parcel of what I do, so although teachers at the school are remunerated and have their travel and accommodation expenses covered and get compensated for teaching, I decline all of that. Moreover, during my final three years there, I taught by inviting other experts in the field as speakers, so that the students could become familiar with other sectors.

This year I invited Mr Nikolaidis, I invited Ms Olga Themeli, I invited Ms Artinopoulou, Mrs Mpeka, the child psychiatrist, from Thessaloniki, Mr Anagnostopoulos from the Department of Child Psychiatry of the “Agia Sofia” Children's Hospital… Over the years, I invited many others, such as Ms Paris Zagoura, to speak.  At least three guest speakers joined me every year to teach the students, to allow them to hear other professionals and to role-play. Seeing how well the information you are trying to impart gets assimilated during role-play is quite something.

So public prosecutors need training, but I had also asked for the same to apply to Judges. When the Judge tries a minor or tries the adult who has abused a minor, he needs to have a broader awareness, otherwise, how can he do it? Should not there be an equivalent course for Judges? Family Law is not enough.

Isn’t there?

No, it is pure, dry Family Law. It is not an education in abuse and delinquency. The Judge needs a different kind of training. If we were to introduce such a course, we would get a different kind of judge, someone who would then pursue some kind of continuing education to enrich their knowledge.

We held so many Conferences across Greece during my three-year tenure as Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court. I visited all our Public Prosecutor’s Offices, both at the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal, covering my own expenses, that goes without saying.

So, I visited them all over Greece. We held training workshops where we did not just invite my people. I invited police officers, port authority officers where available, judges. I trained nearly all the military judges, they were invited to the training, as were judges and public prosecutors of the Court of Appeal and the Court of First instance, everyone I could reach in each location I visited. The aim was to allow them to at least reflect on certain matters; it was not comprehensive training, but you still came away with something. At least you became aware of everything you did not know. You might not have learned a lot, but at least you came to the realisation that you should thoroughly think before you act, that you do not know everything.

Have such initiatives been continued by other prosecutors?

Yes. It touches me when I say it because they are my children, I see them as my children, and I think they see it that way too. They have dedicated books to me, they refer to themselves as my children, all these students of mine who went on to become Deputy Public Prosecutors and Public Prosecutors. Most of my children, whatever post they now find themselves in, can recognise abuse, know how to take steps, find out more, they call me to this day and  ask, “I have this case, this incident, what should I do, how should I proceed?”

I am genuinely moved when I see my children everywhere, in Kavala, Thessaloniki, Heraklion in Crete, Veria, Alexandroupoli, Edessa, Florina, Ioannina, Patras, Piraeus, Kos, Zakynthos, handle juvenile cases which they could not have handled back in my day. Thessaloniki has an incredible Public Prosecutor, Mrs Dimitra Tsiardakli, who is a mother of four herself, so she is not someone who has no other obligations, and still, she made a difference. What did Dimitra do? She gathered all the relevant bodies and services and created a Network. We will now showcase this network abroad too, with Mr Nikolaidis, in a programme Mr Nikolaidis is currently running, about how services can work in tandem across the whole of the EU.

So, we have this Network created by Mrs Tsiardakli, which I brought to Giorgos Nikolaidis’ attention, he had not been aware of it. But I have been following Tsiardakli’s work. In fact, she recently managed to obtain a decision by the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (KEDE) that Municipal Social Services will assist the removal of children into care on a twenty-four-hour basis. Before, they used to tell us, “It’s three am, I am not going to go take the child into care right now, I won’t do this or that.” KEDE issued a decision following Mrs Tsiardakli’s initiative. The hospitals too. No child stays at a hospital for more than twenty-four hours. They are immediately given to families, there is a list of available foster parents.

So it’s not that difficult.

Nothing is difficult.

How did the National Action Plan for Children come about?

The need to draw up a National Action Plan arose long before 2007. According to EU guidelines, Member States were urged to develop National Action Plans for different policy fields, such as healthcare, welfare, exclusion. The National Action Plan for Children was not a top priority at the time, despite our requests and pressing for a national policy for children to be formulated. We were working with a Committee under the General Secretariat for Youth, which was responsible for submitting evaluations on the implementation of the rights of the child in Greece to the UN. It had to submit reports at various intervals, had sent very few, so we were in breach of duty. Anyway, there were other Action Plans in the works. There was some money left over from the NSRF funds and following pressure exerted by The Smile of the Child, which had developed a good working relationship with the Ministry at the time, the plan was set in motion.

I believe there was institutional pressure from abroad, as well as from within Greece, from associations such as the Greek Association of Social Workers (SKLE) and The Smile of the Child. Media publicity also exerted pressure, news reports that shed light on numerous problems: the number of children piled up in institutions was rising, foster care placements in Greece were negligible, and foster care was not being supported as it should be. There was more support given to the adoption of healthy children and institutions accommodating children with special needs were filling up at the same time. The pressure being exerted was significant.

Why was The Smile of the Child chosen?

The Ministry’s Department of Child protection was short-staffed, and of the existing staff, the scientific personnel that could actually do something was limited. Moreover, it was drowning in bureaucracy, so it needed external assistance. The Smile of the Child, enjoying a high profile and exerting pressure, also played its part. That is why I think it was chosen, that and the fact that as a body it stood outside party politics.

Additionally, The Smile of the Child has always had a good working relationship with the various services. A meeting was held about whether The Smile could take on the plan, a budget was available, a very small budget, and I was asked to be in charge of scientific planning. Our communication was excellent, and we agreed on what the priorities for the children should be. I had been assisting them with several matters already. We had also run various activities together. We had trained some of its members.

So, I accepted to do it without remuneration. The Smile of the Child wished to recompense me, but I declined. I believe certain matters should be exempt from any kind of agenda, that nothing should be allowed to cast a shadow on them.

But why wasn’t another state body chosen to bear the responsibility for this?

That is a legitimate question, but which state child agency had the capacity to do so? The Institute of Child Health is one such legitimate state body. Although its staff is not vast, it could have acted as the contracting entity. However, being a public sector entity, the processes it must follow are complex and time-consuming. EU guidelines at the time encouraged the use of NGOs, which are more flexible.

An Institution could have been another option, but even Institutions were drowning in their own problems. Or a Research Institute, a university, but there were no Social Work departments at the university level, only at the level of Technological Educational institutes (TEI). The University of Athens could have taken over, it was producing some noteworthy work in the field of paediatrics at the time, but the work carried out was very specialised and they were not active in the field of welfare as a whole. They mainly focused on children’s mental health.

I think The Smile of the Child suited the state because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided, which led to this result. 

My underlying conviction that NGOs should be evaluated and monitored rather than operate without accountability, especially in matters of financial operation and legitimacy and ethics, aside, The Smile has always been receptive to our feedback. I was impressed by the extent to which it incorporated the training we provided.  Even its President impressed me with how quickly he assimilated the information imparted and how much he respected ethics relating to the handling of various issues. As to the financial aspects, I was never involved in that regard, but the scope of its activities is vast. And The Smile of the Child has always been effective.

There is another issue, which I often raised in my lectures: to what extent can a non-social organisation expand in terms of work volume or structures? In the sense that it eventually becomes too unwieldy and complex. My only issue with The Smile was that the needs were both great and ever-increasing, which presented the risk of bureaucracy and centralisation. However, at least up to and including our collaboration, The Smile had managed to decentralise its decision-making and to dispense with the need for a bloated central organ. It appointed highly trained and capable managers who could operate effectively, be flexible, and who were prepared to go beyond the call of duty. It had cultivated an internal culture that encompassed not only professionalism but also volunteerism and high awareness of what the job entails – because child protection in Greece has always been non-existent, with a few bright exceptions.

Was The Smile of the Child suited to such a task?

The Smile of the Child was useful in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.

It was an enormous task that had to be completed in a short time. We split Greece into Regions and set up scientific teams in each Region to supervise and guide the researchers carrying out the interviews. I drafted the questionnaire with the assistance of Mr Economou, Professor of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. We trained our managers at headquarters and they then trained the regional managers. Our researchers were all Social Science graduates who had been trained in the questionnaire and had been briefed which social welfare organisations to address.

It all happened within a carefully designed framework. They did not just go anywhere asking anything. It was simultaneously very structured and decentralised. We employed a greater number of researchers to speed things up because the questionnaire was long and required time and we also wanted to be able to monitor validity.

Who did your survey address?

It addressed all of the country’s social welfare organisations – state, NGOs and private. It addressed everyone who agreed to participate. We had also approached all the services registered with the Ministry in each Region and some others that our Network had recorded. Most of them responded. We obtained a very good sample, with a high response rate and degree of validity. I do not think many refused to participate, but not everyone was able to respond to all the questions, especially state organisations. Some of them might also not have had the requisite data, but I think that collectively they provided a wealth of material.

Is The Smile of the Child to be credited with this initiative?

Exclusively. But it is of little significance because the Ministry christens it a “Supervised Entity” and the initiative is funded by the NSRF. The Ministry would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.

The study was published in February 2009.

Yes, but it had been completed earlier, in May 2008 if I am not mistaken. The study was delivered six months after its commission. The Smile of the Child was most helpful, a couple of its social workers and other personnel were close to us providing input, and it always paid the researchers and all the other staff on time. At the executive level, everyone worked for free.

What conclusions did you draw about child protection in our country during the preparation of this plan?

That it is non-existent. That there are a few shelters in a raging storm. And that the pre-existing network has no horizontal interconnection. The biggest issue facing Welfare Services is their horizontal cooperation and coordination because, in the absence of such a horizontal interconnection, there can be no effective cooperation. Even if I were to establish ten services in a region, provide plenty of funding and scientific personnel and start offering the services within their remit, their effectiveness would be cancelled out by the absence of cooperation with the other available service providers.

Let me give you an example. Let us take a mother and child who have been abused by the father and left the family home. The services the mother needs are provided by ten different bodies. The problem is that the remit of each service is limited. For example, one service says, “we can cover your rent”, another one says, “we can provide childcare”, another service offers accommodation in a refuge or job training, and so on. If all these services are not interconnected, then the timing of the aid offered can be off, meaning the mother will not be able to assimilate and use these services effectively. You could call and say, “We have found you a job”, but the mother responds, “I do not have childcare”. “This is now available”, “But I have no place to stay.”

How are things in the Healthcare sector?

The same issues face healthcare. We have specialists who attend to an individual, and everyone gives their diagnosis and prescribes medication, but no one attends to the patient as a whole, no one who can say for example, the anti-inflammatory drugs prescribed by the orthopaedic could cause this patient heart failure. This could only be seen by a family GP and a professional who can assess the risk not only to the individual concerned but the whole family. It is not just the individual who is ailing, but the whole system.

It is the same with welfare. The issue is not whether someone committed theft, or a man is being abusive, but that the whole system is ailing. We cannot just look at the symptoms and not identify the causes in order to address and overcome them. Yes, the emergency relief must be provided on the spot, but how do you help someone make the transition from victimhood to independence and self-sufficiency long-term. Without the horizontal interconnection of all welfare services, you cannot do anything.

Which is the decentralised body currently active in the field of welfare? The church. Right now, the church is present in every neighbourhood, is it not? There can even be two churches in each area, with Parish Boards, benevolence funds, women’s charity associations. Unfortunately, until I left Greece, they followed the tenet of ministerial rather than social work. They were providers of alms, which does not help someone escape a situation.

Therefore, churches need to be incorporated into the provision of welfare. Start with the care for the elderly; train them, explain what is going on, in a way that resources can be grouped and shared out. The elderly, too, need comforting, need companionship. These things are costly to the state, yet they could be accessed for free, right next door. Why should the person in question have to get up and go to the Region’s offices so that the Region then comes to the individual to assist in providing companionship? The same thing should apply to the Open Care Centres for the Elderly (KAPI). That horizontal interconnection is of the utmost importance. And it affects the family because child protection is linked to the family. Only in the family’s absence, when the family is missing or unsuitable, do we have some institutions in place.

Look at what is happening at “Paidon” Children’s Hospital now. Children are admitted following the intervention of the public prosecutor. What use is that admission? Is there someone consistently looking after the child, advocating for that child, addressing the child’s ailing network? During my presidency at the National Centre for Social Solidarity (EKKA), for example, we were charged with assisting abused women, domestic violence victims. We held counselling sessions with a psychoanalyst to provide psychological support, we provided legal aid, and we could and did ask to see the perpetrators too, to help the perpetrators. Because when someone commits an error, it does not follow that it is in their nature to always do so. Something has led to that act, there is a confluence of many factors.

They might have been victims of abuse themselves.

Certainly, and you help them, and after you have helped them, you can keep seeing them as a couple. In other words, we do not believe that removing children from their family and then hanging the family out to dry is the answer.  We need to counsel the family and assist it. When the Children’s House in Cyprus came into being, Mr Nikolaidis and I decided to establish one here too. Because the forensic evaluation of abuse is a difficult matter and you cannot take statements from minors in the way that the police does. Lawyers, too, in their attempts to help their client, are abusive to the children. The children must be protected.

I have also spoken with Minors Public Prosecutors, such as Xeni Dimitriou, who was one of the ablest prosecutors in this field. They are not many. Often the post is seen as a stepping stone towards promotion to another post. Minors Public Prosecutors also need to be part of a group fostering a different culture and be supported by doctors, psychologists, everybody else, because it is a complex matter.   

At present, children and adults are vilified on television during court trials and other instances of abuse. I can assure you, based on my own experience, that the truth is not what is being presented. It is not what the children say, nor the truth claimed by the adults. The truth is something else, something that cannot be detected by journalists. The Children’s House in Cyprus came into being because the NGO in charge was able to obtain and implement all the know-how from abroad. They also had access to EU funds, and they were able to set up a commendable Children’s House, which is exclusively run by scientists without the interference of any administrative players.

The state is a player, though.

The state is the supervisory body. The House belongs to it, but state officials act only in a supervisory capacity, they do not provide services. The services are provided by the House’s staff. But the NGO is in charge, they monitor them, they are updated weekly. Ongoing training is provided, it does not stop. They invite people from abroad, receive know-how, publicise, they do many, many things. That is why we initiated more actions. There are other NGOs in Cyprus, too, for example, -------- which addresses the abuse of women. The “Foni” National Strategy Implementation Council is another one. In other words, the failure of welfare to provide the services needed in this field have brought the organisations providing them to the forefront. And the citizens of Cyprus now show greater trust in them, because welfare lost credibility following the publication of articles on the issues concerning benefits and welfare staff.

Through the National Action Plan, you set some guidelines. Were they respected down the line?

I have not made an assessment, but I think the guidelines preoccupied many people. They have been extensively shared, and studies also mention that they have aided research and reflection. At the time, the proposals were subject to certain constraints. They had to be feasible. They had to be incorporable in the Ministry’s plan to receive funding and be implementable. So a number of these proposals is affected by feasibility and the need not to alienate everyone, by claiming that they have no idea what they are talking about and what they are requesting. At the same time, other proposals are more long-term and focus on culture and the general way forward. I do not think these were grasped by the political personnel and the bureaucrats, but they greatly influenced universities and academics. I was impressed by the Democritus University of Thrace Conference on Social Deprivation, Child Protection and Human Rights, focusing on the changes that needed to be made in child protection. An international conference was held, which I was unfortunately unable to attend as I was abroad, at the university’s Department of Social Work, whose President is Charalampos Poulopoulos, whom I had worked with at KETHEA (Therapy Centre for Dependent Individuals).

We do not dispute that the guidelines are a point of reference during conferences, or that they have assisted many scientists and academics. The effort was made, some guidelines were issued, a National Action Plan was formulated. But then, every subsequent government comes up with its own Action Plan.

During the following years, some of our proposals were announced, albeit selectively. They were moves in the right direction and can also be attributed to the influence of managers who read the proposal and whom we had the chance to train. What is missing is for them to say, “Yes, we want to reform the system. Come join us so that we can see what reforms are needed”, but this must be accompanied by a willingness to undertake administrative changes. Administrative changes are also needed, responsibilities need to be reshuffled, scientific protocols and standards must be drawn up and implemented.

When I worked in Healthcare, and we implemented the changes in hospitals, there were specifications, so many beds, so many doctors, so many social workers etc. The personnel of any kind of Service is subject to how many you serve, what services you provide, this affects how much staff you will need. If we copy what is happening at Lechaina, 40 to 50 children and a staff of ten or two, yes you might increase capacity, but still, people are being abused.

So, we need to see first what kind of reforms we seek and take it from there because the truth is that the Welfare Sector is loosely seen as not particularly desirable and the pre-existing models were always reciprocal models. We establish social security and then build a safety network leaving a hole in the middle down which thousands of suffering people fall and then we pretend not to see them and ask for the assistance of volunteers. I do not know if the time has come to see social welfare in conjunction with our social security system, because Greece still has some positive aspects that are absent in other countries. As we speak, state healthcare is free for all, whatever its quality may be. There are gradations, but even then, if you visit a state hospital you will see anyone and everyone, Roma, repatriates, refugees, they all go, wait for their turn and will at some point receive medical care. This is an approach missing in other countries. The same with medication. That is not the case with Welfare.

We have heard terrible reports. About minors with anal warts who simply received treatment and returned home, without any of the doctors administering care wondering how the child came to be infected in the first place. 

But where could they refer the child to? To another Service? In a hospital employing two social workers at most? Go to “Paidon” and talk to the children there. They do not want to receive assistance; they want to leave. The disorder is so serious that hospitals are not always the best place to provide treatment. Neither is an institution. It is as if we are training them to be delinquents and dependent forever.

But you spoke of a Service network.

In the context of redesigning all of these components, I mentioned the need for them to be connected to a single Centre acting as the supervisory or competent body, so that everyone can be aware of and record their needs, their deficiencies, what they require, what they do not require and know that they are solely responsible. Because if I am dealing with it, and you are dealing with it, at the end of the day no one is effectively dealing with it, and we could be spending large sums to no effect because our timing, as I already mentioned, could be off.

Moreover, how is it even possible to announce that Greece has a budget surplus, that a given sum is left over, and then distribute those funds to the uniformed services? By all means, let us allocate them, but the heart of the matter is which needs are you addressing? These are all things that happen, unfortunately. The fact is that, in Denmark for example, which has a comprehensive welfare system, the underpinning mentality is not the mentality we inherited from the Ottomans, namely dealing with things by paying out of your own pocket; the mentality is one of trust in the state. They give more than half their salary to the state and know that everything will be fine because it will respond both effectively and to a high standard. Here, even if you personally have the resources, you still cannot access social services.

I collaborate with therapists, and you have no idea how many prosperous citizens struggle to access services. In other words, it is not only certain social categories that are ailing. The problems are many, the situations are multiproblematic, the whole of society is ailing.

You were the President of the National Centre for Social Solidarity (EKKA) around ten years ago. At present, how do you assess its course?

EKKA should be the Ministry’s executive branch, meaning it should be monitoring everything. The Ministry could have charged EKKA to oversee everything in a scientific manner, without bureaucracy. EKKA could be playing a leading role, although it has not been reinforced with scientific personnel to the extent that it should be. We utilised several NSRF funds effectively and that is how we were able to achieve something, and I tried to emphasise its role as executor and coordinator during my tenure. We have two helplines for adults too, and we also tried to integrate anyone providing related services within Welfare, so that they could have access and their work included, and so that people could find them.

Why is there no political will for reform?

One reason is that the Ministries do not have the requisite scientific personnel. Most politicians are blinded by the short-sightedness of clientelism and are distrustful. They want to ensure they leave their mark in the short-term. That causes problems. Planning policy and implementing policy are two different things. Policies must be implemented by others, and that coordination could be effectuated by EKKA along with the whole infrastructure. We did try this with all thirteen existing Centres of Social Welfare, it is set up and could easily happen provided the Ministry is willing.

Another problem is funding. We need to secure stable funding and not allocate funds willy-nilly, hand them out as if they were alms. We need to have stable funding, and EKKA must be carrying out constant research: How many children are we responsible for, where are they, who cares for them, what resources do we have? We have the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), we have the indices, we have tools which, if allowed to be scientifically coordinated by someone, could work very effectively.

But that work is demonstrably not being carried out. How can anyone hope that the chaos reigning in the field of child protection in this country could possibly change?

As we speak, the greatest means of pressure are the problems themselves, unfortunately. It is not the pressure levied by the scientific community, nor the EU. The scientific and academic community, unfortunately, do not have that kind of influence. It does what it can, it records everything, but movements for change are weak. I attempted to coordinate the NGOs, to make them aware that they are ten bodies facing the same issues, that competing among themselves for visibility is a waste of resources, that we should coordinate by forming an Association, work together, etc. But right now, a single positive step has not been taken. For example, there is no obligation to join the register and elect a Committee that will collaborate with the Ministry so that we can coordinate our actions and receive information.

EKKA had a system under which only bodies that had been assessed could receive Ministerial funding. We had an evaluation system, which was not the most modern of its kind because its contents were determined by the Ministry, but at least we had a register of 200-300 different bodies that also needed the data to obtain the prerequisite approval to receive funds from the Ministry, otherwise the Ministry could not authorise funding because it was institutionally prevented from doing so. In the rest of the world, all bodies are submitted to such evaluations. Tomorrow morning, I could submit my articles of association, rent a flat in Patisia and start accommodating young girls facing various issues and I could be a paedophile and you would have no idea how many children are staying at the flat nor what I get up to.

Could this be happening in our country, Mr Altanis? Is no one checking?

It could be happening; I cannot exclude it.  Because we still live in a society that expresses interest and concern, it would come to light at some point, albeit too late. But it is something that could happen because the institutional framework allows it.

EKKA runs a national helpline for children. But if I were to see someone beating a child right now, who would I call? If we asked any of the people around us right now, they would say The Smile of the Child.

It is the best-known line, we agree on that, although the answer would have to be 112, which is the EU emergency number. There are specific reasons for it: The Smile has many volunteers producing its adverts and it has used the Law on Social Responsibility in Radio and Television effectively. Because EKKA is a state body it stumbled over certain issues: it would not run its adverts, not promote them, consider them competitive toward The Smile etc. There is no institutional framework allowing the state to ensure it is utilising its structures effectively, and I am not sure whether the financial brains of each government see this as a priority. In the sense that when the demand for a service becomes evident, it will swamp them. I had raised it at the Ministry once, said we need to get out there and inform people about a certain topic, and their response was, “And then what? Leave it as it is, we will be swamped.”

Moreover, consider the fact that welfare rights are not actionable. This means that if a service fails to provide me with welfare, I have no legal recourse. Our model suffers from such legal vacuums. And I should also inform you that even though it was the Ministry of Labour that maintained the financial allocation of welfare funds, there was greater scientific expertise at the Ministry of Health and greater understanding. The Ministry of Labour is still very social security centred and I do not know if they have since fostered the requisite culture. I think there is still some way to go, but there are also some very creative forces at play, such as the Municipalities or the thirteen Centres of Social Welfare in the Regions, but their responsibilities do not extend to that.  

We need to give them responsibility for regional coordination, and EKKA should be made responsible for coordinating the Regions. That could be a swift model bearing immediate results until a more comprehensive structure is set up. Are you aware of how many desperately needed welfare premises collapsed and closed due to lack of funds and personnel, and were then given to NGOs to run their programmes? PIKPA (Rehabilitation Centre for Disabled Children) used to own buildings all over Greece. Where have the buildings gone, the premises? Many premises, whose exact location we do not even know, are demolished, lost. They could not even maintain the Gerokomeion Retirement Home!

How relevant is your Action Plan today, ten years after its publication? Would it need a significant review?

It would certainly need to be updated. Many bodies have changed, some new institutions and organisations have entered the field, but we also need a different approach to the new data. I have already mentioned the creation of the thirteen Centres of Social Welfare in the Regions. The Municipalities have also expanded during that time through the Organisation provided for by the Kapodistrias reform, so we have that too. I don’t know if anything has changed for NGOs in terms of the governing institutional framework. EKKA has been entrusted with new responsibilities. I think that it could, if it wished, utilise them and move in some of the welfare directions indicated, but the bodies involved are different now.  State bodies have decreased, and the number of NGOs has risen.

Would you do it again?

You have caught me in a transitional phase. I stopped my academic activities a few months ago, and I am only interested in research now. The truth is that I have declined many meetings and some proposals to accept administrative-scientific posts because I think it is pointlessly soul-destroying and that once you are an academic, you cannot compromise too much with all the different agendas. But I would always be interested in research, in a study. I think research is the only way we can gain control and be able to say whether we are doing the right thing, but research does not suffice, you need to put assessment systems, evaluation mechanisms, in place. Creating something and leaving it to its own devices is not enough.

I feel very disappointed and frustrated, but I would do it again. If another study were to take place now, I would agree to become involved. But I would not act as the President, as a Consultant, any kind of relationship that encompasses dependence is not an option for me. I cannot accept such conditions anymore; they are too abusive.

Was your experience at EKKA abusive?

Yes, certainly, the political leadership and the Ministries behaved as if we were the enemy.

What kind of resistance did you meet there then?

Ignorance, lack of scholarship and scientific understanding, all kinds of agendas, bureaucracy, lack of empathy. All of it, unfortunately. There were many hardworking people, certainly. But when you are ignorant, you cannot help. Love is not enough; it is necessary but not enough. When I visited the PIKPA Pentelis, I found many volunteers there and asked them what they were doing. They were taking the children to play and when I asked them what exactly they were doing, if they knew the child, the child’s specific needs, all they knew was that the child was fair-haired and blue-eyed. They sat there and played. And I banned everyone, I said: “Go receive training in what you are exactly supposed to do.” Some reacted badly, others accepted. We all need to know what is required and how to do it and act in a coordinated manner. In Cyprus, we began to implement a few programmes during the crisis so we could see how many people were involved. We visited a few institutions and realised that it was the same people who went to two, three different parishes. That is the point, welfare should be aggressive, not defensive.

We have talked with many people active in the field of child protection. Some of them have confessed that there are times when they witness an incident and are at a loss as to who to address because they are aware of the system’s flaws.  But who else can you turn to?

The welfare model should be this: all residents should be registered with and have a general practitioner. It is unthinkable that a person should have a problem and not know who to first turn to, the teacher, a psychologist, a psychiatrist? Someone needs to manage this. I used to jest that in Greece you need a PhD just to figure out the service you should turn to. Without registration, there can be no scientific protocol… Surgeries, hospitals, they all follow a protocol. No one can act as they please. The same must apply to Welfare.

How did the institution of the Ombudsman on Children’s Rights come about?

Over the years, the institution of a Children’s Ombudsman was established in a number of European countries, particularly after the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. Towards the end of the ‘90s or possibly in early 2000, the need for an equivalent institution in Greece was discussed. The office of the Citizen’s Advocate (Ombudsperson) had just been established in Greece, so Parliament and the Greek authorities opted against the creation of another Ombudsman’s office, even though in most European countries the Citizen’s Ombudsman and the Children’s Ombudsman are two separate entities. Here, the Children’s Ombudsman is a Deputy Ombudsman on Children’s Rights.

Giorgos Kaminis became the Citizen’s Advocate in 2003, having served as Deputy Ombudsman for Human Rights. As Citizen’s Advocate, he looked for someone to fill the post of Children’s Ombudsman. He approached me as someone with a legal background and work experience in the field and asked if I would be willing to take on the post. I explained that I was well versed in the European system and told him, “Yes, I accept. Under the condition that I will keep you updated, I will work in full coordination with your office for as long as I remain at this post, but the department of the Children’s Ombudsman must be set up along different lines.”

That was the agreement from the start: to meet regularly, focus on communication and employ a multidisciplinary team. At some point, we had a scientific team of fourteen. I recently saw that that number has shrunk to six.

How was the office staffed?

Mr Kaminis was not familiar with this field. He had an open mind and a broad approach. Initially, he proposed that we begin with an office of “three to four specialists and take it from there”. I explained that I disagreed, that I wanted a strong scientific team so that we could do our job properly, both domestically and internationally, following examples from other countries. For example, the Polish Children’s Ombudsman, the best and most powerful Children’s Ombudsman in Europe, is an independent institution with a staff of forty. Wherever the staff is two to four people, the office genuinely underperforms; much less is done.

So, I pushed for it from the start, and we agreed. We built the office up to a staff of fourteen, that included lawyers, psychologists, social workers, educators, a publicist—an interdisciplinary team. It is a prerequisite if you also want to enjoy a good reputation in society as an institute doing serious work. You can’t cover everything, of course. In some fields, you need to know that other specialised institutions are operating too; but you listen and have a global overview. That is what we tried to do during my fourteen and a half years at the office of the Children’s ombudsman: have an overview and advocate for children.

Why did the staff numbers dwindle?

Some left and their post could not be refilled during the difficult years of the crisis. Some transferred to other departments of the Citizen’s Advocate office, some were seconded to postgraduate courses and so on. It could possibly be attributed to current leadership choices. This field might not necessarily be as visible, as powerful.

What actions did the Children’s Ombudsman undertake during the fourteen years of your tenure?

Firstly, we handled cases, reports. A letter or a person would arrive at the office. Reports by the children themselves are very few, internationally. Worldwide. Children do not easily approach a person in this institution. Where you might receive reports, complaints and so on is after you visit a children’s space, either by post or email.  

The Polish and the Dutch also consider verbal reports made by children, that such and such is happening, as formal reports. The child does not need to put their concerns in writing. Moreover, actions are not confined to written forms of communication and mediation. They can take other forms, like what we used to do regularly. Every year, we would visit around sixty schools. I was often present during those visits. We would visit a school, see one or two grades. By talking with the children, we would get a feel for them.  We would listen to their opinions. Frequently, they would express complaints. Teachers would not be present at these meetings. Children would say things like “this teacher does such and such”. We would tell them to leave it up to us to investigate what is going wrong. We did not confine ourselves to identified reports. Very often, children will tell you what is going on. They will say things like, “When I have a problem at home, who do I speak to?” or “I need to see a psychologist”.

Would they actually tell you that?

Very often. The children would either speak up in public without giving away that it concerned them personally or find us during the break. During those visits, we would have a two-hour break. A child would come up to you during the break and say, “Can I tell you something?” because we had established a relationship of trust during the visit.  

What ages did you see?

We visited third graders to twelfth graders. We would have a general discussion, and through that general discussion, we would broach the topics of children’s rights and abuse. We would ask them, “What do you think? How are things working? What should be done?” I always liked to give examples, short stories during the discussion. “There was a child somewhere, something happened to them, their parents did or did not do something, the child needed help” and so on. When children hear a story, they identify and then they ask you questions, tell you that they too know a child that this or that happened to. Then, during the break, they will approach you to share a personal story. They say, “Please don’t tell anyone, but I need to talk to you about this…”

Therefore, in those situations, you are handling an issue. It is not recorded as a report, but you know it is an issue, which you will address, and which will sometimes call for an intervention.

For example, I remember a child confessing that his family was putting a lot of pressure on him about a sporting activity; he was very good at it, and the family was pressing him to become an athlete. The child expressed that he was under a lot of strain and wanted to speak with someone. With his permission, I immediately informed the teacher and the school addressed the family issues.

I now recall a teenage girl at a school who told me during the break, “What you say about abuse is all well and good, but my father is a policeman, and an alcoholic and nothing will be done about it. I’m just waiting to turn eighteen and leave. I just wanted to tell you that, so you don’t think you are actually solving any problems.” We talked to her and found a way for her first to start seeing one of the teachers and then sought the assistance of the support coordinator at the Ministry of Education, which runs Youth Support Stations, to help her process and manage her feelings. Sometimes it is not possible to escape the abuse but processing the emotions is too much to handle; the belief that “nothing can change and I will keep getting beaten up” or “I will watch my mother get beaten up until I turn eighteen”.

Do you first bring the child into contact with a person of reference at the school?

You enter the school and listen, and then you manage what you hear depending on the situation and its gravity. Sometimes you give advice first; do this or that. Secondly, you may make a connection with a person of reference within the school. Thirdly, you can recommend that the child writes to you, that can also happen sometimes. You tell the children you can write to us at this email address and then the children do write. Fourthly, you can follow an empowerment process; you ask the child, “Do you have a relative or someone you can talk to? How will you talk to them?” In other words, you respond to a request initiated by the child.

I remember that in 90% of the schools we visited and possibly more, children came to us during the breaks to report certain issues. The issues they raised spanned the full spectrum of children’s rights.  From very serious to ostensibly simple incidents, like a fight, for example, which is nonetheless an issue to the child that approaches you. Through this process, you learn, and you gain information about how the support system works. You implement the action at the school. You see how the school community responds and you bring that knowledge back to the office, so you are pooling information. This process might not be a reporting mechanism, but you gain a full picture which allows you to intervene subsequently, allows you to say that this important issue must be addressed.

So, as I said, firstly, we handled reports and, secondly, we made visits, a great many visits. The latter allowed us to gather information, based on which we could intervene and instigate change at various levels. Let me give you an example since we are discussing abuse today. In the early days, during a visit to Kos for a case I was attending, teachers expressed their concern about whether they would enjoy legal protection for alerting the public prosecutor. They wanted the law to state somewhere that they could report to the public prosecutor and be legally covered. That was one of the reasons why I, as a member of the legislation drafting committee, insisted that Parliament Law 2500/2006 include an article covering such reports. This became Article 23, according to which teachers are obliged to inform the school principal if they are informed or realise that a crime is committed and so on. The wording might sound extreme or shall we say, magisterial, but it is there to protect teachers.

In my view, what is needed is for the incident to be put in writing. That is what I tell teachers: if you put it in writing, the responsibility then also lies with the school principal, who might do nothing. There is not a school in the country that has not received information about many, many instances of domestic violence. And still, legal recourse is rarely taken, as you know. What is it that we want? Do we want every school to make reports to the public prosecutors? We do not have a system in place to handle that. No. I am against such an approach. The reason we want the law to state “obliged to” is to legally cover teachers when they need to take this course of action.

But this only applies to teachers who want to take action.

Look, a teacher who hides and fails to address an issue should indeed be held accountable. I totally agree. And that is one of the great challenges facing us: how can we monitor teachers who are informed and do nothing. But, in my view, the biggest challenge for our country is how to handle issues extrajudicially. In other words, for the teachers to have specific instructions, for the system to have clarity and the ability to find solutions of another kind.

That is what a Children’s Ombudsman is for. To spread this kind of message. For example, a teacher, who had attended some of our training workshops, called me about a student, a girl of around thirteen or fifteen. The teacher told me, “I am dealing with an issue at school, related to the training you gave us, and I need advice on how to handle it. This student came to school injured, and I asked her what happened. At first, she did not want to say. Then, in private, she told me that her father had hit her after discovering she had been out with a male friend rather than a female friend as she had told him.” Those were the facts of what happened, which are grounds for making a report to the public prosecutor.

The teacher then asked me, “should I go to the public prosecutor, or should we find another way to help the child and the parent and find out what is going on?” I replied, “Can you try the second option? It is harder but more effective in my opinion.” With our guidance, she did speak to the child, and with the child’s consent, the teacher held a meeting with both the student and the parent. The teacher told me that at the end of the meeting all three were in tears, because the girl said, “Yes, I did lie, but I did it because I know my father does not like me to go out with my male friend”. And the father said, “Yes, I did hit her, but I am unemployed, I have lost my job, I’m having a difficult time with everything and I need help to cope and I need honesty.” The teacher told them, “I am not a psychologist although I am acting as a psychologist right now. Can you promise me that you will seek counselling because I cannot continue to be responsible for this?” They made a commitment and then they were referred to a family therapist. What I am trying to say is that this approach is more appropriate and effective, because the teacher in question decided not to turn a blind eye, not to ignore what is happening, but to do something. I believe that is what teachers must learn to do.  They must learn to make referrals. To know who the psychologist is.

There is also another concern. There are instances where a well-intentioned teacher makes a report about an incident that is subsequently not proven, then got the teacher into a lot of trouble. The teacher becomes involved in a lawsuit, and they are the only ones with any evidence, they do not have another professional who can back them up. I advise teachers, “Do make the report when you feel that the child needs recourse to justice but also gather other kinds of evidence, witnesses. Do not act alone.” It is not enough that the child came and told you something at a given point. Every school should have access to a psychologist and a social worker.

Can the Juvenile Protection Teams help?

They cannot intervene in schools and the provision allowing Juvenile Protection Teams to investigate a matter without a public prosecutor’s order has fallen into disuse, unfortunately. Initially, the ministerial decision stated that they could investigate without the need for an order from the public prosecutor. Some did, but then the parents took legal action against them. Subsequently, a stop was put to this practice because it was considered that the Juvenile Protection Teams did not enjoy sufficient legal protection when undertaking investigations without a public prosecutor’s order.

I have received reports from Members of the Greek Association of Social Workers (SKLE) that, in the early days of the law being implemented, some of the social workers who performed investigations without an order from the public prosecutor as stipulated by the ministerial decision went on to face disciplinary proceedings. The provision may have been enshrined in the ministerial decision, but it was not in absolute harmony with other legislation. In any event, the use of that measure has somewhat subsided.

The Committees for Diagnostic Educational Evaluation and Support (EDEAY) have now been instituted. The EDEAY is an institution comprising an integration department and an interdisciplinary team, with a psychologist, social worker etc. Each Committee is supposed to cover five schools.  Their mandate is to visit the five schools in their area once a week, ask “what cases are you dealing with?” and assist parents or children with the necessary intervention. As announced by the Ministry of Education, the EDEAYs are the ideal tool, but they do not exist yet. They are supposed to provide schools with at least the possibility to access a psychologist, a social worker, once a week.

When were the EDEAYs set up?

They started as a pilot scheme around five years ago, but now their operations are expanding. I am increasingly hearing about some positive outcomes in places where they are in operation. Some, not everywhere. I was visiting a school the other day (hesitates) the school principal knew of them, but the teachers did not. There is still some way to go.

Do teachers receive some training on how to recognise the signs of abuse?

There is the work of the Children’s Ombudsman’s office, which published training material etc. quite a few years ago. The training varies according to the type of abuse. A lot of work has been done on how to handle bullying and violence in schools, and I could tell you a lot about that. That is not the case for domestic violence, or violence outside the school if you like, because the violence could also be occurring elsewhere. There is some material to address that, but training is not systematic yet. That is a fact.

In elementary schools in particular, where children are younger and more vulnerable, and abuse can begin more easily at that age, I would appeal to the teachers to make the following statement during the first parent-teacher meeting, particularly to the parents of first-graders:  “Welcome. Our school subscribes to these principles. Our school is responsible for the children’s wellbeing too. When we see that a child is not doing well, is not having a good time, shows signs of violence etc. you should know that we will notify you and, if there is a serious issue, we might request the intervention of the courts. We do not wish to involve judicial authorities. First and foremost, we want to work with you. However, we have a responsibility. Do not think that the family falls outside the scope of our mandate.” Parents need to hear the school principal state that.

But can they take such action?

One of the problems is Greek law as it stands. Let us say that a child approaches a teacher and insinuates that something might be wrong at home. The teacher might have received training, might be informed, but they cannot address it on their own, and the child says, “I want to speak to a psychologist, a social worker.”

In this instance, the law is flawed because it does not permit a specialist to see a child without the consent of the parent. This must end somehow. One of the things we did, one of the actions we took, after handling several cases, was to address a formal opinion to the Ministries of Health, the Interior and Education. The opinion stated that when a child of any age requests to see a mental health or welfare professional about an issue that preoccupies them and makes the request without the parents’ knowledge, the professional receiving the request must accept to see the child, provided the professional works for a public body responsible for children.

Rather than saying “I cannot see you”, the professional can see the child, listen to them and then decide on the appropriate course. Notify the parent. Ask the child to speak with the parent. Report the matter to the judicial authorities. Or any other option. But it is inconceivable for children not to have access to health and welfare professionals.

The Ministry of the Interior accepted our opinion and distributed it to the municipalities. The Ministry of Health initially rejected it, but we asked the Council of Mental Health to give its opinion on our opinion. The Council was positive, but the Ministry never forwarded our opinion to hospitals.  The Ministry of the Interior forwarded it to the municipalities. The Ministry of Education never replied.

So, a significant flaw in our system is that a child at a Greek school has no third party they can speak to other than their teacher. Unless it is a school for special education, which has psychologists and social workers. Or the school is covered by the EDEAY for some reason. But in all other cases, the children cannot, and that is a problem.

How child-friendly is justice?

One of the great obstacles preventing children from coming forward is the awareness of the possible consequences. Of the number of times that they will need to make a statement to various people on the one hand, and the publicity that will surround their case on the other. Particularly the latter. They do not want others to know. That is why we are fighting for the Council of Europe’s guidelines for a child-friendly justice to translate into concrete measures. I am sure you have also heard this from Giorgos Nikolaidis in the context of our efforts to establish a level of protection, especially for child abuse cases. And the new legislation for the Children’s House is inadequate.

Unfortunately, for financial and organisational reasons, the Children’s House legislation was assigned to the wrong service. It was assigned to the probation service, the Supervisors for Minors. I have great respect for that service, but they are not in the field of victim protection. They are there for perpetrators and those at risk, according to the law, but it is a different kind of approach. The Children’s House should have been set up as it was done in Cyprus, with an interdisciplinary special council including a psychologist, a social worker…

Giorgos (Nikolaidis), Ms Themeli and I had submitted a comprehensive proposal, we had raised these issues in Parliament when the discussion was held, but for financial, organisational and other reasons they opted for this model. I do not want to stand against it. I want it to be implemented, I want us to support it as much as we can. If it begins to be implemented, we will support it. But assigning it to the Supervisors for Minors was the wrong decision.

I gained a good understanding of the Children’s House in Sweden because I visited it there, and I have read about its implementation in many other countries. As you know, it is a place that can also accommodate a child for a few days if need be. However, its primary focus is interdisciplinarity and connecting the interview with the court case underway, reflecting the participation of the public prosecution and the justice system, the police, the social worker, the psychologist, the supporting doctor, where needed. Therefore, it is an all-in-one model that allows you to record and make an assessment through a process where the child does not need to see a multitude of people. That is very important. I do not know yet how it will be implemented here. There is a provision for a Children’s House, and I am waiting to see, hoping that it will be implemented and willing to offer my assistance if it is sought, but the provision is not what we would have liked.

For example, the provision that statements made by minors should be filmed is rarely implemented. Neither the police nor justice has paid sufficient attention to this and there is certainly a deficiency there. As a result, a couple of these cases have become public knowledge, that so and so is being depicted by the child or gossip spreads about who was taken where, and the rest of the children become discouraged.

It is very common for photos of the accused to be made public, especially in child sexual abuse cases.

I disagree with the publication of photos. First of all, these are people who have not been found guilty yet. This gives rise to an ethical issue because the presumption of innocence until proven guilty is a fundamental tenet. Secondly, one must consider the families of the accused. The people whose photos are made public could be parents, and who thinks of their children? Because you can imagine what follows. Thirdly, the act of publishing one person’s photo snowballs to include many other people in their milieu and gossip that follows. I had expressed the view, even back then, that the publication of photos serves other purposes, media voyeurism so to speak and competition among media outlets and is not necessarily the most desirable measure for the protection of children.

Let us return to the training provided to teachers. What did the Children’s Ombudsman do about that?

We did everything we could. We had made a proposal that the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government run some training programmes. They did run one in the past. Another one is currently underway. The ideal scenario would be for all teachers, every single one of them, to be able to attend three-day workshops at the beginning of the school year covering some basic matters. Child protection is one such matter. Another matter is knowledge of the services available and which service should or should not be used.  The third matter is the law and judicial services. In other words, there are some matters that need to be constantly revisited.

In practice, however, it is not so easy. I was recently talking with the president of the Institute of Educational Policy, Mr Kouzelis. I was saying how training programmes on school democracy must be run. About how you approach organisation because that also has an impact on bullying. His response was, “I wish we could. Where will we find the resources needed? How do you organise this for the whole of Greece?” The system for teacher training is very weak. They receive some NSRF funds on specific issues and so on and provide training for groups, not even every teacher.

What is the role of the teacher in your view?

Often, it is the teacher who first hears something and then makes the referral. How do you build this relationship of trust? Unfortunately, the traditional tools at our disposal do not favour such a relationship. It requires greater investment on the part of the teacher. To be open to discussion, be available to students during breaks, inform students that the door to their office is always open, that matters falling outside the scope of education also form part of the school agenda. That the teachers are not there simply as instructors but as life guides. In other words, there are a number of things that must become part of school philosophy.

The same applies to institutions. Child protection institutions, unfortunately, are plagued by a multitude of errors in the way that they operate. But it is also the case that often the people working there do not approach the inner world of the child in a way that builds trust. They stick to the rules of what “must” and “must not” be done. “I am here to make sure you sleep, eat, come, go, do this, do that. Let’s look at your record. What will you do? What did they tell you? What is going on with your family?” And it ends there. There is a whole other, very important, aspect however: how the child feels on an everyday basis, what the child sees, hears, feels. Unfortunately, only a few people touch upon this most important aspect.

We visited many institutions multiple times. In my estimate, we made more than 150-200 visits to institutions of every kind. When you first walk into an institution, whether it is the best of its kind, along the lines of the SOS Children’s Village that is the best model, or the worst kind, which are some large church institutions with too many children and a few ladies who are supposedly looking after them, when you first walk into an institution then, if you care about children’s rights and hence care for the children before you, you are confronted by a multitude of spectres. You see the image of the child standing before you and the spectres hiding behind it.

So, you need to investigate the spectres surrounding the child. In a school, the spectres are not so many. Institutions are haunted by them: the child’s anxiety. The child’s guilt. The absence of the birth parent. Worry about the future. About what is happening in the present. Abuse, neglect. To investigate all that you need a different set of tools. You cannot do it in a visit. So, we need to have more systematic training and regulation, too. There needs to be a mechanism that can enter institutions, stay there and come out somewhat better informed.

In schools too, it is often the case that a teacher is good at instruction but a deficient communicator and misses fundamental things. There was one such instance, a very good instructor, an excellent instructor at an elementary school. The children told us during the break that they were being blackmailed by some other students, threatened to have their money stolen if they went to the square and so on. I asked them why they did not tell their teacher. “Because we are afraid that he will tell the bullies off in such a way that they will take revenge outside the school.” So there was fear in the school. A teacher must not let children be afraid. A teacher must embrace them in a way that dispels fear. That takes work. In essence, that necessitates a change of priorities. A shift where the drive to provide knowledge, to spur children on to distinguish themselves and become somebody in a way that fosters competition and a focus on the future gives way to the present and the community.

However, schools do not appear capable of making that change.

It is a philosophy, nonetheless. Some are making efforts in that direction. I think my ideal situation would be one where we learn from one another as much as possible. Of course, you need further training, you need laws that safeguard those involved. At the school in Kos back in 2004, the staff felt legally exposed, abandoned by the law with regard to actions that could be taken. They were afraid. We need stronger laws that tell teachers, “I have your back. Take action.” Of course, laws need to be accompanied by services that support the legislation, ensure its implementation. I would like there to be a system that provides training on the one hand, that this is what you can do, and the legal reassurance that the persons involved will not get into trouble for doing what they were trained to do. The latter is essential.

I had far too many teachers call us and tell us after seminars we ran during school visits, “Yes, we would like to go ahead, but we are scared. We know of colleagues who did that and then went through hell.”

I imagine that there is also a financial consideration, given the crisis.

Of course. If you don’t have a lawyer to defend you, you have to pay out of your own pocket for something that should be a given. Should not the state be telling you that if you get sued in the course of carrying out duties imposed by the law, the state will provide your legal defence?

During my travels all over Greece, I had some very interesting experiences. I recall one such experience in Larissa, where we were running a seminar for teachers with the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. We ran such seminars elsewhere too, but this is a scene that stayed with me. I gave an introduction on what the law says, what the obligations are etc. and welcomed the public prosecutor. I said that in my view, it was important that they meet the public prosecutor and hear from her how and when you can use her services.

At that point, the public prosecutor rose and said, “You should know that the school principal should call me even if they are afraid. If I sense fear, I will act ex officio without a written report. I am on your side. You should know that we share a common goal to protect the children.” The teachers were greatly relieved when they heard that. They came to me afterwards and said, “That was great. I wish public prosecutors would come to meet us more often, become a familiar face rather than a stranger, and reassure us that they will collaborate in difficult cases and start proceedings.” So many school principals do not act because they know the person concerned has a gun at home or is mentally unstable and could harm them in some way.

Assuming a child is subjected to any kind of abuse in Greece. What steps can they take?

First and foremost, children must know and understand their rights. I always start with a talk on rights. When I was first appointed to the post, I went through the textbooks used in elementary school. The word “rights” appeared in the fifth grade. Now we have started to talk to children about rights at nursery level, thankfully. But the word “rights” was missing from the textbooks. In 2003, you started fifth grade, and the textbook spoke of children in Africa, children… far away.

And at present?

At present, it is increasingly used. It is part of the curriculum, but teachers are also learning how to train the children. Steps have been taken; more schools run theme days on World Children’s day, increasingly raising awareness. Of course, formal education on the subject is provided in fifth and sixth grade when children study ‘social and civil education’.  Children’s rights have been incorporated in that curriculum.

Secondly, you must start with the parent, even where the parent is the abuser. Communication with the parent, both the parent and the child must learn that they are starting to talk to one another. Not that you start by going elsewhere but that they work together.

The next step is the people in the educational environment. School, nursery, elementary and secondary schools and so on. They need a support mechanism to assist them in managing situations, but they are the first persons of trust after the family. Children need to know that.

Then there are the services that can be found in the community, the services close to the schools, the services run by the Ministry of Education and the services run by the community. Municipal social services, mental health services, where available, and so on.

Then there are the helplines. Then NGOs, which substitute the state because of the latter’s deficiencies. According to some, they, or one in particular, have overgrown, but that happens because the state is ineffective, it leaves room for someone else to come and supplant it.  

However, I believe and have stressed vehemently over the years that the work must primarily be done in schools. Schools are the key. That is why we ask for psychologists and social workers inside the schools and for support for schools. Schools must make the parents listen. Tell them that the school has a duty of care under the law and will take legal action if parents do not cooperate with this or that.

And you recommend that this conversation take place when you first meet the parents. You do not need to have an indication that something is amiss. That you also address those who may be excellent parents.

It must happen from the start. Addressing everyone. And it must extend beyond that, the information given to the parent must be that we, as a school, are not only responsible, but we deeply care. Not that we are responsible and fear falling foul of the law, but that we care. That the progress of children must also include progress in their wellbeing. And that if there is a problem at home, an alcoholic, someone with mental issues, we need you to inform us so we can help, not so that we can gossip. That we will not handle issues publicly, but by providing support for the child and understanding. That must take precedence over getting top grades for neat handwriting. What use is neat handwriting to us when the child is emotionally distraught?

What do we do if we learn that a child is being abused or suspect abuse?

First of all, we report it somewhere. We could report it to the public prosecutor. Secondly, because some people might not have easy access to the prosecutor or be afraid and so on, they must seek out the municipal social services in their area. This is where the Juvenile Protection Teams come in. Normally, the municipalities are the service providers. The Region has different responsibilities, it forwards cases to the relevant bodies. But the municipalities, municipal social workers, upon receipt of the report, investigate and assess the evidence.

There are also the relevant bodies and institutions, which should be strong and so on, one of which is the Children’s Ombudsman. The Children’s Ombudsman is not the body where a first report should be filed, although we receive many such first reports, but from people who do not know that, because there are no services in their area and they do not know what to do. In that case, they contact the Children’s Ombudsman. That could be the case depending on which region of the country you are in, for example, if you live on an island with no services then you are obliged to address someone else.

The most important thing is to refuse to tolerate any situation that involves violence and children. In my view, citizens must understand that they have a means of influencing a situation as neighbours. They can act, they can talk, they can say, “Come here, do you need anything? Do you need me to help you as a neighbour? Is there something I can do, someone I can alert, someone we can find together? The child I hear screaming and weeping all the time is a suffering that I, as a neighbour, must address.”

The law does not impose a duty of care on the neighbour, but when the neighbour witnesses a crime that can be prosecuted ex officio, there must be a mechanism that allows them to report it. That is the main function of ex officio prosecution, it does not simply describe a means of action for the prosecution, it calls on any citizen who has been a witness to act.

So, the neighbour goes to their local police station…

Starting with the police makes things harder. The police do encourage people to come forward with reporting incidents in Greece too. “File a report, and we will see how we go about examining the evidence.” However, because of the differences between police stations in each area, I cannot advise citizens to go to the police. There are police stations staffed by officers who have been suitably trained and handle things very carefully. So when you file a report, they will investigate matters and not make the situation worse.

But I am for social services being the first port of call prior to the intervention of the police in all matters that concern the violation of children’s rights. Social services can get the full picture and see where the family needs support, they do not start by focusing on the member prosecuted. Of course, by law, the police can also intervene in an advisory capacity too, not just as an enforcement agency.

You gave the example of the girl whose father was a police officer and an alcoholic. I could not possibly refrain from asking you to expand on that.

The girl came up to me and said, and this is important, “I love my father. I understand him. I would like him not to be an alcoholic, but he is. He is fine when he does not drink. But when he drinks, he beats up my mother and hits me too. I do not think there is anything I can do about that. First of all, the police are already behind him, they are his colleagues. Secondly, I don’t know if I want to report him. Report what? Who can help me? How? It is a dark cloud over my life, so to speak, and I keep it to myself.” When I asked her if she had told anyone, she said that she had not. She might have, but that is what she told me.

So I told her, “I hear you. This is a very serious matter, thank you for sharing it with me. Let us see how you can process it, leaving making a report aside.” She told me she had not spoken to anyone, and I said, “There are people you can speak to.” Then she said, “How can I see a psychologist? I would need the permission of my father to see a psychologist.” I asked her, “Would you be willing to see a teacher at the school, someone you trust a little more? Meet with them once or twice and see how we can take it from there?”

Her initial reaction was silence. “I don’t know”. Then she named a teacher, and we moved in that direction. So she wanted help. Then I spoke to the teacher, I told her, “I would like you to start seeing her. She trusts you. If you think there is some way you can intervene with the family, do so. However, I do not ask you to do that. Also, see if you can get support from the Youth Support Station in your area on how to handle it.” The teacher in question said, “Yes, let us do this, she is a good girl and I want us to help her.”

As far as I can tell, the teacher saw her a couple of times, and, during the school year, she sought support from the psychologist counselling teachers and continued to see the girl. The psychologist did not see the child but helped the teacher in handling the issue. That was a first, moderate step. I could not follow the outcome of the case. I think she was in ninth grade, then she left the school and when I asked, they did not know where she had moved to.

What I am trying to say is that it is an example of how the first step in handling abuse is empowerment. The way for a child to handle the experience is to assume it. To be able to say ‘no’. To be able to say, “I love you, dad, but what you are doing is unacceptable.” Otherwise, it leads to a different kind of outburst. I remember a youth, I don’t know if you remember that case, it must have happened ten years ago—who had killed his father wearing a mask.

He put on a mask and killed his father, and everyone wondered what happened. He was incarcerated, and during subsequent psychotherapy, it came to light that the father would rape the mother while wearing a mask. The boy had told no one and then killed his father one day. He had not processed it at all, had not talked to anyone. He spoke up later. He was an excellent young man; I think he was a university student. What I am trying to say is that if you do not talk about it at all, one day you might suddenly snap.

If someone heard you recount the story about the girl and the alcoholic father who was a policeman, they would say, “I can’t believe she told the Children’s Ombudsman and he did not take her to the prosecutor to make a report straightaway!” Why did you opt for another course of action?

Because a fifteen-year-old teenager has their own personality and you must cooperate with them in any course of action you take. That is my view. If I went and made a report, gathered evidence and used it, and so on, I could have caused more damage to the family, to the girl herself. First of all, the child would feel betrayed. They confided in someone and that person betrayed their confidence. Secondly, the child did not want to be parted from the parent. Thirdly, the investigation might have ended up in a drawer, led nowhere, and the child would neither be freed nor empowered, which was my aim.

My primary concern is for the victim to feel empowered and say ‘no’. That is the number one aim. Criminal justice is there not just to punish but also to heal; not to generally penalise life and terrorise, but also to heal and prevent certain behaviours. For that to happen, the vulnerable members of society must be empowered so that they can assert themselves and have a network of support. Therefore, in my view, what is needed above all is for vulnerable children to always have people who are there for them; that is the underpinning philosophy.  

As you say, what can be achieved when things take a judicial course? The removal of the child? Why?

Exactly. Where? Where would you take the child? Certainly, some children need to be removed from the family home. If only our foster care system functioned better, if only we had emergency foster care… I believe in emergency foster care, an established institution in other countries, where the child resides with a foster family for a month until services sort out what is going on in the family. The foster family is kept informed. They are “professional parents”, who do what in practice? Show tenderness and care. They explain that “We will not be together for a lifetime, but you will stay with us for a while, rather than go to an institution or a hospital. Let us work it out and we will do everything we can to make sure you enjoy your stay with us. But really, we are like replacement parents. You also have to listen to what we say.”  It is very important to put this into practice. There was a lot of talk about foster care recently, but it will be a while before we see these aspects of foster care. New legislation was passed but I do not know what will happen in practice.

How do you see the role of the media in this field?

This year, some of your colleagues at state broadcaster ERT produced a TV show on bullying. It was excellent, I tell everyone they must watch it. But a show that has been carefully prepared is worlds apart from news or current affairs, which are founded on spreading panic and boosting ratings.

Or scandalising the public. Unfortunately, the coverage of sexual violence cases also has a sensationalist aspect.

Anything that includes children, sex, foreigners, blood, and so on, especially in conjunction, is always sensationalised. For me, the greatest enemy for children’s rights these days is the way the media operate. Unfortunately. The impact is great. I feel it all the time, how the media ‘shape ’parenting skills, what kind of role models they promote, how they distort children, so to speak, profoundly distort childhood. Sadly. Nevertheless… We must focus on the battles ahead.

The Covid-19 lockdown was challenging for everyone. What did it mean, however, for children faced with abuse or neglect? In Greece, where the child protection system is disjointed, understaffed and disorganised, how did the lockdown affect children who were forced to not have contact with anyone else apart from their abusers? How did State services respond during such a trying period? After the lockdown ended, were any measures put in place to assess and alleviate the consequences for vulnerable children? What is the plan, in case an increase in Covid-19 cases forces a new lockdown?

We sought answers to these questions through five interviews with child protection experts that were streamed live on The Manifold Facebook Page.

Interview #1: Theoni Koufonikolakou

Theoni Koufonikolakou is Deputy Ombudswoman for Children's Rights.

Interview 2: Antonis Rellas

Antonis Rellas is a film and stage director and a disabled activist with "Zero Tolerance". (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #3: Giorgos Nikolaidis

Giorgos Nikolaidis is a psychiatrist, director of the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate of the Institute of Child Health, and former chairperson and current member of the Lanzarote Committee. (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #4: Triantafyllia Athanasiou

Triantafyllia Athanasiou is a social worker, chairperson of the Association of Social Workers of Greece.

Interview #5: Stefanos Alevizos

Stefanos Alevizos is a psychologist with The Smile of the Child NGO.

The Unit stands at the exit from the town of Lechaina in the direction of the village of Myrsini, facing the substation pylons of the Greek public power corporation. The building, which belongs to the episcopal see of Elis, is a four-storied, cross-shaped construction crowned by a dome. Its design could hardly be described as suitable for its intended use.

Perhaps that was the reason it was deemed necessary to restrain the seven-year-old blind girl who had been admitted to the institution at the age of three. Fully mobile yet blind, brimming with the energy of childhood, she would have needed someone to watch over her constantly. Lechaina has always been understaffed. “For her own good”, then, someone decided that she should be locked up in a cage. By the time she was sixteen, she could not even articulate her own name.

The Lechaina Unit was founded in 1987 as a "Child Care Centre", or KEPEP, and began operating two years later, with the mandate of caring for disabled children between the ages of six and eighteen. In its initial conception, it was intended for the children of the Region of Elis and the wider Peloponnese. Progressively, disabled children from all over Greece were brought in, either following a request by their parents or a State Prosecutor's order. Formerly an independent institution, since 2013 it is one of the annexes of the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, which is supervised by the Welfare General Secretariat of the Ministry of Labour. As a rule, the care workers at the Unit are unskilled and their numbers insufficient: five healthcare workers, seven assistants and five auxiliary contract staff for 44 residents, at present. The carpenter who fashioned the cages is also considered institution personnel.

Frozen in Time

In the Lechaina Unit, disabled children were strapped to their beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. These practices were hardly a secret.

In 2008, a group of European volunteers who spent some time at the Lechaina Centre, shocked by the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children, drafted a report which they distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations.

In September 2009, a delegation from the Children’s Ombudsman's office, comprised of the Ombudsman himself, Giorgos Moschos, the Ombudswoman for Health and Social Protection, two scientific experts and May Papoulia, a psychologist and wife of the then President of the Republic, visited the institution for the first time. In March 2011, the Ombudsman issued a damning report on the Unit’s inhuman conditions.

Shortly before the publication of the delegation’s findings, in February 2011, the cameras of ERT, the Greek public broadcaster, entered the institution. The news story aired in the main evening news and Andreas Loverdos, the Minister of Health at the time, intervened on air.

After lauding the work of the manager of Lechaina, the minister announced his intention to allow journalists inside all of the country’s institutions to report on the living conditions. When the newscaster observed that journalists should shed light on issues, but it was the Minister's job to solve them, Loverdos promised that five more healthcare staff and an additional three workers would be hired by the end of the year, attributing the torture brought to light by the news report to understaffing. He also promised that new premises would be secured, so that minors could be separated from adults.

Three years later, pictures from Lechaina spread across the world, when the BBC published an article headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. A few days later, Katerina Papakosta, who by then had become Deputy Minister for Health in a new government formed by New Democracy, visited the institution in a move that seemed rather forced, after the outcry that followed the article’s publication.

In her statements to the media, she claimed that the Unit did not fall within her mandate but that of the Ministry of Welfare and stated: “I came here on my own initiative to examine (the situation), because I have been informed by scientific experts that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

Having normalised cages as “cots", Papakosta, too, promised the recruitment of qualified personnel.

It should be noted that the widespread use of chemical suppression through medication, the practice of restraining children to their beds using straps, the use of cages and electronic surveillance, were already condemned in the 2011 report of Children’s Ombudsman as “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions.”

As to the reassurances given to the Deputy Minister by "experts", it should be noted that in the course of the Ombudsman's investigation, which led to the aforementioned report, the Unit’s psychiatrist at the time, Dionysios Tsangos, was asked to submit a written reply. In it, he stated: “I clearly acknowledge that restraining a patient with straps largely violates individual human rights, but they are superseded by the right of life itself. Given the severity of the patients’ mental disability, it is absolutely necessary to restrain them with straps to avert any self-harming acts which the patient will naturally not become aware of due to their condition. The straps will continue to exist for as long as such severe, high-risk level cases continue to exist. As to the matter of the wooden enclosures, a proposal was submitted by the scientific team in April 2008 and a report by child psychologist Mrs Lolou will follow. Certainly, patient accommodation can be improved with the use of more suitable beds, successfully combining the goals of development and security.”

The Ombudsman's report noted that the Unit's psychiatrist had responded without submitting “any medical opinions on specific patient cases, nor any scientific evidence supporting the need for restraint”. It also pointed out that “the Recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture under The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment do not appear to justify physical restraint, with the exception of psychiatric units for adult patients and only under certain conditions. Confinement to beds/enclosures in particular, is considered an unsuitable psychiatric practice and constitutes degrading treatment.” As to the decision to “use means of ‘mechanical restraint’, such as straps, its appropriateness is decided on a case-by-case, mutatis mutandis basis and is used rarely and only when prescribed by a doctor (or following a doctor’s immediate notification and receipt of approval). Recourse to it should be made exceptionally, as a last resort and for the minimum duration necessary, while its long-term use has no therapeutic properties and is considered misuse in therapeutic terms. This practice cannot be excused by staff shortages, as every instance of restraint demands that a member of staff provide immediate personal assistance and constant supervision, while electronic surveillance cannot substitute the constant physical presence needed. At the same time, every such instance should be recorded in a special register and in the patient’s personal medical file with specific details, such as the start and end time of restraint, the doctor’s name etc. Staff must receive ongoing training in alternative, gentler methods of patient control and be educated in the effects the practice of physical restraint has on the patient.  The Authority believes that the practices chosen clearly fall outside the scope of legality and gravely contravene the duty to respect and protect the human rights of residents with serious mental disabilities.”

The situation in the Lechaina Unit, therefore, was not only fairly widely known, but also officially documented, by March 2011.

“From Asylum to Society”

Approximately a year after Deputy Minister Papakosta’s visit, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Mideniki Anohi” ("Zero Tolerance") occupied the Lechaina premises. The occupation, a protest against the abuse of disabled children taking place in the Unit, began on November 4, 2015, and lasted for four days.

We met with Antonis Rellas, a film director, disabled activist, and member of Zero Tolerance, in his apartment. He let us in himself and led us to his studio.

“We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad," he told us. "In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, ‘Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.’ We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, those who are unable to advocate for themselves, have no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present.”

A video can be found on Zero Tolerance’s youtube channel, entitled From Asylum to Society. Rellas put the footage together immediately after the occupation, to be screened for journalists during the press conference Zero Tolerance held upon its return to Athens.

“We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime," he said, "nine people in four cars, with two cameras. We wanted to record what was happening and highlight those that society rejects by relegating them to an isolated building somewhere far away, turning a blind eye to these images. We wanted to highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living. For us disabled activists, there is no such thing as a good institution. Even if Lechaina were the Hilton, it would remain a secure-type institution that violates every notion of human dignity. I have seen people restrained with ropes in other institutions too, not just Lechaina. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism. No matter how prepared we were, the reality exceeded our worst nightmares…”

During the occupation, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the State Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the human rights violations against the disabled children and youths kept at the institution.

“To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify," Rellas told us. In fact, the Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

"There are specific liabilities at stake," Rellas said. "Who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed prolonged chemical suppression?  Not holding anyone accountable is like asking us to accept that the disabled residents are not worthy of living and therefore, no criminal liabilities arise. The UN, who saw the material we gathered during the occupation, says this is torture. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed."

On November 5, 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee publicised its concluding observations after examining Greece’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Regarding the situation at Lechaina, the Committee stated that “the State party should take immediate measures to abolish the use of enclosed restraint beds and systematic sedation in psychiatric and related institutions. The State party should also establish an independent monitoring and reporting system and ensure that abuses are effectively investigated, those responsible are prosecuted, and redress is provided to the victims and their families.” Similar recommendations had been made three years earlier, with specific reference to the institution at Lechaina.

On November 13, 2015, a few days after the occupation staged by Zero Tolerance, the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO human rights watchdog, filed a complaint at the State Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court of Greece. “In view of the fact," the complaint stated, "that the long-term torture of children took place with the knowledge of all authorities, from the Ministry down to the local prosecutor’s office, while the report of the Ministry’s Committee confirms that this is standard practice in psychiatric units across the country, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court is asked to order the judicial investigation of the claims made here, instructing a public prosecutor in Athens to this end, and demanding that the Ministry of Labour immediately cease using these inhumane methods that amount to torture.”

None of this was enough to mobilise justice to pursue those responsible for the fact that disabled children and young people were being kept in confinement, physically restrained in cages of two by two by one metres, not being let outside even for an hour, medicated for psychiatric and other illnesses — despite the fact that, according to the study carried out by the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, out of the 78 people that have resided in the Lechaina unit over the years, only five had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for psychiatric disorders. 

“In Greece today," Giorgos Nikolaidis, Director of the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, told us, "no court has the legal capacity to impose such a sentence on anyone. How is it possible to tolerate that a person be subjected to this confinement and not ask who ordered it and why? Which ministers, general secretaries, which of my colleagues gave instructions that these people be restrained? Who imposed this deprivation of their rights?”

Breaking the Cages

Shortly after the occupation by Zero Tolerance, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by Harry Potter writer J. K. Rowling to promote and advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises.

At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention, with an initial duration of six months. The intervention team would release the patients from their restraints, re-examine the use of medication, and prepare them through appropriate training, so that they could either return to their families, where possible, or otherwise move to smaller hostels, where the effects of institutionalisation would be alleviated. Meanwhile, the government was supposed to form a plan to radically restructure institutions, with the ultimate aim of deinstitutionalisation.

The emergency intervention was launched in July 2016, under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. It was to last six months, because, according to Nikolaidis, "rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?"

"Unfortunately," he said "the fact of the matter is that, after a lot of pressure, they simply gave an approval so that an initiative taken by other people and institutions, with the funding of others, could be implemented. A programme that enjoyed no jurisdictional backing vis-à-vis the unit in question, its personnel, the way it functions. The political leadership just said, ‘Great, you can go to the Unit and do what you think is best’.”

Two summers later, we visited the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health for the first time. Giorgos Nikolaidis had just entered his office and was in the process of transferring a video from his phone to his PC. He invited us to view some of the material.

The first video was shot as the carpenter of the Lechaina Unit dismantled the wooden cage of a twenty-year-old man, who had been confined to it for years. The man's initial disbelief subsides, as joy and relief burst forth in almost ecstatic laughter. The camera turns back to the carpenter and switches off.

In the second video, someone else is holding the psychiatrist’s phone. The scene takes place in the sea. Nikolaidis is holding a pool noodle, the buoyant foam tube used to teach very young children how to swim. He has passed the tube under the waist of another Lechaina resident, stretched him out on his back, and sways him gently from side to side. Another outburst of joy is heard, as a long-suffering body finds relief in the water.

Antonis Rellas decided to follow the course of events from Zero Tolerance’s occupation to the promised closure of the institution not just as an activist, but as the director of a documentary about Lechaina. Having visited the Unit over thirty times these past years, he explained: “I had the chance to watch how behaviours changed. How the residents I first met, who were uncommunicative, eyes vacant as they lay strapped to beds or locked inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, began to blossom. To watch them leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, to develop their skills. We heard them speak, utter words. Some began to express specific requests, ‘I want a bedside table’, ‘I want a remote control’, ‘I want my own clothes’. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving ‘the prescribed treatment for their own good’.”

“I witnessed their fears and inhibitions," he went on. "For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps. Even after the intervention team removed their restraints, do you know how they slept at night? In the sleeping position that they had been kept for years. For them, the most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured.”

One of the many paradoxes of this story is that, despite the admission by the political leadership that institutionalisation must end, and more specifically that the Lechaina Unit must be shut down, a decision to prohibit new admissions to the institution was never officially made.

Rellas recalled such an incident: “A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. She was evidently being pressured to abandon the disabled child and focus on her ‘normal’ children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears. She took her child and left.”

 “That was not the only incident where admission was averted,” explained Nikolaidis. “We had asked for admissions to be prohibited, everyone agreed, but that agreement never translated into a legal act. I used to arrive at Lechaina and be told that the Board of Directors had admitted a new child. Every time we had to rush to right things after the fact. I would meet the parents, explain the implications of such an admission, try to understand why the family was asking for this. Usually, there was a lot of hidden pain, the decision to leave their child at an institution was not sudden.  Therefore, we created the after-school clubs for many of them, activity clubs to occupy their children after special school. The aim was to offer families some respite so that the children did not end up in an institution.”

Most of the stories shared common ground. “These were children," Nikolaidis told us, "with mental disabilities that the family had kept until their preadolescence- adolescence and then found harder to manage. They usually had other children with typical development too and struggled to look after them all. We set up this service at Lechaina and Patras so that the child could stay at a space with qualified personnel who would occupy them, train them, and then be able to return home at night.”

Resistance

The emergency intervention that was intended to last six months ended up lasting for almost three years, after repeated extensions. Experts have pointed out that reintroducing people who had been subjected to extreme and prolonged abuse into humane conditions was always going to be difficult, but their task was continually complicated by the resistance that they met.

During one of our visits to the Lechaina Unit, we met Patty Sotiropoulou, special needs educator and member of the emergency intervention team. As introductions were made, we witnessed the following incident: one of the centre’s residents had undergone surgery following self-injury to his eye. The surgeon had recommended forty-five days of bed restraint to protect the wound. Our arrival at the centre coincided with the end of his confinement and the intervention team was asking staff to transfer him to a bed. The staff resisted this move, claiming that it could be dangerous because the resident had chewed on his mattress… ten years ago!

 “One day, members of the team took a girl outside for a walk in the courtyard," an exasperated Sotiropoulou told us. "The girl fell down and needed two stitches on her chin. Not only did the staff overreact due to their reigning fear of accountability, but the doctor who put in the stitches also instructed that she be kept inside a cage for ten days. Ten days confinement for two stitches! And when you point out the absurdity, you just get told: ‘doctor’s orders’.

Sotiropoulou said she had been exhausted by the constant battle over matters that should be self-evident. "No culture has been fostered," she said, "that it is unacceptable to keep children inside cages in an institution. If we had seen a child with typical development inside a cage in those news reports, the reaction would have been different. In the case of disabled children, both the system itself and, unfortunately, a large section of society accepts all too willingly that ‘there is no alternative’, that ‘the specialists say they need to be physically restrained so they must be right’, and ‘thank goodness there is an institution to house them’.”

The battle over matters that should be self-evident, as Sotiropoulou put it, rages at the Lechaina Unit even when the proposed changes are also intended to benefit the workers themselves. 

“During the intervention," Sotiropoulou told us, "we trained staff in the use of a small crane to lift people from the bed. It is essential that the residents change positions. It might not sound like that big of a deal, but there is a world of difference between spending twenty-four hours a day confined to a bed and getting up, both physically and in terms of receiving some stimulation. At the end of the day, only our team and the volunteers use the crane."

"It's a small example of the resistance here," she said. "You have a goal, to get people out of bed. And it can’t be achieved. You give them a tool that can help the carers, too. And I say this being fully aware that just changing the sheets and diapers of so many people is extremely taxing physically. And yet, they will not use it. So, on the one hand, you see a resistance to change, even when the change is beneficial to them, and on the other hand, you realise that they cannot appreciate the importance of people being out of bed.”

The deinstitutionalisation that never was

In December 2017, the Greek Government announced that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Unit and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future, setting out the transition process, the facilities to be developed, the timetable, etc.

 “Incidentally," Nikolaidis told us, "I should mention that we had already drafted such a detailed plan and submitted it to the government, as well as the board of directors of the Centre of Social Welfare, and the relevant services of the Commission and other bodies both within Greece and abroad. We had also discussed it with the permanent personnel of the Unit. I’m not saying that this was the best plan and should be adopted as the final detailed plan. I’m just saying that the commitment made by the government to form such a plan never materialised. The most disheartening aspect is that this time the funds are there, so that’s not the impediment.”

The emergency intervention ended in February 2019. When we asked Nikolaidis why the Institute of Child Health did not continue with the intervention, as well as why the collaboration between the Institute and Lumos was not renewed, he replied: “Because in February 2019, the representatives of Lumos visiting Greece met with the Minister for Social Solidarity Theano Fotiou and were informed that for as long as they cooperated with us, any cooperation with the Greek government was out of the question. So Lumos interrupted its cooperation with us and began working with NGO SOS Children's Villages, which was recommended to them.”

We went on ask why in Nikolaidis’s opinion the government, through its minister, would do this. 

“I think,” Nikolaidis told us, “it was because we kept raising the need to close down the unit, and for a number of real actions, not PR, leading to the residents’ psychosocial rehabilitation and deinstitutionalisation to be taken. Ms Fotiou had probably decided that she wanted to adopt ostensible rather than true actions. The timing also coincided with the completion of a phase of our actions in Lechaina, with the gradual and progressive transfer of all the residents out of confinement, be it cages, or straps or any of the other inventive methods used by the institution. Our task had been to provide interim emergency relief geared towards the abolition of confinement, pending the implementation of a deinstitutionalisation scheme. Having completed that work, having drawn up a plan for deinstitutionalisation and secured a budget for that purpose, and seeing that no steps were being taken in that direction, we had no intention of remaining at Lechaina to window-dress the perpetuation of institutionalisation.”

Former Minister Fotiou did not comment on these statements by Nikolaidis, despite our repeated requests. Lumos likewise did not reply to our request for comment. SOS Children’s Villages, which signed a cooperation agreement with Lumos in May 2019, replied that “after a request by Lumos and the Ministry, we agreed to become the organisation responsible for dispensing salaries to personnel that was hired for three months, without participating in any way in the scientific work, or observing its implementation on location”. 

In the event, personnel to staff the action team that would implement a three-year deinstitutionalisation programme was hired in June 2019 on twelve-month contracts. Selected by competition, team members have no work experience in matters of deinstitutionalisation. This move provoked the strong reaction of the institution’s staff, who once again reiterated their longstanding request for the recruitment of permanent personnel.

While time was again grinding to a halt in Lechaina, the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity came under increasing pressure to submit a long overdue general deinstitutionalisation strategy proposal, which was an obligation under the terms of 2014-2020 NSRF funding, and should in fact have been submitted since 2014. The Ministry asked for technical assistance from the European Commission and the Structural Reform Support Services (SRSS). A Brussels-based NGO, the European Association for People with Disabilities (EASPD), was awarded a 200.000 contract by SRSS to draw up a deinstitutionalisation plan for Greece.

In July 2019, national elections were called, SYRIZA lost power, and New Democracy found itself in government. Domna Michailidou became the new Minister. 

EASPD presented a draft paper on a national deinstitutionalisation strategy to the Ministry, as well as several experts, in January 2020. Presumably, somewhere at the end of this process, the promise made to the Lechaina residents through the emergency intervention, that they may have a chance to leave institutionalised living behind, might eventually be fulfilled. For the time being, though, they have to wait and endure - again.

When asked about the feelings their experiences at Lechaina have left them with, everyone we spoke to gave the same reply: frustration. Antonis Rellas’ response, when asked about his hopes at the start of filming the documentary, was riveting: “I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that the announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the biological family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That someone would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.”

Frustration, then, and sadness. “For us," Rellas said, "the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen and sadly, it is not mobilising.  That is the heart of the matter. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.”

Over a year ago, an unprecedented advertising campaign appeared in the streets of Athens: part of it was authorless and guerrilla-like, graffiti or banners hanging on road bridges and overpasses with slogans such as “joint custody” and “dads are not visitors, they are parents”; and part of it had the hallmarks of high-powered lobbying, with posters calling for “equal time with both parents” and “alternating homes” covering advertising spaces in bus stops all over the city.

The bus stop posters, sponsored by Politis Group, a major street advertising company, bore the logo of an organisation named “Active Dads for Children’s Rights”. Other organisations, such as the “Joint Custody Association”, and the Association GON.IS., also became more vocal in the press and in social media in advocating for the overhaul of child custody laws. 

A few months previously, the minister of Justice, Kostas Tsiaras, had appointed a legislative committee tasked with drafting a bill that would reform Greek family law. Konstantinos Bogdanos, a member of Parliament for New Democracy, whose candidacy and parliamentary tenure have been as controversial as his preceding journalistic career, boasted in a social media post that it was thanks to his own efforts that the protection of "dads' rights", to be achieved through the new bill, came to the attention of the minister. Bogdanos claimed he had been alerted to the issue by Nikos Tsilipounidakis, a journalist connected with the Joint Custody Association. Bogdanos called him a "dynamic dad".

The street campaign turned the pressure up. As the Joint Custody Association was quick to point out to its followers, there was no guarantee that the committee would move in a direction favourable to the association’s demands. 

These demands targeted what the Joint Custody Association and the other groups considered unjust privileges accorded by the courts to mothers after a divorce, such as exclusive custody over the children. Their proposed solution was for the government to legislate that children after a divorce would by default spend equal time with both parents, within a regime of “shared parenting”, meaning that a child would live half the time with one parent and half with the other. 

Through the efforts of such groups, similar legislative measures, concisely known as “joint custody”, had been pursued by some sympathetic — or misled — politicians over the years, but they never went beyond the stage of an informal meeting, a proposed amendment or at most a draft bill that never left a minister’s desk drawer.  

The danger that the same would happen in this case, according to the Joint Custody Association, lay in the fact that Ioannis Tentes, an emeritus chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court and chairman of the Society of Family Law, was appointed to head the legislative committee. Members of the Society of Family Law, a scientific association of legal scholars, lawyers and judges, some of whom are also former politicians, had previously taken a public position against “joint custody”.

According to official sources, 70% of divorces during 2017 in Greece were consensual. Members of Parliament both for the government and the opposition cited additional evidence during parliamentary discussions on the new bill, which brings the number of consensual divorces up to 86%. Of the remaining 14%, only about half proceed to a full lawsuit and of those only 3% reach an appellate court. It is therefore evident that even if the grievances proponents of “joint custody” have against court decisions are justified, they only concern a very small proportion of divorces that are highly acrimonious.

The start 

While officially they appeared to advocate for the benefits of both parents participating in child rearing, some media appearances and a multitude of social media posts began to reveal that the groups pushing for “joint custody” formed a burgeoning “men’s rights” lobby, representing divorced fathers who believed that the courts had wronged them in awarding custody of the children to their former spouses. 

The Association GON.IS., which was approved as a “primary social care” institution by ministerial decision in 2015 and claims that it supports “both parents”, was founded by former members of an older organisation, named SYGAPA that tellingly translates as “Association for Male and Paternal Dignity”. 

Nikos Tsilipounidakis, the journalist who Bogdanos said had enlightened him about "dads' rights", famously quipped during a TV interview: “There are many dads who pay too much rent for nine months of pregnancy.”

Increasingly after the summer of 2020, the lobby succeeded in placing more interviews by its representatives in mainstream media, and enjoyed favourable coverage of its positions in articles not only by journalists, but also by psychologists and legal scholars. This was accompanied by increased activity in social media.

Despite the Joint Custody Association’s professed worries about the composition of the legislative committee, two prominent figures of the lobby, Marios Andrikopoulos and Patrina Paparigopoulou, were also appointed as members. Andrikopoulos is a legal director for a major energy company who runs a popular Facebook page, “Act against Parental Alienation". Paparigopoulou is a law professor and sister of Ioannis Paparigopoulos, frontman of Joint Custody Association, board member of the International Council on Shared Parenting, former member of “Male Dignity” and co-founder of GON.IS.

The legislative committee presented its draft and report to the Ministry of Justice in November 2020. Unbeknownst to the wider public, the majority of the committee’s members had rejected some of the more radical provisions advocated by the men’s rights lobby. (As the minister is not legally obligated to publish the legislative committee’s draft, this only became evident much later — when the minister was compelled to disclose it after the opposition had filed an official request.)  

This led to disagreements within the lobby on whether the proposed bill, which was soon leaked to the press, was worthy of their support. In the event, the Joint Custody Association published its own draft bill in December 2020 and sent it to the ministry, which rejected it.

During an online panel discussion organised by the Joint Custody Association in February 2021, Marios Andrikopoulos claimed that the majority of the committee was intent on “letting the proposal rot away”, and that he and Patrina Paparigopoulou “put up a great fight”.

Ioannis Paparigopoulos, who is apparently regarded as the éminence grise of the lobby and had expressed doubts about the leaked bill, retorted that “if the bill that you [Andrikopoulos] prepared is voted in, you still won’t see your children”.

Nikos Tsilipounidakis challenged Paparigopoulos by claiming that they should all support the minister of Justice. “Last Monday,” he said, “I personally called Mr Paparigopoulos and told him that Mr Tsiaras wanted to see him. When I called him, I was in Mr Tsiaras’s office.”

He went on to say that Tsiaras has been facing heavy opposition within his own party, New Democracy, but he was the first minister of Justice in recent years that had agreed to meet with “their group”.

Tsilipounidakis identified the Society of Family Law as the scourge of the new bill, and claimed that “they” (presumably the society) enlisted the help of Giorgos Gerapetritis, the minister of State, to plant doubts about the bill in the Prime Minister’s mind. He claimed that he knew this because he was “virtually present” at a teleconference between Tsiaras, Gerapetritis and Mitsotakis, where the minister of Justice defended his bill.  

Andrikopoulos argued that the spirit of the new law was in the right direction, particularly in providing that the two parents exercise their parental function after the dissolution of marriage “in common and equally”. “You have won,” he said to Paparigopoulos.

Tsilipounidakis also argued that the bill was “a start” and that they should now “organise their attack” during the public consultation process.  

The attack

When the draft was presented for public consultation on March 18, some members of the Legislative Committee protested that it exhibited important deviations from their recommendations. Some of the provisions advocated by the men’s rights lobby had found their way back into the draft, despite the committee not including them. Although legislative committees’ reports are not binding, deviating from them widely when a draft law is reviewed by a ministry is not only less than transparent in terms of who influences the final draft, but also entails the risk of technical mistakes, such as vague or unenforceable provisions, which was one of the issues some committee members protested about. 

Close to 15.000 comments were posted in all articles of the draft bill, the public consultation platform. The Active Dads Association announced, in its memorandum to the Parliamentary Committee, where the bill landed after public consultation was concluded on April 1, that “out of 15.230 comments submitted, 12.289 were IN FAVOUR of joint custody”. And they concluded that “the consultation has spoken loudly and given a popular mandate for a self-evident change”.

The same argument was employed by Kostas Tsiaras, both in an interview and during discussion in Parliament, where he said that a “record breaking number of comments” signalled a “favourable reception” of the bill. 

However, Aggeliki Adamopoulou, an MP for Mera25, disputed the minister’s claim and said that according to an analysis conducted by her staff, one supportive comment had been copied and pasted over 1200 times, while 6 supportive sentences appeared in identical form up to 1400 times. 

“Is this what overwhelming support means?” Ms Adamopoulou said. “Out of 15000 comments, 9200 at a minimum, that is 61%, are copied and pasted again!”

We decided to check the accuracy of these claims by conducting an analysis of the comments on the public consultation platform. The result supports neither the minister’s claim nor that of the Active Dads Association, being much closer to the numbers cited by Adamopoulou, but it also raises significant questions about the vulnerability of the public consultation process. 

After scraping the comments on the 23 articles of the draft bill (14.814 in total), we trained a machine learning model in order to categorise comments according to whether they were in support or in opposition to the bill. According to our model, within a +-3% margin of error, it does initially appear that out of 14.814 comments, το 77% (approximately 11.500) indeed is supportive, whereas 23% (approximately 3.400) is in opposition. However, out of the 14.814 total comments, only 47% (6.920) are original, whereas 53% (7.894) are copies of other comments. The picture therefore changes considerably if we only take into account original comments and not copies. In that case, the percentage of comments that support the bill falls to 60% and the percentage of those that oppose it rises to 40%. 

Out of approximately 11.500 comments that we estimate to be in support of the bill, 63% (more than 7.200) are copies of other comments, and only 37% (more than 4.100) are original. 

The 7.200 comments in support of the bill that have been copied essentially correspond to only 658 original comments that have been pasted multiple times. For example, just one of the 658 original comments has been copied and pasted 343 times, while two variations on it have been pasted 358 times (for a total of 701 copies).  

Conversely, out of approximately 3.400 comments that we estimate to be in opposition to the bill, 80% (more than 2.700) are original and 20% (about 670) are copies. The 670 copies correspond to 225 original comments.

Our analysis therefore shows that not only the numbers of supportive and opposing comments are more balanced that the minister and the supporters of the bill claimed, but also that:

Firstly, over half of the comments in the public consultation are misleading, being simply repeated up to hundreds of times each.

Secondly, the majority of these misleading comments are in support of the bill.

Thirdly, there appears to have been a major intervention in the consultation, as the volume of the supportive comments that were copied and repeated (over 7.200 or 63%) is enormous.

The criticism

During public consultation, as well as during discussion in the Parliamentary Committee and in the media, the draft bill was heavily criticised by a wide range of experts, organisations, institutions, feminist groups and NGOs, including the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls and the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; the Hellenic Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; the Family Law Society; the gender equality organization Diotima; the Lawyers Committee on Legal Issues of Co-Custody; and Bar Associations across the country.

The overarching issue for those opposing the new law was that it departed from the child-centered approach of previous legislation, prioritising instead the rights of parents. This was particularly evident in its definition of “the best interest of the child” as equal co-custody between parents, as opposed to a provision that it needs to be defined on a case-by-case basis, as required by international law. 

Another major point of contention was that the bill did not limit visitation/communication rights, even if a parent was accused of child abuse, unless there was an irrevocable conviction for the act. This seemed to reflect a view, espoused by men’s rights groups but also shared by some child protection professionals, that many allegations of child abuse are false and are employed by mothers against fathers in order to alienate them from their children. The Active Dads Association highlighted data from a child abuse hotline run by The Smile of the Child, a prominent child protection NGO, that appeared to show that most abuse allegations are made against mothers. And Maria Kaperoni, a clinical psychologist with Ippokrateio General Hospital in Thessaloniki, who supported the new bill in the media and has been cited by men’s rights groups, has said that she has been asked to provide mothers with reports stating that their children are being sexually abused by their father. “Very often,” she claimed, “the accusations are false.”  

Giorgos Nikolaidis, a psychiatrist who heads the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate at the Institute of Child Health, and an internationally acknowledged expert on the psychosocial support of child abuse survivors, told us that in Greece there is no unified system for recording reported incidents of child abuse and neglect, and therefore partial data and statistics published by individual services or institutions bear little relation to the characteristics of the totality of incidents in society, as they emerge from studies in random segments of the general population. He went on to say that “using such ‘evidence’ to create a certain impression just before a new family law reform is to be enacted, is plainly a communication game, and has no value for designing social policy for families”.  

Critics of the new bill further noted that in Greece, where court delays are a persistent problem, a provision requiring an irrevocable conviction would mean that a potential abuser could remain in unsupervised contact with their victim for a period of up to ten years. 

This was the only part of the bill that was partially amended in the face of expert criticism. After the changes, the visitation/communication provisions made no mention of the issue of child abuse, while the provision about the loss of “parental responsibility” called for a “first instance conviction”.

Further criticism of the new bill focused on both substantial and technical matters, the most important of which were:

• Τhe bill provides that after separation parents continue to exercise their parental function “in common” and “equally”. The meaning of “equally” (whether, for example, it refers to “equal time”) is vague, which according to opponents of the bill will lead to confusion in the courts. The same provision extends to children whose parents have not married or entered into a cohabitation contract, and were not living together after the recognition of the child by the father. Opponents of the bill pointed out that this essentially awards “equal” custody to a parent — usually the father — who never provided care for the child, without any obligation to prove their suitability or interest.  
• The bill provides that if the child after separation is living with one parent, then the other parent is by default entitled to visitation/communication amounting to ⅓ of the “total time of the child”. Opponents of the bill pointed out that the term “total time” is vague, as it can be interpreted to mean 8 hours per day, 10 days per month, 4 months per year, or even calculated based on weekends, holidays, and spare time, thus leading to the so-called “⅔ parent” assuming full responsibility for care and the “⅓ parent” becoming a “holiday parent” without responsibilities. Opponents also pointed out that the bill allows the ⅓ parent to actually request less time, leading therefore to a situation where visitation/communication is determined by the needs of the parents instead of the children, contravening international law.   
• The bill obliges the parent who lives with the child — the ⅔ parent — to inform the other parent — the ⅓ parent — about every decision relating to the care of the child, prior to acting upon it. Opponents of the bill pointed out that this constitutes a violation of the ⅔ parent’s private life, and can be used as a means of harassment or revenge in cases of particularly strained or hostile relations between former partners. 
• The bill provides that parents have an obligation to “maintain and strengthen  the relationship of the child with the family of the other parent”. Opponents pointed out that this broadens the obligations of the parents towards the child to an unlimited number of other persons, while leaving no room for appreciation of the best interest of the child in relation to its contact with the extended family members of the other parent.
• The bill makes mediation mandatory, a violation, opponents say, of the Istanbul Convention to which Greece is a party. 
• The law relies on the “parental alienation syndrome” theory for the determination of the best interest of the child, the description of child care, and the regulation of communication and visitation. Opponents of the bill pointed out that the theory is disputed.

The support

Even before the draft of the new law was revealed, it was evident that the “parental alienation syndrome” theory was employed by the men’s rights lobby as a scientific argument in support of the reform. According to the theory, the “syndrome” occurs when a child becomes alienated from a parent as a result of the psychological manipulation of another parent, particularly in the context of conflictual family separation. Interestingly, during discussions in the Parliamentary Committee, the “syndrome” was not only defended, but presented as the prevailing academic consensus, by Marieta Papadatou-Pastou, a professor of psychology representing the Hellenic Psychology Society. 

When asked to cite her sources, Ms Pastou pointed to what she calls “the Warshak report”, meaning a 2014 paper by psychologist Richard Warshak, titled Social science and parenting plans for young children: A consensus report. The conclusion of the paper was that equal time spent between parents was beneficial to the child. The “consensus” part of the title was based on the fact that the paper was accompanied by a list of 110 scientists that endorsed its findings. As the paper itself admits, this is “a rare occurrence in social science”. Both for the author of the paper and Ms. Pastou in the Greek Parliament seven years later, this was an advantage of the paper that allowed it to support its claim of offering a “consensus”. In truth, it did not make Warshak’s view any less controversial.

Richard Warshak has picked up the mantle of child psychologist Richard Gardner, who proposed the “syndrome” in 1985. He is considered his scientific successor, so much so that after Gardner’s passing, Warshak inherited his unpublished instructional video and audio tapes from his family. Warshak is the author of a best-selling book titled Divorce Poison and more importantly, he has inspired a business as an applied version of his ideas called Family Bridges, where he holds a role as scientific advisor.

Family Bridges are often called by their opponents “reunification camps”. They are workshops that aim to heal “parental alienation” and repair the relationship with both parents. In reality, according to a series of stories told by outlets such as The Atlantic, NBC and Reveal, multiple testimonies of children that have been through these camps tell a different story, accusing the programme of manipulating them and traumatising their relation with the parent who had custody. An expert was quoted in The Atlantic calling them “torture camps for children”. And since these workshops are quite expensive and mandated by judicial orders, a lawyer involved in a legal battle against Family Bridges told the Washington Post in 2017 that “the programs are basically shams. It was clear to me what they were doing was reaping massive fees by selling a custody change”.

According to psychiatrist Giorgos Nikolaidis, the claim that the existence of the syndrome in question is widely accepted is false. “This so-called syndrome,” he told us, “is a communication tool, systematically promoted by various organisations of divorced men. It has never been recognised as an actual clinical entity by prestigious international or national scientific institutions. Recently, in order to clarify the issue and avoid misinterpretation, the World Health Organisation decided to omit any mention of deprivation of contact with a parent in its most recent revision of the International Classification of Disorders.”

Another source of support for reforming family law in the direction espoused by the Ministry of Justice was the Greek Ombudsman, or Citizen’s Advocate, an independent authority, headed by lawyer and law professor Andreas Pottakis. As early as August 2020, Pottakis addressed a letter to the minister, where he argued for the benefits of “joint custody” and “shared parenting”, citing Council of Europe resolutions of 2013 and 2015 that urged member-states to legislate providing an "option for common custody in case of separation" and introduce "the principle of alternating habitation".

In May 2021, when the draft bill was being discussed in the Parliamentary Committee, the Ombudsman addressed another letter, this time to the chairman of the committee, Maximos Charakopoulos, where he reiterated his approval of the ministry's efforts to reform family law, but criticised it for not going far enough in legislating "alternating habitation".

Yiota Masouridou, a lawyer who also serves as the general secretary of European Democratic Lawyers and a vocal critic of the bill, told us that "the Council of Europe’s recommendations are non legally binding policy agreements which constitute soft law. They are often used for political pressure on governments to act or regulate an issue according to a specific guidance."

"Lobbies supporting changes on family law, as well as institutions such as the Ombudsman," said Masouridou, "recall specific extracts from selected CoE’s recommendations, causing, deliberately, confusion over the scope and the context of Greece’s obligations deriving from international law. It should be clarified at all levels that the protection of victims of domestic violence is absolute and does not allow for any measure that protects or covers the perpetrators at the detriment of the rights of the victims."

According to Nikolaidis, who is also a member and former chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, the Council of Europe body responsible for monitoring the Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse,  there is now a tendency in various European countries to revise “shared parenting” or “alternating habitation” measures, as they are proving “non viable”. 

“The same is true,” Nikolaidis told us, “for international institutions such as the Council of Europe and its various committees: in a recent discussion of the committee for the protection of the rights of children who are deprived of parental care due to divorce or other causes, any mention of such measures was omitted to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations.”  

“There is a confusion,” he said, “between the widely accepted benefits for a child of continued contact with both parents and the dubious promotion of the spurious ‘alienation syndrome’ or ‘alternating habitation’ as a general rule. It is one thing to observe that children of separated couples can benefit from quality contact with both parents. But this is achieved primarily by former couples that find a way to communicate for the benefit of their children. To apply findings based on this observation to cases of separated parents in conflictual divorces and legal battles, and to use them to support legal and administrative measures, such as those we saw in Greece, is a leap of logic and a methodological sleight of hand.”

“It is a shame,” Nikolaidis concluded, “that even respected academics, but also institutions like the Greek Ombudsman, have had such a lapse of judgement.”

The split 

In the days leading up to the Parliament Plenary Session debate, the disagreements over the bill that had been brewing within the governing party became public. Two New Democracy MPs, former ministers Marieta Giannakou and Olga Kefalogianni, publicly expressed their objections to the bill, reiterating the main points of criticism that had emerged during public consultation.

Τhe minister of Justice retorted in an interview that the two MPs’ objections were rooted in their “personal experiences,” which was “no way to legislate”. Giannakou countered with the question if the minister would have said as much if the objections had been raised by men. 

The two MPs then went on to file a proposal for ten amendments to the bill, tackling the most problematic points. It was the first instance of such determined opposition to government policy during New Democracy’s two years in office. The ministry rejected the amendments.

During discussion in the Parliamentary Committee, Giannakou criticised the ministry for not meeting with established women’s organisations and excluding them from the dialogue on family law reform. “By contrast,” she said, “we saw improbable organisations, such as GON.IS., Joint Custody, Active Dads, tremendous adverts in support of the bill, which means a lot of money, and an identical letter emailed to us with various names but no actual identification. All these people love their children so much that they can’t write a letter about this issue? Or is it a company, which has the money to send all this with false names? I believe it is the second.” 

At the Plenary Session debate, on May 20-21, the opposition vigorously opposed the bill. There were some differentiations: Andreas Loverdos, former minister and MP for KINAL (Movement for Change) voiced his support for shared parenting. And Elliniki Lysi (Greek Solution), a far-right party, opposed the bill on homophobic grounds, as in their opinion it does not safeguard the traditional family. Although a few more New Democracy MPs expressed reservations about it, notably former minister of Justice Charalambos Athanassiou, most defended it strenuously — some a little too strenuously, as evidenced by one parliamentarian’s opinion that “a woman may hate her ex husband, who cheated on her, beat her and abused her, but still the child has the right to grow up with both parents”.

In an unusual turn of events, at least for parliamentary norms, when the minister of Justice was confronted by criticism that the civil code does not include a provision to the effect that parents exercise their parental function “equally” during marriage, and therefore the bill’s provision that they are to “continue” doing so when divorced is nonsensical, he decided to amend the civil code on the spot, and add “equally” to the relevant article.

It was also revealed during the debate that the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls and the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, had addressed a letter to the Prime Minister on May 17, which was highly critical of the bill and recommended “review and reconsideration of those provisions in the Bill taking into account Greece’s international human rights obligations”. It also requested that its contents “be shared with the Parliament at the earliest”. The government had not disclosed the letter to Parliament, and when confronted with it by the opposition, the Minister of Justice denied knowledge of it. 

The bill was finally enacted on May 21, with opposition parties either abstaining or voting against it. No corrections were made, despite the extensive criticism. The new legislation is the first to radically change provisions regarding the custody of children after a divorce, since the modernisation of family law that took place in 1983.

Barely a few minutes after the voting was concluded, Act Against Parental Alienation, the facebook page run by Marios Andrikopoulos, shared a curious post: a photograph of Grigoris Dimitriadis, General Secretary to the Prime Minister. No explanation was offered.

Other social media accounts associated with the lobby celebrated their victory in more overt ways: 

“The battle was triumphantly won, gentlemen,” one post read. “We move ahead according to the basic plan, without a STEP back. We turn our heavy artillery against the judiciary, we load, we lock and we WAIT! Let the members of this group who leak things tell the Union of Judges and Prosecutors that we have them in our sights.”

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

In the spring of 2011, the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, was running the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect. As they were processing their results, during the summer, they noticed what seemed like an anomaly. In the results from the Region of Rethymno, in Crete, there appeared an extremely high rate of self-reported sexual victimisation of boys and almost a complete reversal of the boy to girl ratio.

“We could not explain it,” George Nikolaidis, Director of the Department, told us. “We speculated it must be due to a technical error.”

It was not an error. On December 1st, 2011, the police arrested a school basketball coach, Nikos Seiragakis, who also coached the local youth basketball team, AGOR. He was charged with molesting dozens of children.

It was this man’s activity that produced the “anomaly” in the BECAN results.

A methodical police operation

A few days after the coach was arrested, the Rethymno police chief, Manolis Paradoulakis, told the press that this was “a systematic and methodical police operation,” which “happened in the shortest time possible”.((The statement is available (in Greek) via the <em>local</em> TV <strong>Creta</strong> station.))  

The chief’s emphasis on the “shortest time” seemed to anticipate the question that soon emerged, why there had been a thirteen-month interval between the time when two families went to the police with allegations that the coach was abusing their children, and the time of the arrest. 

The chief maintained that there had been “rumors” rather than allegations, despite the fact that the two families of immigrant workers had eponymously denounced the coach to the police. He then explained that the police investigated the “rumors” and “discreetly” gathered evidence, in order to determine whether there was any merit to the case. When they found that there was, they proceeded to build the case in collaboration with the Rethymno prosecutor at the time, Maria Dimitriadou, a process which took more than a year, because they wanted to make sure the evidence was solid. “The arrest,” the chief said, “was made in the shortest possible time, as soon as there was complete corroboration of the case with incontrovertible evidence.”

When, during our visit to the Department for the Protection of Minors in the General Police Directorate of Attica, we discussed police handling of child abuse cases, we were told that from an operational point of view, a coach is one of the “easiest” types of perpetrator to catch. “If he is a coach,” the officers told us, “there are more victims”. When, however, we specifically referred to the Rethymno case, the officers said that they had not personally conducted the operation, so they could not comment in detail. 

The possibility that the authorities attempted to preempt any discussion on the police’s choice of timing is strengthened by the fact that Manolis Othonas, Deputy Minister for Citizen protection and Member of Parliament for Rethymno at the time, was already reassuring reporters that there had been no delays, two days before the police chief officially briefed the press on the operation. He commended the police on turning “whispers” into “a case”, and dismissed allegations that the coach had enjoyed some sort of “protection” due to his supposed standing in Rethymno society.

This was contradicted by the Manager of AGOR at the time, Vassilis Theodoroulakis, who stated in an interview that he had been unofficially informed by a police officer about the allegations against the coach, about three months after they happened. He then informed the team’s Board of Directors, who he says did nothing, in order not to damage the team’s reputation. The Board has denied the accusation.  

What is undisputed, however, is that during the time that elapsed between the allegations of the two migrant families against the coach and his arrest, no child protection official or professional was alerted to protect the interests of the children. The decision to prolong the children’s plight for over a year was made without the intervention of any part of the child protection system.

An esteemed member of local society

When we visited Rethymno, in autumn 2018, the weather was rainy. The wet buildings in the old town, dating from Rethymno’s Venetian period, the castle, the lighthouse hidden in the fog, all painted a highly unusual picture for non-locals who stereotypically associate Crete only with summer tourism. We kept wondering how in this town of 40.000 people, which looked even smaller without the summer crowds, it was possible for someone to systematically abuse dozens of children for years, without anybody ever noticing a thing? 

In the old town, opposite the renowned Rimondi fountain, we met with Chara Vilara, an experienced local journalist, who had followed the case closely.

“It was a chronic situation,” she told us. “Obviously, it wasn’t going on for just one or two years, it went back quite a lot. Some of the children had grown up when it became public. There were many children who knew, who weren’t a part of it, but knew and didn’t speak. It touched many families, both directly and indirectly.”

Everyone we spoke with agreed that coach Nikos Seiragakis was an important member of Rethymno society. He had been one of the organisers of the “Treasure Hunt”, a popular yearly event. He was esteemed in the “old town”, meaning the circles of Rethymno’s aristocratic families, and he was well connected in local politics. His contacts reached into the Greek national basketball team, and even the American NBA. Those who know say that children thought of him as a mentor. He was a good speaker, and when he coached, nobody made a sound.

Under strict discipline, the coach had created a kind of “sect”. He approached his students with the promise of admittance to an inner circle, to which only a select few could belong. He used pseudo-historical references to military training in ancient Greece, in order to convince them that in this way they would form a tighter bond with their teammates and become better athletes. Through a series of “trials”, aimed at wresting a kind of “consent” from the children, a process known as “grooming”, the coach initially encouraged them to sexually engage with each other, and subsequently molested them himself. His influence on them was so strong that some students actually defended his actions.

“The big question,” Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, told us, “is how the perpetrator selects the children, how the grooming actually happens. Which children does he choose? Well, he chooses vulnerable children, ones without strong family bonds. Children with certain disadvantages, foreigners, the disabled, or children who are emotionally neglected. He finds cracks. He comes as a mentor. As a protector. Then comes the second step: trust. Privileges. And then comes submission. This can take a long time. At that point, children gradually realise what is going on. So, there is a stage of transferring responsibility: whoever doesn’t want this, can get up and leave now. That’s the transfer: it is you who wants this. And when there is a collective situation, a sharing within a group, it is even more difficult to break this chain. Children understand they are trapped. They stay at this stage of entrapment for many years. This can happen in any abusive relationship. We call it ‘learned helplessness’. Most children will never tell. Some will tell when they cannot bear it any longer. Or because they may see their younger siblings or other loved ones victimised. Or a random event may trigger it off. And then, after a long time, they will tell. Some will have already become adults.”

Coach Nikos Seiragakis was initially charged with 53 counts of child molestation, and convicted on 36 counts. His sentence of 400 years imprisonment was upheld by the Appeals Court, which heard his appeal in 2016. 

During our visit to Rethymno, we were told by people, who spoke to us on the condition of preserving their anonymity, that the number of victims not included in the charges probably raised the total to over one hundred children. 

Seiragakis was conditionally released, according to the provisions of Greek law, at the end of April 2020, after serving eight years and five months. The conditions of his release stipulate that he cannot live in, or visit Rethymno. A few days later, he was arrested again for breaching the conditions of his release. The decision on whether he will remain free or return to prison is pending.

Inherent resistance

In mid December 2011, a conference on child protection took place in Heraklion, the capital of Crete, as part of the Council of Europe’s “One in Five” campaign. ((“One in Five” was a campaign by the Council of Europe to stop sexual violence against children, which was initiated in 2010 and branched out into national campaigns, which were handled by member-states, in the following years. Its title is based on data, which suggest that about 1 in 5 children in Europe are victims of some form of sexual violence.)) The conference had been planned before the Rethymno child abuse case was made public, but, as George Nikolaidis remembers, when he arrived in Crete, everyone was understandably talking about little else.  

“I went to Rethymno the following day,” Nikolaidis told us, “and because of my occupation, I attended a meeting with the municipality, the region and the local authorities. I was then asked to make a proposal, which I submitted both to the local authorities and the relevant ministries at the end of December 2011. It was a proposal on the actions that needed to be taken, given the scope of the case, whose extent we did not know, but it appeared to be a mass case.”

After a meeting of relevant ministries and authorities, it was decided that the proposal by the Institute of Child Health should be implemented. The lack of resources, exacerbated by the financial crisis, was addressed by allocating European Union NSFR funds to the programme. Still, it took about a year for the intervention to begin.

“This is indicative of how unwieldy the Greek public sector can be, even when it comes to projects it funds and the political will is present,” Nikolaidis said.

In the event, the unit for Comprehensive Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”. ((The unit’s website (in Greek) is still active, despite the programme’s termination.))

“At the same time,” he told us, “we ran a widely accessible health promotion campaign on the subject of child abuse, children’s sexuality, the children’s right to their body, and so on, at all levels of education in the whole of the Region of Rethymno, that is to say, primary and secondary schools, students, parents and teachers. We also trained personnel at various services, we held educational actions for coaches and sportspeople. Because we were immediately visited by the coaches’ association and told, “We don’t dare touch the children, you can’t coach children and be afraid to touch them at the same time.” Therefore, we had to impart all the international know-how about how it is possible to have both child protection processes in place and still function as a sports space.” 

Despite the obvious need for intervention in the consequences of a case that had affected dozens of families, Nikolaidis told us that the programme faced what he terms “inherent resistance”. “I believe,” he said, “that at least some of the local actors preferred to forget this incident had ever happened rather than work to enable the local community to get over it. There was a fairly strong tendency to sweep everything under the rug.”

Chara Vilara shared with us a similar perspective. “After the events came to light,” she said, “many parents punished their children, they beat them up, because they believed it had been the children’s fault. And other families never dealt with it at all. Like it never happened. Some, of course, did try to help their children, but what really made an impression on me was that when the police brought the coach to court, there was no one outside. Nobody went to protest, to vent, even. If it had been someone else, there would have been a crowd outside, there would have been shouting, all hell would have broken loose. This is telling, because these children belonged to the local social elite. These people want to cover up what happened.” 

Although Nikolaidis and his team managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, in the autumn of 2014 resources were exhausted. 

“We were informed by the political leadership,” Nikolaidis told us, “that their decision was to shut down the unit permanently, which was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field. There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health’s Action Plan on Children’s rights, which was published online for public debate during the pre-election period, in November 2014, included an extension of the Rethymno programme, funded through the NSFR 2014-2020. But the January 2015 elections brought a change of government, and any plans to extend the programme were quietly dropped.

Out of the sky

On the hill that overlooks Rethymno harbour stands an austere concrete building, which at the time of our visit temporarily housed the Rethymno Mental Health Centre. We were greeted by its director, psychiatrist, psychodramatist and actor, Antonis Liodakis.

He was of the opinion that the Rethymno programme had been “interjected”, and had “dropped out of the sky”. “In the sense,” he explained, “that these professionals from Athens were coming here to see children, parents, other cases, the whole thing functioned like a medico-paedagogic centre.”

Chara Vilara, on the other hand, points out that the children were under immense pressure, “because other kids knew and made fun of them”. “So, they went to private psychiatrists in Chania and Heraklion, because they were afraid of the stigma.”

George Nikolaidis’s experience seemed to echo Vilara’s observation: “One of the criticisms we received,” he said “was that the personnel employed in our intervention did not come from the local community, did not come from Rethymno. But I believe that was a very intelligent choice if anyone involved in the events back then recalls the mood of the local community at the time.  In every new incident, our personnel, the psychologists, the social workers, the child psychologists who worked with us, were asked by those they saw whether they were from Rethymno. The moment they heard, “No, I’m from elsewhere,” there was a huge wave of relief and then they shared their suffering, which they would probably not have done had the personnel been local. So, let’s just say there was some discontent that we did not support local employment. But we chose to make communication for the beneficiaries easier and more effective.”

Antonis Liodakis, however, pressed his point: “We had already identified the key issues since 2008,” he told us. “We have been asking for the creation of a medico-paedagogic centre with every opportunity.”

Nikolaidis makes no secret of his surprise that the programme was discontinued. “Until the very last minute,” he said “people close to the political leadership of the time, the political actors in Rethymno, were reassuring us that an extension would be granted, as there was evidently no other solution. I cannot know what could have possibly happened overnight to change that decision.” And he added: “All I know is that any efforts made in the immediate aftermath for questions on this matter to be tabled in Parliament by SYRIZA, the main opposition party at the time, ultimately failed. Incidentally, SYRIZA’s health coordinator in opposition was Andreas Xanthos, who subsequently became Minister of Health in the following government, and who is also the local MP for the Region of Rethymno.”

After SYRIZA came to power in January 2015, it took the new government two years to come up with its own “Action Plan” on child protection. The Rethymno programme was not a part of it, and it was never reinstated.

Antonis Liodakis started working in consulting groups in the Ministry of Health and joined Andreas Xanthos in official SYRIZA events on public health. In 2017, Xanthos approved Liodakis’s plans for the medico-pedagogic centre, with himself as director.

Giorgos Nikolaidis

Actor card content

• Director • Mental Health and Social Welfare Department • Institute of Child Health
• Chairperson (former, currently Member) • Bureau • Lanzarote Committee
• Scientific Coordinator (former) • Day Centre • The Smile of the Child

• 11
• 7

See the actor

A few years ago, the Institute’s Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare created certain tools to link the various services dealing with child abuse. Can you tell us more about that?

We had created a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. The necessity for such a tool arose from previous studies, as well as the widely acknowledged experiential findings of professionals working on the front-line that, in Greece, from the moment the suspicion that a child is being abused arises, a number of different professionals usually become involved, looking into it and doing different things at different times, depending on a number of random factors, such as where the suspected or reported abuse is initially lodged. This is unacceptable because the process of evaluating the credibility of such a report cannot depend on subjective or random factors.

So, we set up the national protocol, actually following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice. It is like an algorithm of steps covering every type of suspected abuse, physical, sexual, psychological, neglect, and determining which professions must intervene and what they must examine so as to reach a reliable conclusion. Back then, we trained 400 professionals in all 13 Regions of the country on how to use the protocol and have since provided further training, because we are asked to do so by various bodies, so the protocol must have been received as a useful and rather comprehensive tool.

We notified the state, the relevant ministries, because the protocol was inherently intersectoral, in other words, it was intended to be used by professionals working in the welfare, health, justice, law enforcement and education sectors.

When did you notify them about the protocol?

In 2014, when the work was completed. At the same time, within the framework of this project, we had created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered and various professionals from different bodies, sectors and specialisations could all have access to this computerised system, their access adjusted according to what the law stipulates. What I mean is, in the Greek legal system, for example, public prosecutors may have access to any information, but other professionals may have access to restricted data, for personal data protection reasons. So, the system we set up could provide varying degrees of access to the different professional categories. We also produced the accompanying material, training guides, user guides. And we trained, once again, 400 people from all areas of public administration and non-governmental organisations in their use. We informed the state about these tools too, in 2014.

What became of these tools?

They remain inactive. The state never adopted them. They have not been granted any institutional status. The irony is that at the same time, our institution, heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.

What must the state do in order to adopt it?

It needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present. In some way, the actors involved must receive a sign from the state that they need to use it and that this data will be utilised in some way.

Is it a case of lacking a culture of intersectional cooperation?

In Greece, the tradition of intersectoral cooperation is certainly limited. And experiences in the field of child protection are often traumatic because intersectoral cooperation is always necessary, there is no way any sector or any profession could ever adequately deal with an incident on their own.

However, the truth is that it has not been at all easy in several European countries, too. The inflexibility that arises from being confined in one’s sector is not a uniquely Greek characteristic; it was also found elsewhere. A systematic effort was needed to overcome or bypass resistance, to shatter given preconceptions and practices and reframe practices on the basis of the child being victimised. We had to rethink our processes, not based on what suits us, the professionals, the adults, on what comes most naturally based on the way our service operates or the traditions of our practice, but based on how we should all work together to serve the interests of the population that they benefit, the child victim.

Is the financial crisis to blame for the lack of progress in Greece?

Look, there is a poverty of resources, although that was also the case before the crisis as far as the field of social and child protection is concerned. And yet, we can apparently afford the luxury of no less than four or five parallel service networks, fragmented and inefficient. There is a social services network under first-level local government authorities, a network under Regional authorities, which also has different statutory powers, another network under the Ministry of Labour’s General Secretariat of Welfare, another one under the Ministry of Justice and its legal entities, a health network under the Ministry of Education and the Community Mental Health Centres for Children and Adolescents, and so on and so forth.  We indulge in the luxury of maintaining them all as separate parallel networks despite the poverty of resources and keep them as is, despite the crisis and the even greater poverty of resources. So, you see, there is indeed the problem of funding, but there is also the issue of how we use the resources at our disposal.

Then how do you explain what is happening?

Social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve. Take local government, for example, go to the social services of a municipality and ask the staff how often municipal leaders interfere in what they do, in the priorities and planning of their service. Sometimes, in extreme cases, especially in smaller communities, they even interfere in the work itself. Or take justice. Obviously, the services there are subject to the priorities of the prosecutorial or the judicial mechanism. What I mean is, everyone set up their own thing, with the embroilment of politicians from various posts too, but each of those things began to develop an autonomous existence and then everyone began to defend its particularities and self-existence. The fact remains that all of those things do not constitute a system.

So, the most pressing need is the unification of services?

I have already mentioned the fact that which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises. This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things. I must confess that when I first arrived at this post, I found open cases where the revelation had been made in 2002 and the final judgement was ultimately delivered in 201. In other words, a child found the courage to reveal something when they were four or five years old and justice was delivered when that child was on the verge of adulthood.  

You can understand how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. I can also give you more examples of how harmful this chaos can be. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, “I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.” That’s not how it should be, though…

Isn’t there procedural immunity for health professionals who report such incidences?

Yes, there is, and the fact that it was legislated for social services too, extending the immunity of professionals, was a positive step. For many years, others and I were constantly called to testify as witnesses for the defence of colleagues who had been sued for defamation or breach of duty by those named as perpetrators of crimes against children.

Are not professionals who fail to report such incidents subject to criminal liability?

They are, but that is not the point. It is often the case that the law merely provides for penalties without any provision for support. In other words, the law says you must do this, and if you don’t, you will be prosecuted, go to prison for so many years, but without giving you any backing, without providing the support that will allow you to do what you need to do, leaving you to your own devices to that end.  If a teacher reports a case and the alleged offender then sues, who in Greece will provide the teacher with institutional support? Let me tell you that the experience of people working in this field, be they doctors, or psychologists, or social workers, or other professionals in the mental health or social welfare sectors, is that at least until the latest legislation, whose impact in practice remains to be seen, there were people who were dragged through the courts for six, seven, eight years as defendants. No one paid for their lawyer, no one recompensed them for the fact that they had to appear before the court every six to eight months, no one supported them on how they were supposed to do what they are being instructed to do.  

Legislation on its own does not resolve all issues, as a great many instances show us. The point is, what mechanism would actually allow us to agree in this country that a given professional was doing their job in good faith and lege artis? The right of the alleged offender to take legal action, because their reputation was damaged for example, is understandable and inviolable. Although less frequent, instances of accusations being made frivolously do arise. So, the accused must have some legal recourse.  

The problem is that we have no reliable system in place to ensure that if, for example, Nikolaidis sends 100 cases to court and not one results in a guilty verdict, a body will find this practice unacceptable. There needs to be some reliable way for the authorities to review me, if I am doing my job properly. In Greece, this is not a given, because traditional monitoring bodies are not universally accepted, because politics, interpersonal relationships and the like also come into play.

But even when a report is made, it does not necessarily follow that the state will respond appropriately, does it? In the notorious child sexual abuse case of Rethymno, in 2011, approximately a year passed between the report being made and the suspect’s arrest…

Yes, and there was much talk, many questions about the time gap between the initial report and the arrest.

Were there answers?

Look, I can’t say whether the answers were satisfactory or not. In the first press release by the Greek police, there was a triumphant tone about the systematic surveillance that led to the perpetrator’s arrest. Of course, the counterargument to that is that in a city like Rethymno, which is a small community where everyone knows everything, surveilling someone is not so difficult as to require such a long time. Nonetheless, it is open to debate…

How did you come to be involved in the Rethymno case?

In the spring of 2011, we were running the BECAN study on child abuse and neglect. One of the areas of Greece, where we took a random sample of 15,000 children, was Crete. In the summer, as we were processing our first results, we observed a paradox, an anomaly in the results from the Region of Rethymno: we had an extremely high rate of self-reported sexual victimisation of boys and almost a complete reversal of the boy to girl ratio, contrary to what we had expected. We could not explain it. We speculated it must be due to a technical error.

Then, on 1 December 2011, coach Nikos Seiragakis was arrested, and the largest paedophilia case in Greece came to light. By coincidence, we had already planned an open event to take place in Heraklion, Crete, a few days later, on the protection of children against sexual abuse, implementing the “One in Five” campaign of the Lanzarote Committee and the Council of Europe. So, I arrived in Heraklion and, as you can guess, the Rethymno case was all everyone talked about. I went to Rethymno the following day, and because of my occupation, I attended a meeting with the municipality, the region and the local authorities. I was then asked to make a proposal, which I submitted both to the local authorities and the relevant ministries at the end of December 2011. It was a proposal on the actions that needed to be taken, given the scope of the case, whose extent we did not know, but it appeared to be a mass case.  However, we said that we, as an institute, could not support the initiative because we lacked the necessary funds; if you remember, this was at the end of 2011. Then, after a meeting between the ministries involved and local authorities, we were informed that they would like us to implement the actions we had proposed. They found the necessary funding through the NSRF for us to begin.

When did you begin?

A year later. This is indicative of how unwieldy the Greek public sector can be, even when it comes to projects it funds and the political will is present. There were other obstacles later, of course, there was inherent resistance, in a manner of speaking…

What kind of resistance?

One of the criticisms we received was that the personnel employed in our intervention did not come from the local community, did not come from Rethymno. But I believe that was a very intelligent choice if anyone involved in the events back then recalls the mood of the local community at the time.  In every new incident, our personnel, the psychologists, the social workers, the child psychologists who worked with us, were asked by those they saw whether they were from Rethymno. The moment they heard, “No, I’m from elsewhere,” there was a huge wave of relief and then they shared their suffering, which they would probably not have done had the personnel been local. So, let’s just say there was some discontent that we did not support local employment. But we chose to make communication for the beneficiaries easier and more effective.

One must bear in mind that in western Crete at the time there were no structured free public mental health services for children and teenagers—even today there are very, very few. So, we set up this unit in Rethymno and saw around 450 children, not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs. At the same time, we ran a widely accessible health promotion campaign on the subject of child abuse, children’s sexuality, the children’s right to their body, and so on, at all levels of education in the whole of the Region of Rethymno, that is to say, primary and secondary schools, students, parents and teachers. We also trained personnel at various services, we held educational actions for coaches and sportspeople. Because we were immediately visited by the coaches’ association and told, “We don’t dare touch the children, you can’t coach children and be afraid to touch them at the same time.” Therefore, we had to impart all the international know-how about how it is possible to have both child protection processes in place and still function as a sports space. We also held educational actions on child protection and domestic violence for priests, with very strong support from the metropolitan bishop of Rethymno. Both he and Mrs Lioni, the Vice-Prefect of the Region, greatly supported us back then, fully understanding what was at stake.  

How long did your intervention last?

Until the end of 2014, when the resources at our disposal ran out. This program was normally supposed to last for twelve months, but we somehow managed to extend it to 22 months, carefully managing our resources, with the agreement of the managing authorities of course.

Why did you stop?

The decision of the political leadership of the time was to not extend the operation of the unit there, despite the fact that both other actors in the community and we had requested an extension, given the absence of other units, other facilities for children and teenagers in the region. Talking of resistance, I believe that at least some of the local actors preferred to forget this incident had ever happened rather than work to enable the local community to get over it. There was a fairly strong tendency to sweep everything under the rug.

Anyhow, we were informed by the political leadership that their decision was to shut down the unit permanently, which was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field. There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.

Were you asked to contact anyone succeeding you?

No, nothing, nothing. We did not speak with anyone. They did not even seek our opinion about anything.

What became of those children?

Many of them were obviously unable to continue receiving treatment at services elsewhere. And I imagine that at least some of them will find it very hard to recommence using such services again, the way things were handled…

However, at the end of 2014, during Charalambos Athanasiou’s tenure at the Ministry of Justice, the “National Action Plan for the Rights of Children” that was put to public consultation included the continuation of the psycho-social intervention programme in Rethymno, with new funding under the NSRF 2014-2020…

The truth is that when that day, I think it was a Sunday lunchtime, 24 September 2014, Katerina Papakosta, the then Deputy Minister of Health, announced during a broad meeting between various actors that the unit would be permanently shut down, we were surprised. Because until the very last minute, so to speak, people close to the political leadership of the time, the political actors in Rethymno, were reassuring us that an extension would be granted, as there was evidently no other solution. I cannot know what could have possibly happened overnight to change that decision. But it is true that all the signs, which were also present in documents as you rightly note, pointed to the state continuing this action because what had been done until then was certainly not enough.

Evidently, the repercussions of such a massive paedophilia case in such a small community have a continuous, negative effect on the psychosocial life of the children’s families. It is not something that can be dealt with in a year, a year and a half.

All I know is that any efforts made in the immediate aftermath for questions on this matter to be tabled in Parliament by SYRIZA, the main opposition party at the time, ultimately failed. Incidentally, SYRIZA’s health coordinator in opposition was Andreas Xanthos, who subsequently became Minister of Health in the following government, and who is also the local MP for the Region of Rethymno.

Are you implying that the side that wished to sweep the case under the rug won?

I can’t say that with any certainty. I’ve told you what I know.

Did the visit to the Lechaina unit also take place on your initiative?

In the summer of 2015, following a report that had been made and some coverage by the international press and Greek broadcaster ERT, a visit to the site was organised, headed by Georgos Moschos, the Children’s Ombudsman, with the participation of Ioanna Kouvaritaki from the Circle of Children’s Rights and Aimilia Panagou from Social Welfare, and I was asked to also attend. It was a shock. I saw people in wooden cages, a space of two by two meters. Permanently locked up. I saw people with both hands and feet shackled. Continuously. Following this, yes, we submitted a plan…

On your initiative?

Yes. The Institute at the time was beginning a partnership with British NGO Lumos, which works towards deinstitutionalising child protection around the world. Allow me to remind you, however, that the summer of 2015 was a very turbulent period. At the same time, the Centre for Social Welfare management changed. We submitted a proposal again. In November of the same year, the unit was occupied in protest for four days by the Greek Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Mideniki Anohi” (Zero Tolerance), which also drew publicity to the situation. At some point during the following year, our partnership with Lumos was finalised for the development of an emergency relief intervention in the Lechaina Unit to put an end to these extreme forms of restraint and confinement. In the spring of the following year, the management and the Ministry of Labour gave their approval for our emergency intervention to be implemented.

So, you enjoyed the support of the new political leadership, after the change of government in 2015?

I often hear or read that the leadership of the time took the initiative to change the situation at the Lechaina Unit. The truth is that, after a lot of pressure, they simply gave an approval so that an initiative taken by other people and institutions, with the funding of others, could be implemented. So, if the political leadership of the time can lay claim to anything, it is that after a lot of toing and froing, they gave us the go-ahead to implement our programme, a programme that enjoyed no jurisdictional backing vis-à-vis the unit in question, its personnel, the way it functions. They just said, “Great, you can go to the unit and do what you think is best…”

The experience of this intervention, of course, was life-altering for me personally. It is truly incredible to watch people who have only existed as objects regain their subjectivity. For a person to extend their hand and choose who they want to caress, to choose which top they want to wear or pronounce words after ten years of silence, these are all concrete evidence of their subjective desires and choices.

How does a child end up in such a unit?

Unfortunately, as is the case for too many state and non-governmental welfare institutions, the decision to admit someone is taken by examining the case file without anyone coming into direct, face-to-face clinical contact with the beneficiary or their family. For example, one day, I was checking in with our own people in Lechaina, and they told me that the board of directors had decided to admit a new child. I asked them, “Who has seen the child in question?” And I found out that no one had. They only saw the supporting documents.

Had these supporting documents been submitted by the family?

Yes, because in Greece, by and large, the admission of a child with disabilities at an institution is still viewed, at least by some, as a boon to the family. And sometimes, it is also handled as political favour towards the family. This situation is not confined to Lechaina, but also exists in other institutions, both state and non-governmental, or run by the church or other organisations.

The same situation?

Not identical as such, but the fact that there is a country within the country, so to speak, where other rules apply, or the provisions of the law do not apply. For example, we met an adult in Lechaina who had entered institutionalised care as a child. For many years, both at Lechaina and the previous state institution where he had resided, his father’s wish for communication concerning the child to be confined to his work telephone numbers was respected. This was because the father had lied to the child’s mother that the child had gone into intensive care for two days after birth and then died. For seventeen, eighteen consecutive years, two state institutions had hidden the existence of a Down’s syndrome child living there from its mother. You understand that such events violate every notion of a legal or moral code.

Is there no disciplinary investigation or a criminal law procedure for all this?

When Zero Tolerance occupied the space, the police were called. The activists went to the prosecutor’s office and said we wish to report that there are people there whose rights are flagrantly violated. Did you see any charges being brought against the management? The ministers? The general secretaries? Any charges pressed for the fact that people are still restrained against those that restrained them?

What is needed for the prosecutions to go ahead?

Nothing. In the Greek legal system, the public prosecutor can instigate proceedings. There have been repeated press reports in this instance. Is there no one who could be held accountable for the fact that a person was held in a cage for 21 consecutive years, without leaving the cage for even an hour? I wonder, in Greece today no court has the legal capacity to impose such a sentence on anyone, so how is it possible to tolerate that a person be so deprived of their rights and for this not to raise the question: who subjected them to this deprivation? Why?

After the “emergency intervention” in Lechaina, what followed?

The most disappointing aspect of the whole story is the following: in December 2017, the then government announced that it would allocate a sum from the super-surplus, within the framework of a programme with a budget of fifteen million euro to be shared between the Centres of Social Welfare of Attica and Western Greece, for the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Unit. This is also stated in the joint ministerial decision signed at the end of 2018. The same decision also states that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future, setting out the transition process, the facilities to be developed, the timetable, etc.

Two years previously, in partnership with Lumos, we had already drafted such a detailed plan and submitted it to the government, as well as the board of directors of the Centre of Social Welfare, and the relevant services of the Commission and other bodies both within Greece and abroad, and had also discussed it with the permanent personnel of the unit. We had also notified the municipality as extensively as possible. It was extremely detailed, with a budget, timetables, and so on.

I’m not saying that this was the best plan and should be adopted as the final detailed plan. I’m just saying that absolutely nothing has happened since then. The most disheartening aspect is that this time the funds are there. So, the issue is not funding, the lack of resources we were talking about. It is the fact that, even when the resources are there, nothing happens other than general rhetoric endorsing deinstitutionalisation.

But isn’t this absence of organisation and concrete planning typical of the entire child protection system?

Yes. Greece was the first country to ratify the Lanzarote Convention, an action that is in keeping with a long tradition of the Greek state, ever since the time it ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1992, again one of the first countries to do so, to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented and if they will be implemented. In other words, we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.

Do you know how many things should already exist? Sexual education at all levels of formal and informal education. Have you ever seen anything like it in Greek education? And as to the provision of services to child victims…

Shouldn’t there be some kind of specialised training for professionals, especially those in health and education, who come into contact with children and act as the first “filter”, outside the family, in the identification of child abuse?

Yes, there should be. There should also be training for public prosecutors and judges trying such cases. Because, let me remind you, in Greece, there are no family courts, not as a dedicated institution that can acquire the expertise and sensitivity needed to approach children. So, alongside property disputes and homicides, the court tries sexual abuse of minors cases, as best it can.

So, historically, Greece just speculates on the various initiatives of different bodies, one of which is our Institute sometimes, and then claims, “We held a training programme,” for instance, just because one of those bodies did so. No systematic efforts have been made to comply with the implementation of the conventions we ratified as a country. What has happened is that a number of people involved in the field in any case and motivated to put various initiatives into action, and raise the funds needed (usually from abroad), did so and the state just said, “Look at all the actions we have taken!”.

But all these efforts bring about results, don’t they?

Yes, but they do not constitute a strategy that can cover the whole sector. An organisation takes the initiative and says I will train thirty, three hundred, three thousand professionals. How long can this last without institutional backup? A social worker in the Region, let’s say, will go to the Children’s Ombudsman’s offices and receive training. That’s fine, but the social worker’s superior is not the Ombudsman, their superior is usually a doctor because the Region still keeps the administrative structure of social services under a single Directorate of Health and Welfare. In some cases, and I have met people who are very attuned to social issues, the social worker will be given autonomy and support. However, in other cases, if the Prefect or the Mayor is holding a bazaar and wants to host a municipal fete, the social worker will be told that there are other things to attend to.

Why do any attempts to coordinate this system, for example, the reform introduced during Harris Kastanides’ tenure at the Ministry of Justice concerning the Central  Scientific Council for the Prevention and Combating of Victimisation and Criminality of Minors (“KESATHEA”) and the Juvenile Protection Teams, fail?

Look, from the moment that this institution was founded, I had reservations as to whether the introduction of an administrative nomenclature would actually lead to anything. I think the experience until now has been that, firstly, KESATHEA, which, as stated by the ministerial decree, was supposed to coordinate the Juvenile Protection Teams, does not coordinate them. They are coordinated by the National Centre for Social Solidarity (EKKA) because KESATHEA does not have the resources to do so. Secondly, the Juvenile Protection Teams the ministerial decree provides for, are not teams. They are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.

The fact is that municipal social services, whatever name we give them, after nearly a decade of memorandums and restrictions in public sector recruitment, have ended up consisting of a single person. And that person is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team…

When the Juvenile Protection Teams were introduced, I was asked by the state to train the social workers who would participate in them and discovered that it was just the social workers as individuals, no teams. Georgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training, and I asked them, “Who is permanent and who is contract staff?” More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, “When does your contract expire?” “In three months.” “How about you?”  “In five months.” I turn around and tell them—Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there—what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?

For some years now, for example, NSRF programs have been running, under which psychologists and social workers are hired in the education sector. How effective is this measure, beyond supporting employment? I understand that supporting employment is no small thing, but a social worker, a psychologist, visits three schools, is responsible for 15-20 classes, and by the time he gets to know them he has to leave in three months because the contract expires, and then there is a gap in the system until his position is filled by someone else the following years…

The system does not fundamentally improve with such actions. In terms of strengthening its functionality, it would be better to say let us use the resources at our disposal to employ half the people but within a unified system.

I do understand that given the domination of the most neoliberal public administration policies across Europe, concepts such as networking the services, complimentarity of services, targeted programmes and so on, have been all the rage these past two decades. I, personally, consider anything beginning with the word “networking” a scam. I’m sorry to be so blunt. We do not need networks here, we need institutions. We need a service. We have no service in this country, so we what, talk about making a network out of a non-existent service?

In a reality such as the Greek reality, which does not have a social services structure like most other European countries, the issue at hand is how to set up an autonomous sector. Then we can debate how it can function better to our heart’s content.

What do we mean when we say that a child is abused?

Abuse can take many forms. When I first came to the shelter, in 2011, we saw many children from dysfunctional families, many off the street, and many children street beggars. We had many physically abused children, beaten up. All sorts of beatings, belts, iron bars, some with scars beyond belief. 

We also had many neglected children. I remember one time, one of our street work teams went to the east of Thessaloniki, near Kodra former army camp, and they found three kids in some cardboard boxes. Their mother and her partner were drug users, so they left them there, hidden away, until they got back from whatever they were doing. Kodra camp is a huge area. There are some derelict buildings. They were obviously staying there, after getting kicked out of their flat. At some point, the kids ventured out and they were spotted by our team. 

We also had trafficking victims, who turned up whenever a trafficking ring was dismantled. There was one girl who was a victim in one court case, and a perpetrator in another. It turned out that she had reached out to a girlfriend through Facebook and invited her to come over, so she was both a trafficking victim herself, and accused of being responsible for getting the other girl into it.

How old were these children?

The little boy in the cardboard box was a little over two. His two sisters were six and nine. The trafficking victim was maybe fifteen when she came to us. 

She was actually prosecuted?

Yes, she was taken to Minors’ Court. Not that cases like this are frequent, this was a really difficult one. But it is clear that the inability of the different people involved to coordinate with each other further damaged the child. 

This girl was staying in an institution in her own country. It happened in one of the usual ways: she fell in love with someone, he said he would be working in Greece for the summer holiday season, she came with him, he sold her for 1000 euros. They held her on an island — I can’t give you specifics, you understand, but it was a small island. They made her prostitute herself for two and a half years. You get the picture. It is a really small place. The whole island knew.

Could one tell her age, or did she look older?

No, there was no way you could not tell she was underage. She was around thirteen when it started. And she was in a bad way, there were a lot of drugs, I mean, they gave her drugs. So, what happened was that the other girl, the one that was invited through Facebook, was having serious gynecological problems, which were getting worse, because the people that held them started giving her various drugs themselves. In the end, she got so sick, they took her to the island doctor. Thankfully, he called it in immediately. 

But, then she was first taken to a shelter for adult victims. From there, they started looking for a more suitable institution, but couldn’t find a spot. They sent her to a shelter operated by Mother Teresa missionaries. No one else would take her. They had also contacted us, but we did not have a place. Eventually, a place did open up, though, and she came to us. This was a really hard case, they had messed her up badly. She was having fits, she was cutting herself. And then the consulate of the country she had come from demanded that we return her. We wanted a social inquiry into the institution she was taken from. We put up a big fight. But they were having none of it. 

Anyway, these are extreme cases. We also had adolescents, whose families for any reason cannot handle them, teenagers who had run away from home many times. Overall, though, we used to have many physical abuse cases. Sexual abuse cases did not turn up as frequently. Now they are definitely on the rise.

So, what does House of Arsis do?

House of Arsis is a shelter for children and adolescents, run by NGO Arsis. We can host up to twenty children at a time, victims of abuse, neglect, trafficking and exploitation. We take girls up to eighteen years of age, boys up to twelve, and no children younger than five. Some of these rules are flexible, for example if we don’t want to divide siblings and if their stay is expected to be quite brief, then we might take in a child younger than five. We certainly don’t take in children older than eighteen, we try to find other solutions for cases like that. Generally, we try to adapt to conditions. 

How do these children get here?

Mostly, when a state prosecutor for minors orders their removal from their families. If their age and gender are a match, and if there is a place available, then we take them in. 

And how does a case, say, of a neglected child, get to the prosecutor? 

With a report or a complaint. Anyone can do it. It can be a teacher. A neighbour. It can be anonymous, though generally that is a bit of a problem, because it is hard to know the motive behind it, so it needs quite a lot of looking into. The complaint sometimes goes directly to the prosecutor, but even if the complaint comes to a social worker, like me for instance, or a hotline like the ones that Smile of the Child or EKKA run — whoever gets it is obliged to take it to the prosecutor. And they, in turn, have to immediately order a social worker, who is based at the municipality where the family resides, to conduct a social inquiry.  

How does that work?

The law says that in order to conduct an inquiry following a prosecutor’s order, the social worker must be accompanied by the police. Now, I don’t know what the police are doing, but usually a police precinct will just reply “we can’t”. You could go to the Minors Department at the Police Directorate, but there’s just a few people there, and they are handling all the pending investigations. I mean, every single authority is understaffed. As a result, the social worker might try to take a colleague along, or they will just go alone.  

There is no one way to do this, I mean, every case is different. If you know, for example, that a father is an alcoholic and gets aggressive, then you will probably not go to the house the first time. You will ask them to come to your office, especially if you can’t take someone else with you. And please bear in mind that we are now talking about Thessaloniki, where there are actually social workers in the municipalities. If you go further out, then maybe each municipality will have one social worker who is there for the elderly. And they will probably be local, from the same village, so now they have to go to a family and conduct an inquiry. That’s tough.

Anyway, in one way or another, they have to go. They also have to talk to the neighbours, if they manage to find them, to the school the child goes to, and compile a report on living conditions. Then, they reach a conclusion. If the conclusion is that the child has to be removed, because they are in immediate danger, then the prosecutor will just go with that.

Weren’t the state prosecutors for minors supposed to have their own team of social workers?  

Yes, there was a law that was never implemented. There is supposed to be a social service attached to the prosecutor’s office, but it never happened. So, unavoidably, the prosecutor will put a lot of weight onto what the social worker who conducted the inquiry says. 

Who actually removes the child?

The Minors Department of the police is alerted. This is in Thessaloniki. In the areas further out it will be the local precinct. Either way, it will be a social worker, along with the police.

Uniformed police?

Well, no, thankfully. But there were cases where the patrol car was waiting outside. There have even been removals straight out of schools, straight out of the classroom. Terrible things have happened. 

Where do the police take the children?

They take them to hospital, to any pediatric clinic that is on duty, and the prosecutor issues an order for a medical check-up. After that, if there is already a place available in an institution, the child will leave right away. If no place is found, sometimes we at the House of Arsis can help.

How can you help?

Most institutions have long procedures for admitting a child. They are a kind of evaluation, to see who will be the child’s primary person of reference, for example, or which group it will be placed with. These procedures are reasonable, but they can take quite some time, and there are no places for the children to stay while they go on. That is where we step in.

So, you do not have a lengthy procedure?

It depends. We are more flexible. If a child is in the street, we will just have the few tests at the hospital to make sure if the child needs anything, and we’ll take it in — as long as there is a place. For example, a prosecutor called me recently, she said, look, we have two kids, their dad kicked them out of the house, they are in the street, we have them at the hospital, can we bring them to you? I checked age, gender, places. Bring them in.

On the other hand, when we are faced with harder cases, like psychiatric issues, then we need more time. Or if we have a chronic illness, which requires management, or regular administration of medicines. It can be diabetes, it can be HIV. Then, we need to prepare our staff, see how we can manage, and who is going to do what. We also need to prepare the other children, who are already staying here, have a talk with them. In those cases, the child will stay in the hospital longer. I will go every day to visit, and prepare the child, and at the same time make preparations at the shelter.

Of course, if we don’t have a place, or another short-term shelter, then the children may end up staying in hospital for a lot longer.

What kind of support can a general hospital provide?

According to the law, minors must be under protective guard, which means there must be a police officer present. Especially if we believe there is a possibility that someone might try to remove the child. On the other hand, often there are no officers available for this, so volunteers do it. Some from NGOs, some from different associations. They come and keep the child company, and give it some support. But all this finishes around nine in the evening, because, theoretically, the child will go to sleep and the nurse will be there... 

But if someone tries to take the child away? What will the nurse do?

The child could actually just run away on its own. It has happened to me. We went to the hospital to meet a girl, and as soon as she realised what was going on, she started running. Nobody could catch her.

Practically, it is impossible to have protective guard for every child. Sometimes the hospital may not even ask for it. At other times, the prosecutor will say, sorry, we just don’t have anyone to send. Police precincts are also understaffed. 

So, the next step after the hospital is, when a place becomes available, an institution?

Yes. Of course, we have to investigate together with the child’s family, speaking with everyone in its environment, teachers, relatives, to see whether someone close to the child can take it. So it can be spared the process of going to an institution. Still, the main thing for the child is to not stay in an institution forever. Because, as good as you can make an institution, it will still — I mean, there are countless reports on this, it is not just me saying it, right? After eight years in this field, it is totally clear to me what happens to children in institutions. 

Sometimes, some children might need systematic support for many years. But, certainly, I would say, most cases of neglect are no reason to put a child in an institution. These cases can be addressed in the community. Even if, for any reason, there is a need to bring a child to an institution, this has to be for a short time, until it goes to a foster family. And then its biological family must be supported, so the child can be reunited with it.

Let’s say a child is not going to school. That’s an effect. We have to look into the cause. Why is it not going to school? Can we be sure? Because once the child is removed and taken to an institution, what it will see may be more abusive than staying with its family — provided the family is supported. A child that was neglected, but not abused in the sense of being beaten, or prostituted, a child that was, say, left on its own for very long hours, will go into an institution and likely see other children with serious difficulties. Some might have seizures, some might be self-injuring, some might be aggressive. It will be confronted with situations that there is no reason for it to face, in my opinion.

Foster care is a kind of child protection that we have seen work. Children change. They blossom. Many gaps are filled, whether emotional or cognitive. 

So, why is foster care not implemented more widely?

Look, we can connect the child with a volunteer, an approved family of volunteers, who can accompany the child on exits and recreational activities. This may gradually turn into hosting the child overnight every second weekend and, of course, they may host the child on Christmas, Easter and summer during holidays or vacation periods for some days at a time. That is something we can do relatively easily.

But when we are talking about foster care, then we need a different kind of preparation, supervision, and control. The process needs time, it needs research, and it needs people. You need to have teams set up to provide support and safety for the child. We try to work with the Prefecture, but we can’t do this alone, we don’t have the staff for it.

In the spring of 2011, the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, was running the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect. As they were processing their results, during the summer, they noticed what seemed like an anomaly. In the results from the Region of Rethymno, in Crete, there appeared an extremely high rate of self-reported sexual victimisation of boys and almost a complete reversal of the boy to girl ratio.

“We could not explain it,” George Nikolaidis, Director of the Department, told us. “We speculated it must be due to a technical error.”

It was not an error. On December 1st, 2011, the police arrested a school basketball coach, Nikos Seiragakis, who also coached the local youth basketball team, AGOR. He was charged with molesting dozens of children.

It was this man’s activity that produced the “anomaly” in the BECAN results.

A methodical police operation

A few days after the coach was arrested, the Rethymno police chief, Manolis Paradoulakis, told the press that this was “a systematic and methodical police operation,” which “happened in the shortest time possible”.((The statement is available (in Greek) via the <em>local</em> TV <strong>Creta</strong> station.))  

The chief’s emphasis on the “shortest time” seemed to anticipate the question that soon emerged, why there had been a thirteen-month interval between the time when two families went to the police with allegations that the coach was abusing their children, and the time of the arrest. 

The chief maintained that there had been “rumors” rather than allegations, despite the fact that the two families of immigrant workers had eponymously denounced the coach to the police. He then explained that the police investigated the “rumors” and “discreetly” gathered evidence, in order to determine whether there was any merit to the case. When they found that there was, they proceeded to build the case in collaboration with the Rethymno prosecutor at the time, Maria Dimitriadou, a process which took more than a year, because they wanted to make sure the evidence was solid. “The arrest,” the chief said, “was made in the shortest possible time, as soon as there was complete corroboration of the case with incontrovertible evidence.”

When, during our visit to the Department for the Protection of Minors in the General Police Directorate of Attica, we discussed police handling of child abuse cases, we were told that from an operational point of view, a coach is one of the “easiest” types of perpetrator to catch. “If he is a coach,” the officers told us, “there are more victims”. When, however, we specifically referred to the Rethymno case, the officers said that they had not personally conducted the operation, so they could not comment in detail. 

The possibility that the authorities attempted to preempt any discussion on the police’s choice of timing is strengthened by the fact that Manolis Othonas, Deputy Minister for Citizen protection and Member of Parliament for Rethymno at the time, was already reassuring reporters that there had been no delays, two days before the police chief officially briefed the press on the operation. He commended the police on turning “whispers” into “a case”, and dismissed allegations that the coach had enjoyed some sort of “protection” due to his supposed standing in Rethymno society.

This was contradicted by the Manager of AGOR at the time, Vassilis Theodoroulakis, who stated in an interview that he had been unofficially informed by a police officer about the allegations against the coach, about three months after they happened. He then informed the team’s Board of Directors, who he says did nothing, in order not to damage the team’s reputation. The Board has denied the accusation.  

What is undisputed, however, is that during the time that elapsed between the allegations of the two migrant families against the coach and his arrest, no child protection official or professional was alerted to protect the interests of the children. The decision to prolong the children’s plight for over a year was made without the intervention of any part of the child protection system.

An esteemed member of local society

When we visited Rethymno, in autumn 2018, the weather was rainy. The wet buildings in the old town, dating from Rethymno’s Venetian period, the castle, the lighthouse hidden in the fog, all painted a highly unusual picture for non-locals who stereotypically associate Crete only with summer tourism. We kept wondering how in this town of 40.000 people, which looked even smaller without the summer crowds, it was possible for someone to systematically abuse dozens of children for years, without anybody ever noticing a thing? 

In the old town, opposite the renowned Rimondi fountain, we met with Chara Vilara, an experienced local journalist, who had followed the case closely.

“It was a chronic situation,” she told us. “Obviously, it wasn’t going on for just one or two years, it went back quite a lot. Some of the children had grown up when it became public. There were many children who knew, who weren’t a part of it, but knew and didn’t speak. It touched many families, both directly and indirectly.”

Everyone we spoke with agreed that coach Nikos Seiragakis was an important member of Rethymno society. He had been one of the organisers of the “Treasure Hunt”, a popular yearly event. He was esteemed in the “old town”, meaning the circles of Rethymno’s aristocratic families, and he was well connected in local politics. His contacts reached into the Greek national basketball team, and even the American NBA. Those who know say that children thought of him as a mentor. He was a good speaker, and when he coached, nobody made a sound.

Under strict discipline, the coach had created a kind of “sect”. He approached his students with the promise of admittance to an inner circle, to which only a select few could belong. He used pseudo-historical references to military training in ancient Greece, in order to convince them that in this way they would form a tighter bond with their teammates and become better athletes. Through a series of “trials”, aimed at wresting a kind of “consent” from the children, a process known as “grooming”, the coach initially encouraged them to sexually engage with each other, and subsequently molested them himself. His influence on them was so strong that some students actually defended his actions.

“The big question,” Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, told us, “is how the perpetrator selects the children, how the grooming actually happens. Which children does he choose? Well, he chooses vulnerable children, ones without strong family bonds. Children with certain disadvantages, foreigners, the disabled, or children who are emotionally neglected. He finds cracks. He comes as a mentor. As a protector. Then comes the second step: trust. Privileges. And then comes submission. This can take a long time. At that point, children gradually realise what is going on. So, there is a stage of transferring responsibility: whoever doesn’t want this, can get up and leave now. That’s the transfer: it is you who wants this. And when there is a collective situation, a sharing within a group, it is even more difficult to break this chain. Children understand they are trapped. They stay at this stage of entrapment for many years. This can happen in any abusive relationship. We call it ‘learned helplessness’. Most children will never tell. Some will tell when they cannot bear it any longer. Or because they may see their younger siblings or other loved ones victimised. Or a random event may trigger it off. And then, after a long time, they will tell. Some will have already become adults.”

Coach Nikos Seiragakis was initially charged with 53 counts of child molestation, and convicted on 36 counts. His sentence of 400 years imprisonment was upheld by the Appeals Court, which heard his appeal in 2016. 

During our visit to Rethymno, we were told by people, who spoke to us on the condition of preserving their anonymity, that the number of victims not included in the charges probably raised the total to over one hundred children. 

Seiragakis was conditionally released, according to the provisions of Greek law, at the end of April 2020, after serving eight years and five months. The conditions of his release stipulate that he cannot live in, or visit Rethymno. A few days later, he was arrested again for breaching the conditions of his release. The decision on whether he will remain free or return to prison is pending.

Inherent resistance

In mid December 2011, a conference on child protection took place in Heraklion, the capital of Crete, as part of the Council of Europe’s “One in Five” campaign. ((“One in Five” was a campaign by the Council of Europe to stop sexual violence against children, which was initiated in 2010 and branched out into national campaigns, which were handled by member-states, in the following years. Its title is based on data, which suggest that about 1 in 5 children in Europe are victims of some form of sexual violence.)) The conference had been planned before the Rethymno child abuse case was made public, but, as George Nikolaidis remembers, when he arrived in Crete, everyone was understandably talking about little else.  

“I went to Rethymno the following day,” Nikolaidis told us, “and because of my occupation, I attended a meeting with the municipality, the region and the local authorities. I was then asked to make a proposal, which I submitted both to the local authorities and the relevant ministries at the end of December 2011. It was a proposal on the actions that needed to be taken, given the scope of the case, whose extent we did not know, but it appeared to be a mass case.”

After a meeting of relevant ministries and authorities, it was decided that the proposal by the Institute of Child Health should be implemented. The lack of resources, exacerbated by the financial crisis, was addressed by allocating European Union NSFR funds to the programme. Still, it took about a year for the intervention to begin.

“This is indicative of how unwieldy the Greek public sector can be, even when it comes to projects it funds and the political will is present,” Nikolaidis said.

In the event, the unit for Comprehensive Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”. ((The unit’s website (in Greek) is still active, despite the programme’s termination.))

“At the same time,” he told us, “we ran a widely accessible health promotion campaign on the subject of child abuse, children’s sexuality, the children’s right to their body, and so on, at all levels of education in the whole of the Region of Rethymno, that is to say, primary and secondary schools, students, parents and teachers. We also trained personnel at various services, we held educational actions for coaches and sportspeople. Because we were immediately visited by the coaches’ association and told, “We don’t dare touch the children, you can’t coach children and be afraid to touch them at the same time.” Therefore, we had to impart all the international know-how about how it is possible to have both child protection processes in place and still function as a sports space.” 

Despite the obvious need for intervention in the consequences of a case that had affected dozens of families, Nikolaidis told us that the programme faced what he terms “inherent resistance”. “I believe,” he said, “that at least some of the local actors preferred to forget this incident had ever happened rather than work to enable the local community to get over it. There was a fairly strong tendency to sweep everything under the rug.”

Chara Vilara shared with us a similar perspective. “After the events came to light,” she said, “many parents punished their children, they beat them up, because they believed it had been the children’s fault. And other families never dealt with it at all. Like it never happened. Some, of course, did try to help their children, but what really made an impression on me was that when the police brought the coach to court, there was no one outside. Nobody went to protest, to vent, even. If it had been someone else, there would have been a crowd outside, there would have been shouting, all hell would have broken loose. This is telling, because these children belonged to the local social elite. These people want to cover up what happened.” 

Although Nikolaidis and his team managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, in the autumn of 2014 resources were exhausted. 

“We were informed by the political leadership,” Nikolaidis told us, “that their decision was to shut down the unit permanently, which was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field. There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health’s Action Plan on Children’s rights, which was published online for public debate during the pre-election period, in November 2014, included an extension of the Rethymno programme, funded through the NSFR 2014-2020. But the January 2015 elections brought a change of government, and any plans to extend the programme were quietly dropped.

Out of the sky

On the hill that overlooks Rethymno harbour stands an austere concrete building, which at the time of our visit temporarily housed the Rethymno Mental Health Centre. We were greeted by its director, psychiatrist, psychodramatist and actor, Antonis Liodakis.

He was of the opinion that the Rethymno programme had been “interjected”, and had “dropped out of the sky”. “In the sense,” he explained, “that these professionals from Athens were coming here to see children, parents, other cases, the whole thing functioned like a medico-paedagogic centre.”

Chara Vilara, on the other hand, points out that the children were under immense pressure, “because other kids knew and made fun of them”. “So, they went to private psychiatrists in Chania and Heraklion, because they were afraid of the stigma.”

George Nikolaidis’s experience seemed to echo Vilara’s observation: “One of the criticisms we received,” he said “was that the personnel employed in our intervention did not come from the local community, did not come from Rethymno. But I believe that was a very intelligent choice if anyone involved in the events back then recalls the mood of the local community at the time.  In every new incident, our personnel, the psychologists, the social workers, the child psychologists who worked with us, were asked by those they saw whether they were from Rethymno. The moment they heard, “No, I’m from elsewhere,” there was a huge wave of relief and then they shared their suffering, which they would probably not have done had the personnel been local. So, let’s just say there was some discontent that we did not support local employment. But we chose to make communication for the beneficiaries easier and more effective.”

Antonis Liodakis, however, pressed his point: “We had already identified the key issues since 2008,” he told us. “We have been asking for the creation of a medico-paedagogic centre with every opportunity.”

Nikolaidis makes no secret of his surprise that the programme was discontinued. “Until the very last minute,” he said “people close to the political leadership of the time, the political actors in Rethymno, were reassuring us that an extension would be granted, as there was evidently no other solution. I cannot know what could have possibly happened overnight to change that decision.” And he added: “All I know is that any efforts made in the immediate aftermath for questions on this matter to be tabled in Parliament by SYRIZA, the main opposition party at the time, ultimately failed. Incidentally, SYRIZA’s health coordinator in opposition was Andreas Xanthos, who subsequently became Minister of Health in the following government, and who is also the local MP for the Region of Rethymno.”

After SYRIZA came to power in January 2015, it took the new government two years to come up with its own “Action Plan” on child protection. The Rethymno programme was not a part of it, and it was never reinstated.

Antonis Liodakis started working in consulting groups in the Ministry of Health and joined Andreas Xanthos in official SYRIZA events on public health. In 2017, Xanthos approved Liodakis’s plans for the medico-pedagogic centre, with himself as director.

Manolis Othonas

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• Deputy Minister (former) • Ministry for Citizen Protection
• Member of Parliament (former) • PASOK

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How did the decision for the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance" to occupy the Lechaina Unit in November 2015 come about?

Zero Tolerance was formed in 2010 with a view to building a disability activist movement, a movement for the emancipation of disabled subjects, alongside the Movement of Disabled Artists. We began implementing actions, publishing articles, occupying premises, staging all kinds of interventions. And then came the time to emancipate ourselves so that we could deal with the grave issue of institutionalised life and deinstitutionalisation. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, unable to advocate for themselves, having no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present. So, we, their fellow disabled, began to advocate for their rights.

A two-day festival was held at the self-managed theatre “Embros” shortly before the occupation, a solidarity festival for the children and adults of Lechaina as well as all the other institutions. There were discussions, documentary screenings, plays. The groundwork for the occupation was laid there.

What was the aim?

To highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living.

What was the plan?

To occupy the premises in question and invite civil society to join us in becoming many. It did not happen. The response was not there. The cameras were there, in that there was widespread media coverage at the time.  All the TV channels, both public broadcaster ERT and private broadcasters, aired reports, each in their own manner. A lot of the coverage took on an anti-government bias. We were not focusing on that aspect at all, at the time. Besides, the SYRIZA-ANEL government had only been in power for two months. Our focus was to highlight what was a chronic situation. Lechaina had not been happening for two months, it had a history of 37 years.((For an in-depth account of the Lechaina Unit, read our case study: Hell as an Institution))

We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad. In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. In other words, we were not doing anything new, something that had never been done before. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, “Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.” We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside.  

Were you afraid?

No, no, no. Not at all. We were in the right, I had nothing to fear. None of us was afraid. We had already occupied the Social Insurance Institute (IKA) in 2011. When Syntagma Square was packed with half a million people, we went and peacefully occupied the IKA headquarters for four days. We stayed in Lechaina for four days, too; apparently that is how long our bodies can withstand being exposed to these conditions…

We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime, a total of nine people, most of us disabled, in four cars. We explained who we were. The Chairman of the Board of the facility said we needed a permit to enter – the police conveyed the management’s request to us. We were prepared, ID cards in our pockets. We told the policeman that the violations taking place here were far greater than any violation our presence might give rise to, that we had no intention of hindering the staff in their work but had no intention of leaving either. We went inside knowing what awaited there, but the reality is always much harsher than anything you could have imagined.

Did you have any run-ins with the authorities after the occupation?

We are the ones who went to the Public Prosecutor. Four of us left the unit and went to the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada and filed a complaint. To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify.((The Prosecutor's office archived the complaint in 2016. See our case study on the Lechaina Unit: Hell as an Institution))

The complaint was filed officially, not anonymously. There are specific liabilities at stake: who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed the medication? Specific criminal liabilities are pending, and, to date, they have not been investigated. Unless we are to accept that the disabled persons at the unit are unworthy of living, in which case no criminal liability arises.

The fact that no one is held accountable for this conduct, the fact that nobody seems to wonder about who is to blame for these people’s torture–it is just not possible that no one is to blame—is indicative of the treatment  of disabled subjects in institutions. Is the psychiatrist responsible? Did she prescribe by fax? Was she contacted at two in the morning and told “so-and-so is hitting themselves,” and did she reply, “I’ll fax you a prescription”? Did she do that? If so, is it allowed? Is it a punishable offence? Are prolonged physical restraint and/or prolonged chemical suppression scientifically accepted practices? Are they torture? The UN says they are. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed.

We met the psychiatrist, too, she came to the premises while we were inside. We wanted to speak to her. She did not.

Ideologically, we stand against doctors. Obviously, we do not refuse the intervention of medical science. At the same time, however, we are aware of the part that the medical field has played in us being disabled. By “disabled” in this instance I mean “oppressed”, I do not refer to the impairment. The initial impairment is a separate matter. But if you study the file of a person who has spent twenty years in an institution, his resulting state bears no relation to the initial impairment. Because the impairment of institutionalisation has been added on top.

Several other attempts had been made prior to your intervention and official complaint…

Are you asking why we left it for so long?

No…

I do wish to answer that, nonetheless. We have critically self-reflected on this, on why we left it for so long. Nine of us went there and did something. Why did we leave it so late, why did we not act sooner? We would have made a difference to more people. We looked away, we did not want to face it, we could not face it.

One in two people will project. One of our fellow disabled members, who has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation in the past. His mother had been told the all-too-frequent “Don’t make it harder on yourself. Send him to an institution so you can focus on raising your daughter”. It was hard. I, with my acquired disability, never felt that. I did not believe at twenty-one that my parents would lock me up in an institution. I was already a director; I was working in television. But for other members of the group, who were born disabled, that was one of the turns their life could have taken. We became wiser…

That is what our group is all about, the emancipation of the disabled. The first to become emancipated are the members themselves through this process. We did not want to face this harsh aspect of reality, this prospect that could have been ours. On the other hand, once we stepped outside this individualised perception of disability, once the personal became social, that is when we began to think about what we could do. Could our small band go inside and do something impactful? Not just take a couple of photos and then leave. Would we be taken seriously? Would there be news coverage? Would the ministry take note? Because frustration also plays a part. When you have experienced frustration so many times, over and over, you think it over and wonder, “Should I get involved or will it lead to yet more frustration?” In the end, we burst in and ultimately, some things were put in motion.

Therefore, in terms of a section of society staging an intervention, it was an action worth taking. At the same time, the self-criticism for the delay still stands. We had to fight against our own taboos. That is no small thing. It was a more painful process for our members who had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation at some point than for us. It was harder for them to cope with it. We used to meet, days later, not out of a need to discuss politics or organisational matters, but to talk. To cry, to drink, to cry again… mainly to be there for those who had found it most painful. If you talk to the fellow disabled member I mentioned, he will tell you this: “No matter where I find myself, a cage stands beside me. I carry it with me.” It was an experience that marked people, and I don’t just mean the members of Zero Tolerance. But we are not enough. For deinstitutionalisation to become a demand, for this monstrosity to stop being socially acceptable and normalised, we need to change the way society thinks of disability. We are not interested in everyone’s personal sensibilities. We are interested in mobilising civil society.

What we say applies to all institutions. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism, in living bereft of human dignity in a difficult part of the country, where people perceive disability in the manner stated by Minister of Agricultural Development Makis Voridis,  namely that there are disabled people who have the capacity for understanding and disabled people who do not.((Minister Voridis, during a TV panel discussion, had quipped that children at sixteen "are not disabled", meaning that at that age they have a capacity of adult communication. Video is available (in Greek) here.)) And as a society, we still hold on to the belief that the people in Lechaina do not have the capacity for understanding.

Lechaina must be shut down, the people there must leave. Four years to the day, however, we are still discussing what must be done.

Why do you think that is the case?

It is rotten from the start. Because when a child is born, the first thing the parents, where available, will hear is the medical opinion. It is rotten from the moment the obstetrician enters the room and tells the new mother, “Your child was born faulty.” He will not tell her, “Look, there are difficulties ahead, but you can do this and that.” He will only tell her about the difficulties. He will not offer comfort but launch into the medical script of “he will not be able to think, to see, to hear” and so on. That this child will be bad for her other children, that this child will ruin her relationship with her husband, so “Do not breastfeed, I will interrupt your milk-flow and we will send it to an institution. Your responsibility ends there, you do not need to concern yourself with the course of this child’s life.” That is the classic scenario.

In this instance, we are not talking about broken families, about offenders who are imprisoned, and whose children end up in institutions. We should note here that only fourteen to fifteen per cent of the institutionalised have absolutely no point of reference, in other words, a parent who could potentially take on some responsibilities. Therefore, we are talking about abandonment; about how a couple imagines the stork bringing a blond, green-eyed “normal baby” and then receives a “faulty baby” and decides to bin it.  In those cases, it is the doctor’s intervention that causes the initial damage. Add the way society espouses those same views and the parents freak out. They suffer too, of course, but that does not change the end result.

We saw this in the case of Maria in Lechaina, when we spoke to her mother. The moment her daughter was born, the doctors began to list everything that could happen, medically speaking. But a person is not a medical diagnosis. They are a person. And the problem arises when you start listing all the medical difficulties that lie ahead instead of how they could be dealt with in an organised society.

Does that organised society exist?

Well, people who, despite all these difficulties, make a choice that goes against the medicalised belief that a person who thinks differently ought to be normalised certainly do exist. People who, for example, do not try to normalise autistic children, who do not have a neurotypical brain but an autistic one, and make them be like us. Because that is the beginning of Nazism.

According to Lev Vygotsky, there is a belief that the disabled are a priori unhappy.((Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist. More info available in Wikipedia.)) It is a racist belief, this belief that our lives are lives of suffering, that sometimes they are lives not worth living.

Adriana, who recently passed away, was nineteen years old. I think Adriana’s original diagnosis was glaucoma, meaning she was blind. When we found Adriana, she did not speak, she did not walk, because she lived in a cage. She was restrained when she was around seven years old, because they had no way of confining her and because they could not “nurse” her. So, they put her in a cage because she was active, and no personnel was available to watch over her. The most common question in there is “What are you doing standing up?”. It’s like a regular barracks. Why must they be lying down all day long? Why must they be confined to their bed? Why can they not be outside on the swings?

The standard reply is that the unit is understaffed. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Why are they understaffed? Why are all the residents in diapers? Why do none of them know how to be self-reliant, to use the toilet on their own, to feed themselves? Because they have lost their skills due to institutionalisation and the complete deprivation of every social right. Therefore, the reason the personnel does not suffice is that all these people have been rendered incapacitated.

Is there some kind of logic in what the staff are claiming? There are two people per floor in each shift.

That’s true. But the conclusion depends on your starting point. Do you begin by examining why this happens, or are you only interested in examining the outcome you are dealing with? Two people per floor in each shift are obviously not enough. But why does that happen? How can it be possible for a person with spastic quadriplegia not to be autonomous? Not to be able to eat, drink, use the toilet on their own? How can the rest of us do all those things? They were never allowed to develop.

Or their abilities were “anaesthetised”. A child enters the institution mobile and within a week stops using the toilet. Then the child gets given a bedpan…

A bedpan, really? They soil themselves and then are cleaned with a wipe. They only rarely shower. If a minister is planning to visit, they’ll be given a bath, so they don’t stink. If anyone makes the mistake of soiling themselves after the diaper change, they must wait for the next round. There is no personalised care for this. That means someone can spend hours in a soiled diaper. That is why you end up with that pervading smell in institutions that they can’t wash away.

Have you seen their bodies? Have you seen how many functional deformities have resulted from the repeated adoption of certain postures? Would you like to hear something strange, which also demonstrates the oppression, the torment they have been subjected to? The persons freed by Nikolaidis’ team, unfettered, still slept at night in the same sleeping position they had been restrained in for years. Do you understand what that means? The most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured. That is why, in the early days, almost no one accepted the intervention. That is why it was such an enormous, difficult task for that team.  

Another scene I will never forget is the two young girls, Ellie and Maria, who were eleven years old at the time. When the intervention team arrived at Lechaina, these two girls, being the youngest, were removed to the Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children (PIKPA) in Voula. We used to go and visit them there. One day, they came to our home for a few hours, accompanied by PIKPA volunteers. I remember Ellie in particular, looking for a place to hide. Under the table… always a sheltered spot, away from people and animals. By the end of the day, they were crying because they did not want to leave. It was our understanding that they had never been in a house before. She lay down on our bed, she wanted us to tuck her in so she could sleep there. She saw a dog for the first time, she had never seen one before. She stared at the dog, watched it as if wondering what that strange creature was. We ate together, they had dessert, we danced… same as one would with any other child.

Except that these children had been deprived of love and care. Real love, not the care that an institution’s staff can give. I do not dispute that some of the staff may form emotional attachments with the disabled there, but the way of life in an institution is the very opposite of nurturing care. You spend your whole life being approached by someone in a laboratory coat. Why? They can’t even grasp the fundamental concept of turning up in your own clothes. The gloves, too. Wearing surgical gloves to feed the residents. Why? What are you going to catch? The whole set up of institutions is medico-centric.

You are not only an activist; you are a director too. You are currently working on a documentary about Lechaina…

The two roles are interconnected in any case.

So you enter the occupied building with a camera…

I was not the one holding it, but yes. Two cameras. We went to record what was happening. That’s how it started.

What was the initial purpose of filming? Did you take the cameras as protection?

On the one hand, it was to protect ourselves against anything that might happen, on the other hand, it was to record that moment. Film it and see what was happening there. What we encountered was beyond our worst nightmares.

Did you also take cameras to the occupation of the IKA headquarters you had previously staged?

Yes, small cameras then too, to record everything. As well as for protection, we use the cameras to film material that we can then upload on Zero Tolerance’s social media.  

After the press conference we held at the Lechaina Child Care Centre (KEPEP) on the third day and our departure on the fourth day, the first thing I did was to edit some early material, which is still available online, to accompany the press conference in Athens, to show the journalists and launch the discussion.

When did you decide that you wanted to turn this into a documentary?

I decided during the occupation. I realised that this was an issue I needed to follow up. So, I returned at various intervals, no longer as an “occupier” but first and foremost as a disabled person. And I kept filming. I stayed inside the unit for three, sometimes four days at a time, left, returned, again and again. These past four years, I have made 34 trips to Lechaina if my memory does not fail me. I keep a diary…

This allowed us…

You use the first-person plural?

Not out of politeness, but because I consider this to be a group project, not my work exclusively.

Anyway, this allowed us to observe how things evolved inside Lechaina because one year later, Nikolaidis’ team arrived to implement the interim intervention. The emergency relief intervention for the residents was introduced, and we began to see how these people changed thanks to it.

How their behaviour changed, how the residents we first met, who were uncommunicative, tied up, inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, eyes unfocused, began to blossom in the year and a half that followed the start of the intervention. We watched them develop their skills, we heard them speak, utter words, we heard others express specific requests, “I want a bedside table”, “I want my own clothes”, “I want a TV set”, “I want a remote control”. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving “the prescribed treatment for their own good”.

We saw them step outside. Leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, and that momentous occasion when they saw the front door, stepped outdoors. We witnessed their fears and inhibitions. They did not want to break their routine. For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps; “bed restraint” or “mechanical restraint” as they call it. Some did indeed refuse to cooperate. But that is perfectly normal. Fear was the cause.

But we also saw people suddenly use a spoon and feed themselves, it was incredible! Because up until then they had been bottle-fed, lying down, gulping down liquidised meals in seconds. They did not know how to use their mouths to eat. That is why the teeth of nearly all the residents are in a terrible state. This change took place inside the institution – we did not go to a new space where things were different. It was inside those premises, that place of torture, that the situation changed.

What I had not anticipated in the making of this documentary was filming the dead. People we had met. Attempts were made to remove them from the institution, but they subsequently passed away. I’m not talking about elderly people, they were young.

Take Panagiotis, for example, the oldest resident at fifty years old. It is a miracle he has managed to survive like this, staring at the ceiling. The people who died were much younger: Christos and Ellie and Adriana and Maria.  Ellie was fifteen. Adriana had just turned nineteen. She was the blind girl.

We imagine you have spoken to the staff during your visits. You must have interviewed some of them…

They did not want to be interviewed. Now that they have found out I’m not filming for the sake of it, that I am creating something specific, they might change their mind. I never film with any formality; I do not shout “action!” I prefer things to be spontaneous, a recording of reality without altering the environment so that the actual circumstances remain unchanged. This means that the set up must be minimal. Small cameras to avoid creating a sense of occasion, no boom mics, no lights, no large crew wearing headphones.

So, I met them as individuals first and foremost, learned about their lives, their stories, how they ended up working at the unit since most of them had no previous background, no connection to this field. That did not surprise us, they are locals who found work. Some of them have been working there since the very first day, so we heard about how they were thrown in at the deep end when the institution opened, without any organisational setup. They brought the residents there without any idea of how to deal with them. The staff told us how they ended up organising themselves and creating these conditions, meaning the beds that they enclosed in bars, turning them into cages.

Which they refer to as cots or playpens among themselves.

 Yes. Of course, the term was coined by the former Minister of Health, Katerina Papakosta. “Playpens” then, and that “strapping them down is for their own good” so that “they cannot harm themselves”. Once again, was it the chicken or the egg? When you are enclosed in a confined space for a prolonged period, without any stimulation, no sensory stimulation, no psycho-emotional stimulation, then you begin to hit yourself, to drink your own urine, to eat your own faeces and all the other things you hear about. But this applies to every human being subjected to these conditions, you do not need to have an impairment to reach that point. The institutionalisation makes you impaired. Of course, all behaviours are attributed to their disabilities, it is the easiest narrative to adopt. They tell you, “Can’t you see what they are like?”.

We imagine you have also wondered how these people accept to subject other human beings to this abuse. Do you have an answer to that?

I know that they struggled at first, at least according to their narratives.

Morally?

Morally, I would say yes, they morally struggled with strapping people down. The system is set up in such a way as to render them responsible for some people. But given that this conversation is constantly rehashed, the issue is not whether we can hire more staff so that the torture can go on, so that there is “better monitoring” and residents can continue to be drugged up to the eyeballs. The issue is that no matter how much personnel you hire, you are still running an institution. And the concept of an institution is not that far removed from the concept of a barracks or a prison. Wake up at set times, eat at set times, sleep at set times.

Were these people convinced by scientists that this is the appropriate approach?

Scientists prescribed both “mechanical restraint” and the drug dosages. With absolutely no supervision. In fact, in some cases, they added a new medication to the mix without discontinuing the previous medication. Without anyone ever checking drug interactions or potential side effects. We saw the end result. Zombies. That’s it.

For years the personnel refused to accept the new state of affairs. They did not want to accept that there is an alternative way to provide care. 

Because it meant stepping outside their comfort zones?

I think they did not want to accept that they might be doing something wrong. The prevailing attitude was “Are you here to tell me that what I have been doing for twenty-five, thirty years is not right? How dare you?”

But you are not just telling them this is wrong, you are saying this is inhuman, this is torture.

 “We love these children very much, but there is no other way to manage them. They are monsters. They are unpredictable. If we don’t restrain them, they’ll be climbing up the walls. They could eat the plaster. They could eat their own faeces. They could swallow a large object, choke and die.” These are all actual words we have heard. That is why our position is that none of these people should continue to work in this environment. I don’t mean that they should lose their jobs. I mean that they should go and work in a different environment, certainly not in an institution.

By talking to them, showing them examples from abroad, we managed to persuade a few of them, too few. We were thinking of organising screenings of foreign documentaries on deinstitutionalisation, where the residents themselves discuss life before and after the closure of their institution once they had lived in society and developed their capabilities. The response was, “You are in the Balkans now, this is all too European. Who will fund all this? They’ll run it for half a year and then back to the same old.”

The truth is that we went there having made the conscious decision not to go down that frequent route. Blaming personnel is the easiest thing in the world. That is not to say there is no personal accountability, but the main responsibility lies with the so-called, in our view non-existent, welfare state. It lies with the politicians, who have kept us trapped in a time warp all these years.

And when the issue was all over the news, they would come out with statements. Like former Health Minister Andreas Loverdos in 2011, who stated that he would grant access to any journalist who wished to visit an institution and report on the conditions. And former Deputy Minister of Health Katerina Papakosta, who visited Lechaina following the BBC report and informed us that the situation was not what had been presented, that the “cots” were used for the children’s own protection and that they were standard practice. Then, former Minister Effie Achtsioglou and Deputy Minister Theano Fotiou announced a deinstitutionalisation scheme, and for the first time in Greece, the word “deinstitutionalisation” was pronounced by someone in power.  

What was the reaction at the Lechaina unit?

Their first reaction when deinstitutionalisation was announced and I visited Lechaina was, “It’s going to be just like ERT. They are going to shut it down and fire us all.” They needed to hear reassurances from the ministry that they would not lose their jobs. Very few said, “OK, I can understand why this needs to happen, this situation cannot continue. What will our part be going forward? How will this thing work? What’s the next step?” I told them, “It would be far better to work in a real home in the city of Lechaina or a place nearby and work in more humane conditions.”

Moreover, the professional foster care scheme had been announced, which would enable some of the workers to foster a resident in their home. Some of them had, indeed, bonded with certain residents, bonded with the “children”, everyone is called a “child” there, even when they are fifty years old, so they could opt for professional fostering and work from home.

The SYRIZA-ANEL former government announced professional foster care but did not take the necessary actions to implement it. How did your interlocutors react to the idea, nonetheless?

I discussed this with a worker who calls one of the residents her “daughter”. I told her, “Why don’t you take your daughter home under the professional foster care scheme then?” She fell silent. She just gaped at me. Being in your workplace and having formed a bond with someone there is very different to transferring that relationship into your own home. I imagine that would require discussions with her husband, her children, her social circle. Even without the implementation of professional foster care, the option to take a resident home for the weekend was still there. All it required was the permission of the Board of Directors. No one ever did that.

Or for the holidays, Christmas…

Every Christmas they host an event for “normal” children who are allowed into the lobby, they do not go further inside, and sing Christmas carols.

There are children who have been inside the unit and decorated the cages...

Yes, from the American Community Schools of Athens (ACS), to brighten up the torture of the people kept inside the cages. Of course, the residents were not physically inside the cages while the students painted them.

Small mercies…

That was one of the most vivid contrasts that struck me as I entered the centre. The dystopian landscape. The stench of excrement, fettered residents moaning and groaning and “I love you” painted on the walls, signed by ACS. I really would like to know what on earth the educator in charge had been thinking.

Returning to the subject of the personnel, I have seen the extent to which they have accepted the work they are asked to carry out and the resulting way of life for the residents. It never ceases to astound me, in all the institutions I have visited, be it Crete, the PIKPA in Voula, Thessaloniki, Komotini, Rhodes… This situation is normalised. It might shock those of us witnessing it for the first time, but that is the reality as far as they are concerned. I was also astounded by the fact that few visiting relatives seemed to be astonished by what they saw. They found it normal too.

We have also witnessed an admission being deterred. A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. The reasoning behind the decision was to save her marriage and spare her other children. She was evidently being pressured by her husband to abandon the disabled child, so they could focus on their “normal” children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears.

Did she take the child with her?

Yes.

So at least one child was spared…

Maybe she split up with her husband. Who knows what kind of pressure she was under? The guilt she carried with her for giving birth to a disabled child. The belief that she was being punished by God for some previous sin… In any case, yes, we were glad that the admission was averted.  But they did admit a new resident recently. Various organisations were mobilised, we opposed the decision publicly, the ministry intervened, and the child was brought to Athens because the public prosecutor would not rescind the order. That is also a big issue. I do not know if a decision to prohibit new admissions at Lechaina has been officially made.

There is a Board of Directors decision to suspend admissions.

Only that. Theano Fotiou, Effie Achtsioglou or the General Secretary for Welfare, I do not think they ever issued a decision to ban new admissions when they decided Lechaina would eventually close. Of course, things are no better elsewhere in Greece. Lechaina differed in the use of those “cots”. But I have seen a resident fettered with ropes in another institution, I have seen those tall “cots” with high bars, allegedly to stop people from falling if they stand up on their beds. All institutions operate along the same lines. Even the smell is the same. They all smell the same.

What did you have in mind when you began working on this documentary?

Look, when you start a documentary, you are not in charge, the reality guides you. Going into Lechaina, I decided to do what the documentary title says: From Asylum to Society. In other words, we decided to take what society rejects by relegating it to an isolated building somewhere far away, record it and bring it before its eyes. I wanted to experience it, to go on this journey that I think is gradually coming to its end. I cannot sit and wait to see how the new government will act.  See if it wants to raze everything that happened before to the ground and do something entirely different. Many rumours are going around, some bordering on science fiction, but there are some others which may find us in agreement. I wanted to record this unbearable situation, which is one hundred per cent legalised and imposed by the state itself. A situation that is connected to the perceptions we all have, including the country’s politicians, about the lives of the disabled who find themselves outside the family circle for some reason, and that is the only protection we afford them.

Unfortunately, a documentary cannot communicate the smells, nor what being there does to someone like you or me. But the conditions… the conditions inside an institution. No matter how good you try to make them, an institution remains a place of torture. Torture that has been normalised using the physical impairments of the those confined there as a pretext.

You must have been hoping for something at the beginning of the documentary, however.

Yes, I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. I did…

Do you feel frustrated?

We are used to frustration… Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that Effie Achtsioglou’s announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the birth family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That they would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.

During the four days of the occupation there was tension, our interactions were formal, information would reach us, Theano Fotiou made a statement, we made a statement. In the end, we decided the pressure group must move from inside Lechaina to headquarters, we announced that we expected to be called to the Ministry to discuss everything we had recorded. At the same time, we sent all the material we had gathered abroad to spark a reaction in Europe, the bodies charged with welfare. We sent it to the UN, and they issued a recommendation that we read out during the press conference we held at Lechaina on the afternoon of the third day, inviting local press. The mayor came, along with various others.

 We broke down on the day of our departure. We broke down because we were saying goodbye to our fellow disabled, and we could not grasp that we were free to leave that place, but they would stay behind. We broke down. We wept. We sobbed. We said goodbye and gathered around a bench outside, by the olive trees and burst into tears. An olive tree is planted every time someone dies. All these people, they enter the institution as children and leave when they are adults… by dying. “Deinstitutionalisation” via movement to the great beyond, if you are a believer. We wept because we knew that we were going home and that from that day forth, we would have to find a way to change the reality we had experienced, no matter what.

I also feel great sadness. Because, for us, the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. They have been ready to leave the institution for a year now. Nikolaidis rightly said from the start that you cannot just take people out of a cage and simply transfer them elsewhere, there needs to be a training and transition process. That process has taken place.

So, I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen. But, sadly, society is not mobilising.  And that is the heart of the matter. The issue of deinstitutionalisation is vast, it concerns a great number of people. In 2014, the Roots Research Centre in Greece estimated that approximately 900 disabled persons are held in institutions. They enter as children and depart as olives. That is the Greek version of deinstitutionalisation. It is a massive issue. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.

The Unit stands at the exit from the town of Lechaina in the direction of the village of Myrsini, facing the substation pylons of the Greek public power corporation. The building, which belongs to the episcopal see of Elis, is a four-storied, cross-shaped construction crowned by a dome. Its design could hardly be described as suitable for its intended use.

Perhaps that was the reason it was deemed necessary to restrain the seven-year-old blind girl who had been admitted to the institution at the age of three. Fully mobile yet blind, brimming with the energy of childhood, she would have needed someone to watch over her constantly. Lechaina has always been understaffed. “For her own good”, then, someone decided that she should be locked up in a cage. By the time she was sixteen, she could not even articulate her own name.

The Lechaina Unit was founded in 1987 as a "Child Care Centre", or KEPEP, and began operating two years later, with the mandate of caring for disabled children between the ages of six and eighteen. In its initial conception, it was intended for the children of the Region of Elis and the wider Peloponnese. Progressively, disabled children from all over Greece were brought in, either following a request by their parents or a State Prosecutor's order. Formerly an independent institution, since 2013 it is one of the annexes of the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, which is supervised by the Welfare General Secretariat of the Ministry of Labour. As a rule, the care workers at the Unit are unskilled and their numbers insufficient: five healthcare workers, seven assistants and five auxiliary contract staff for 44 residents, at present. The carpenter who fashioned the cages is also considered institution personnel.

Frozen in Time

In the Lechaina Unit, disabled children were strapped to their beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. These practices were hardly a secret.

In 2008, a group of European volunteers who spent some time at the Lechaina Centre, shocked by the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children, drafted a report which they distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations.

In September 2009, a delegation from the Children’s Ombudsman's office, comprised of the Ombudsman himself, Giorgos Moschos, the Ombudswoman for Health and Social Protection, two scientific experts and May Papoulia, a psychologist and wife of the then President of the Republic, visited the institution for the first time. In March 2011, the Ombudsman issued a damning report on the Unit’s inhuman conditions.

Shortly before the publication of the delegation’s findings, in February 2011, the cameras of ERT, the Greek public broadcaster, entered the institution. The news story aired in the main evening news and Andreas Loverdos, the Minister of Health at the time, intervened on air.

After lauding the work of the manager of Lechaina, the minister announced his intention to allow journalists inside all of the country’s institutions to report on the living conditions. When the newscaster observed that journalists should shed light on issues, but it was the Minister's job to solve them, Loverdos promised that five more healthcare staff and an additional three workers would be hired by the end of the year, attributing the torture brought to light by the news report to understaffing. He also promised that new premises would be secured, so that minors could be separated from adults.

Three years later, pictures from Lechaina spread across the world, when the BBC published an article headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. A few days later, Katerina Papakosta, who by then had become Deputy Minister for Health in a new government formed by New Democracy, visited the institution in a move that seemed rather forced, after the outcry that followed the article’s publication.

In her statements to the media, she claimed that the Unit did not fall within her mandate but that of the Ministry of Welfare and stated: “I came here on my own initiative to examine (the situation), because I have been informed by scientific experts that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

Having normalised cages as “cots", Papakosta, too, promised the recruitment of qualified personnel.

It should be noted that the widespread use of chemical suppression through medication, the practice of restraining children to their beds using straps, the use of cages and electronic surveillance, were already condemned in the 2011 report of Children’s Ombudsman as “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions.”

As to the reassurances given to the Deputy Minister by "experts", it should be noted that in the course of the Ombudsman's investigation, which led to the aforementioned report, the Unit’s psychiatrist at the time, Dionysios Tsangos, was asked to submit a written reply. In it, he stated: “I clearly acknowledge that restraining a patient with straps largely violates individual human rights, but they are superseded by the right of life itself. Given the severity of the patients’ mental disability, it is absolutely necessary to restrain them with straps to avert any self-harming acts which the patient will naturally not become aware of due to their condition. The straps will continue to exist for as long as such severe, high-risk level cases continue to exist. As to the matter of the wooden enclosures, a proposal was submitted by the scientific team in April 2008 and a report by child psychologist Mrs Lolou will follow. Certainly, patient accommodation can be improved with the use of more suitable beds, successfully combining the goals of development and security.”

The Ombudsman's report noted that the Unit's psychiatrist had responded without submitting “any medical opinions on specific patient cases, nor any scientific evidence supporting the need for restraint”. It also pointed out that “the Recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture under The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment do not appear to justify physical restraint, with the exception of psychiatric units for adult patients and only under certain conditions. Confinement to beds/enclosures in particular, is considered an unsuitable psychiatric practice and constitutes degrading treatment.” As to the decision to “use means of ‘mechanical restraint’, such as straps, its appropriateness is decided on a case-by-case, mutatis mutandis basis and is used rarely and only when prescribed by a doctor (or following a doctor’s immediate notification and receipt of approval). Recourse to it should be made exceptionally, as a last resort and for the minimum duration necessary, while its long-term use has no therapeutic properties and is considered misuse in therapeutic terms. This practice cannot be excused by staff shortages, as every instance of restraint demands that a member of staff provide immediate personal assistance and constant supervision, while electronic surveillance cannot substitute the constant physical presence needed. At the same time, every such instance should be recorded in a special register and in the patient’s personal medical file with specific details, such as the start and end time of restraint, the doctor’s name etc. Staff must receive ongoing training in alternative, gentler methods of patient control and be educated in the effects the practice of physical restraint has on the patient.  The Authority believes that the practices chosen clearly fall outside the scope of legality and gravely contravene the duty to respect and protect the human rights of residents with serious mental disabilities.”

The situation in the Lechaina Unit, therefore, was not only fairly widely known, but also officially documented, by March 2011.

“From Asylum to Society”

Approximately a year after Deputy Minister Papakosta’s visit, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Mideniki Anohi” ("Zero Tolerance") occupied the Lechaina premises. The occupation, a protest against the abuse of disabled children taking place in the Unit, began on November 4, 2015, and lasted for four days.

We met with Antonis Rellas, a film director, disabled activist, and member of Zero Tolerance, in his apartment. He let us in himself and led us to his studio.

“We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad," he told us. "In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, ‘Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.’ We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, those who are unable to advocate for themselves, have no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present.”

A video can be found on Zero Tolerance’s youtube channel, entitled From Asylum to Society. Rellas put the footage together immediately after the occupation, to be screened for journalists during the press conference Zero Tolerance held upon its return to Athens.

“We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime," he said, "nine people in four cars, with two cameras. We wanted to record what was happening and highlight those that society rejects by relegating them to an isolated building somewhere far away, turning a blind eye to these images. We wanted to highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living. For us disabled activists, there is no such thing as a good institution. Even if Lechaina were the Hilton, it would remain a secure-type institution that violates every notion of human dignity. I have seen people restrained with ropes in other institutions too, not just Lechaina. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism. No matter how prepared we were, the reality exceeded our worst nightmares…”

During the occupation, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the State Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the human rights violations against the disabled children and youths kept at the institution.

“To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify," Rellas told us. In fact, the Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

"There are specific liabilities at stake," Rellas said. "Who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed prolonged chemical suppression?  Not holding anyone accountable is like asking us to accept that the disabled residents are not worthy of living and therefore, no criminal liabilities arise. The UN, who saw the material we gathered during the occupation, says this is torture. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed."

On November 5, 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee publicised its concluding observations after examining Greece’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Regarding the situation at Lechaina, the Committee stated that “the State party should take immediate measures to abolish the use of enclosed restraint beds and systematic sedation in psychiatric and related institutions. The State party should also establish an independent monitoring and reporting system and ensure that abuses are effectively investigated, those responsible are prosecuted, and redress is provided to the victims and their families.” Similar recommendations had been made three years earlier, with specific reference to the institution at Lechaina.

On November 13, 2015, a few days after the occupation staged by Zero Tolerance, the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO human rights watchdog, filed a complaint at the State Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court of Greece. “In view of the fact," the complaint stated, "that the long-term torture of children took place with the knowledge of all authorities, from the Ministry down to the local prosecutor’s office, while the report of the Ministry’s Committee confirms that this is standard practice in psychiatric units across the country, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court is asked to order the judicial investigation of the claims made here, instructing a public prosecutor in Athens to this end, and demanding that the Ministry of Labour immediately cease using these inhumane methods that amount to torture.”

None of this was enough to mobilise justice to pursue those responsible for the fact that disabled children and young people were being kept in confinement, physically restrained in cages of two by two by one metres, not being let outside even for an hour, medicated for psychiatric and other illnesses — despite the fact that, according to the study carried out by the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, out of the 78 people that have resided in the Lechaina unit over the years, only five had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for psychiatric disorders. 

“In Greece today," Giorgos Nikolaidis, Director of the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, told us, "no court has the legal capacity to impose such a sentence on anyone. How is it possible to tolerate that a person be subjected to this confinement and not ask who ordered it and why? Which ministers, general secretaries, which of my colleagues gave instructions that these people be restrained? Who imposed this deprivation of their rights?”

Breaking the Cages

Shortly after the occupation by Zero Tolerance, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by Harry Potter writer J. K. Rowling to promote and advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises.

At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention, with an initial duration of six months. The intervention team would release the patients from their restraints, re-examine the use of medication, and prepare them through appropriate training, so that they could either return to their families, where possible, or otherwise move to smaller hostels, where the effects of institutionalisation would be alleviated. Meanwhile, the government was supposed to form a plan to radically restructure institutions, with the ultimate aim of deinstitutionalisation.

The emergency intervention was launched in July 2016, under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. It was to last six months, because, according to Nikolaidis, "rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?"

"Unfortunately," he said "the fact of the matter is that, after a lot of pressure, they simply gave an approval so that an initiative taken by other people and institutions, with the funding of others, could be implemented. A programme that enjoyed no jurisdictional backing vis-à-vis the unit in question, its personnel, the way it functions. The political leadership just said, ‘Great, you can go to the Unit and do what you think is best’.”

Two summers later, we visited the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health for the first time. Giorgos Nikolaidis had just entered his office and was in the process of transferring a video from his phone to his PC. He invited us to view some of the material.

The first video was shot as the carpenter of the Lechaina Unit dismantled the wooden cage of a twenty-year-old man, who had been confined to it for years. The man's initial disbelief subsides, as joy and relief burst forth in almost ecstatic laughter. The camera turns back to the carpenter and switches off.

In the second video, someone else is holding the psychiatrist’s phone. The scene takes place in the sea. Nikolaidis is holding a pool noodle, the buoyant foam tube used to teach very young children how to swim. He has passed the tube under the waist of another Lechaina resident, stretched him out on his back, and sways him gently from side to side. Another outburst of joy is heard, as a long-suffering body finds relief in the water.

Antonis Rellas decided to follow the course of events from Zero Tolerance’s occupation to the promised closure of the institution not just as an activist, but as the director of a documentary about Lechaina. Having visited the Unit over thirty times these past years, he explained: “I had the chance to watch how behaviours changed. How the residents I first met, who were uncommunicative, eyes vacant as they lay strapped to beds or locked inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, began to blossom. To watch them leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, to develop their skills. We heard them speak, utter words. Some began to express specific requests, ‘I want a bedside table’, ‘I want a remote control’, ‘I want my own clothes’. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving ‘the prescribed treatment for their own good’.”

“I witnessed their fears and inhibitions," he went on. "For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps. Even after the intervention team removed their restraints, do you know how they slept at night? In the sleeping position that they had been kept for years. For them, the most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured.”

One of the many paradoxes of this story is that, despite the admission by the political leadership that institutionalisation must end, and more specifically that the Lechaina Unit must be shut down, a decision to prohibit new admissions to the institution was never officially made.

Rellas recalled such an incident: “A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. She was evidently being pressured to abandon the disabled child and focus on her ‘normal’ children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears. She took her child and left.”

 “That was not the only incident where admission was averted,” explained Nikolaidis. “We had asked for admissions to be prohibited, everyone agreed, but that agreement never translated into a legal act. I used to arrive at Lechaina and be told that the Board of Directors had admitted a new child. Every time we had to rush to right things after the fact. I would meet the parents, explain the implications of such an admission, try to understand why the family was asking for this. Usually, there was a lot of hidden pain, the decision to leave their child at an institution was not sudden.  Therefore, we created the after-school clubs for many of them, activity clubs to occupy their children after special school. The aim was to offer families some respite so that the children did not end up in an institution.”

Most of the stories shared common ground. “These were children," Nikolaidis told us, "with mental disabilities that the family had kept until their preadolescence- adolescence and then found harder to manage. They usually had other children with typical development too and struggled to look after them all. We set up this service at Lechaina and Patras so that the child could stay at a space with qualified personnel who would occupy them, train them, and then be able to return home at night.”

Resistance

The emergency intervention that was intended to last six months ended up lasting for almost three years, after repeated extensions. Experts have pointed out that reintroducing people who had been subjected to extreme and prolonged abuse into humane conditions was always going to be difficult, but their task was continually complicated by the resistance that they met.

During one of our visits to the Lechaina Unit, we met Patty Sotiropoulou, special needs educator and member of the emergency intervention team. As introductions were made, we witnessed the following incident: one of the centre’s residents had undergone surgery following self-injury to his eye. The surgeon had recommended forty-five days of bed restraint to protect the wound. Our arrival at the centre coincided with the end of his confinement and the intervention team was asking staff to transfer him to a bed. The staff resisted this move, claiming that it could be dangerous because the resident had chewed on his mattress… ten years ago!

 “One day, members of the team took a girl outside for a walk in the courtyard," an exasperated Sotiropoulou told us. "The girl fell down and needed two stitches on her chin. Not only did the staff overreact due to their reigning fear of accountability, but the doctor who put in the stitches also instructed that she be kept inside a cage for ten days. Ten days confinement for two stitches! And when you point out the absurdity, you just get told: ‘doctor’s orders’.

Sotiropoulou said she had been exhausted by the constant battle over matters that should be self-evident. "No culture has been fostered," she said, "that it is unacceptable to keep children inside cages in an institution. If we had seen a child with typical development inside a cage in those news reports, the reaction would have been different. In the case of disabled children, both the system itself and, unfortunately, a large section of society accepts all too willingly that ‘there is no alternative’, that ‘the specialists say they need to be physically restrained so they must be right’, and ‘thank goodness there is an institution to house them’.”

The battle over matters that should be self-evident, as Sotiropoulou put it, rages at the Lechaina Unit even when the proposed changes are also intended to benefit the workers themselves. 

“During the intervention," Sotiropoulou told us, "we trained staff in the use of a small crane to lift people from the bed. It is essential that the residents change positions. It might not sound like that big of a deal, but there is a world of difference between spending twenty-four hours a day confined to a bed and getting up, both physically and in terms of receiving some stimulation. At the end of the day, only our team and the volunteers use the crane."

"It's a small example of the resistance here," she said. "You have a goal, to get people out of bed. And it can’t be achieved. You give them a tool that can help the carers, too. And I say this being fully aware that just changing the sheets and diapers of so many people is extremely taxing physically. And yet, they will not use it. So, on the one hand, you see a resistance to change, even when the change is beneficial to them, and on the other hand, you realise that they cannot appreciate the importance of people being out of bed.”

The deinstitutionalisation that never was

In December 2017, the Greek Government announced that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Unit and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future, setting out the transition process, the facilities to be developed, the timetable, etc.

 “Incidentally," Nikolaidis told us, "I should mention that we had already drafted such a detailed plan and submitted it to the government, as well as the board of directors of the Centre of Social Welfare, and the relevant services of the Commission and other bodies both within Greece and abroad. We had also discussed it with the permanent personnel of the Unit. I’m not saying that this was the best plan and should be adopted as the final detailed plan. I’m just saying that the commitment made by the government to form such a plan never materialised. The most disheartening aspect is that this time the funds are there, so that’s not the impediment.”

The emergency intervention ended in February 2019. When we asked Nikolaidis why the Institute of Child Health did not continue with the intervention, as well as why the collaboration between the Institute and Lumos was not renewed, he replied: “Because in February 2019, the representatives of Lumos visiting Greece met with the Minister for Social Solidarity Theano Fotiou and were informed that for as long as they cooperated with us, any cooperation with the Greek government was out of the question. So Lumos interrupted its cooperation with us and began working with NGO SOS Children's Villages, which was recommended to them.”

We went on ask why in Nikolaidis’s opinion the government, through its minister, would do this. 

“I think,” Nikolaidis told us, “it was because we kept raising the need to close down the unit, and for a number of real actions, not PR, leading to the residents’ psychosocial rehabilitation and deinstitutionalisation to be taken. Ms Fotiou had probably decided that she wanted to adopt ostensible rather than true actions. The timing also coincided with the completion of a phase of our actions in Lechaina, with the gradual and progressive transfer of all the residents out of confinement, be it cages, or straps or any of the other inventive methods used by the institution. Our task had been to provide interim emergency relief geared towards the abolition of confinement, pending the implementation of a deinstitutionalisation scheme. Having completed that work, having drawn up a plan for deinstitutionalisation and secured a budget for that purpose, and seeing that no steps were being taken in that direction, we had no intention of remaining at Lechaina to window-dress the perpetuation of institutionalisation.”

Former Minister Fotiou did not comment on these statements by Nikolaidis, despite our repeated requests. Lumos likewise did not reply to our request for comment. SOS Children’s Villages, which signed a cooperation agreement with Lumos in May 2019, replied that “after a request by Lumos and the Ministry, we agreed to become the organisation responsible for dispensing salaries to personnel that was hired for three months, without participating in any way in the scientific work, or observing its implementation on location”. 

In the event, personnel to staff the action team that would implement a three-year deinstitutionalisation programme was hired in June 2019 on twelve-month contracts. Selected by competition, team members have no work experience in matters of deinstitutionalisation. This move provoked the strong reaction of the institution’s staff, who once again reiterated their longstanding request for the recruitment of permanent personnel.

While time was again grinding to a halt in Lechaina, the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity came under increasing pressure to submit a long overdue general deinstitutionalisation strategy proposal, which was an obligation under the terms of 2014-2020 NSRF funding, and should in fact have been submitted since 2014. The Ministry asked for technical assistance from the European Commission and the Structural Reform Support Services (SRSS). A Brussels-based NGO, the European Association for People with Disabilities (EASPD), was awarded a 200.000 contract by SRSS to draw up a deinstitutionalisation plan for Greece.

In July 2019, national elections were called, SYRIZA lost power, and New Democracy found itself in government. Domna Michailidou became the new Minister. 

EASPD presented a draft paper on a national deinstitutionalisation strategy to the Ministry, as well as several experts, in January 2020. Presumably, somewhere at the end of this process, the promise made to the Lechaina residents through the emergency intervention, that they may have a chance to leave institutionalised living behind, might eventually be fulfilled. For the time being, though, they have to wait and endure - again.

When asked about the feelings their experiences at Lechaina have left them with, everyone we spoke to gave the same reply: frustration. Antonis Rellas’ response, when asked about his hopes at the start of filming the documentary, was riveting: “I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that the announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the biological family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That someone would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.”

Frustration, then, and sadness. “For us," Rellas said, "the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen and sadly, it is not mobilising.  That is the heart of the matter. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.”

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

In the spring of 2011, the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, was running the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect. As they were processing their results, during the summer, they noticed what seemed like an anomaly. In the results from the Region of Rethymno, in Crete, there appeared an extremely high rate of self-reported sexual victimisation of boys and almost a complete reversal of the boy to girl ratio.

“We could not explain it,” George Nikolaidis, Director of the Department, told us. “We speculated it must be due to a technical error.”

It was not an error. On December 1st, 2011, the police arrested a school basketball coach, Nikos Seiragakis, who also coached the local youth basketball team, AGOR. He was charged with molesting dozens of children.

It was this man’s activity that produced the “anomaly” in the BECAN results.

A methodical police operation

A few days after the coach was arrested, the Rethymno police chief, Manolis Paradoulakis, told the press that this was “a systematic and methodical police operation,” which “happened in the shortest time possible”.((The statement is available (in Greek) via the <em>local</em> TV <strong>Creta</strong> station.))  

The chief’s emphasis on the “shortest time” seemed to anticipate the question that soon emerged, why there had been a thirteen-month interval between the time when two families went to the police with allegations that the coach was abusing their children, and the time of the arrest. 

The chief maintained that there had been “rumors” rather than allegations, despite the fact that the two families of immigrant workers had eponymously denounced the coach to the police. He then explained that the police investigated the “rumors” and “discreetly” gathered evidence, in order to determine whether there was any merit to the case. When they found that there was, they proceeded to build the case in collaboration with the Rethymno prosecutor at the time, Maria Dimitriadou, a process which took more than a year, because they wanted to make sure the evidence was solid. “The arrest,” the chief said, “was made in the shortest possible time, as soon as there was complete corroboration of the case with incontrovertible evidence.”

When, during our visit to the Department for the Protection of Minors in the General Police Directorate of Attica, we discussed police handling of child abuse cases, we were told that from an operational point of view, a coach is one of the “easiest” types of perpetrator to catch. “If he is a coach,” the officers told us, “there are more victims”. When, however, we specifically referred to the Rethymno case, the officers said that they had not personally conducted the operation, so they could not comment in detail. 

The possibility that the authorities attempted to preempt any discussion on the police’s choice of timing is strengthened by the fact that Manolis Othonas, Deputy Minister for Citizen protection and Member of Parliament for Rethymno at the time, was already reassuring reporters that there had been no delays, two days before the police chief officially briefed the press on the operation. He commended the police on turning “whispers” into “a case”, and dismissed allegations that the coach had enjoyed some sort of “protection” due to his supposed standing in Rethymno society.

This was contradicted by the Manager of AGOR at the time, Vassilis Theodoroulakis, who stated in an interview that he had been unofficially informed by a police officer about the allegations against the coach, about three months after they happened. He then informed the team’s Board of Directors, who he says did nothing, in order not to damage the team’s reputation. The Board has denied the accusation.  

What is undisputed, however, is that during the time that elapsed between the allegations of the two migrant families against the coach and his arrest, no child protection official or professional was alerted to protect the interests of the children. The decision to prolong the children’s plight for over a year was made without the intervention of any part of the child protection system.

An esteemed member of local society

When we visited Rethymno, in autumn 2018, the weather was rainy. The wet buildings in the old town, dating from Rethymno’s Venetian period, the castle, the lighthouse hidden in the fog, all painted a highly unusual picture for non-locals who stereotypically associate Crete only with summer tourism. We kept wondering how in this town of 40.000 people, which looked even smaller without the summer crowds, it was possible for someone to systematically abuse dozens of children for years, without anybody ever noticing a thing? 

In the old town, opposite the renowned Rimondi fountain, we met with Chara Vilara, an experienced local journalist, who had followed the case closely.

“It was a chronic situation,” she told us. “Obviously, it wasn’t going on for just one or two years, it went back quite a lot. Some of the children had grown up when it became public. There were many children who knew, who weren’t a part of it, but knew and didn’t speak. It touched many families, both directly and indirectly.”

Everyone we spoke with agreed that coach Nikos Seiragakis was an important member of Rethymno society. He had been one of the organisers of the “Treasure Hunt”, a popular yearly event. He was esteemed in the “old town”, meaning the circles of Rethymno’s aristocratic families, and he was well connected in local politics. His contacts reached into the Greek national basketball team, and even the American NBA. Those who know say that children thought of him as a mentor. He was a good speaker, and when he coached, nobody made a sound.

Under strict discipline, the coach had created a kind of “sect”. He approached his students with the promise of admittance to an inner circle, to which only a select few could belong. He used pseudo-historical references to military training in ancient Greece, in order to convince them that in this way they would form a tighter bond with their teammates and become better athletes. Through a series of “trials”, aimed at wresting a kind of “consent” from the children, a process known as “grooming”, the coach initially encouraged them to sexually engage with each other, and subsequently molested them himself. His influence on them was so strong that some students actually defended his actions.

“The big question,” Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, told us, “is how the perpetrator selects the children, how the grooming actually happens. Which children does he choose? Well, he chooses vulnerable children, ones without strong family bonds. Children with certain disadvantages, foreigners, the disabled, or children who are emotionally neglected. He finds cracks. He comes as a mentor. As a protector. Then comes the second step: trust. Privileges. And then comes submission. This can take a long time. At that point, children gradually realise what is going on. So, there is a stage of transferring responsibility: whoever doesn’t want this, can get up and leave now. That’s the transfer: it is you who wants this. And when there is a collective situation, a sharing within a group, it is even more difficult to break this chain. Children understand they are trapped. They stay at this stage of entrapment for many years. This can happen in any abusive relationship. We call it ‘learned helplessness’. Most children will never tell. Some will tell when they cannot bear it any longer. Or because they may see their younger siblings or other loved ones victimised. Or a random event may trigger it off. And then, after a long time, they will tell. Some will have already become adults.”

Coach Nikos Seiragakis was initially charged with 53 counts of child molestation, and convicted on 36 counts. His sentence of 400 years imprisonment was upheld by the Appeals Court, which heard his appeal in 2016. 

During our visit to Rethymno, we were told by people, who spoke to us on the condition of preserving their anonymity, that the number of victims not included in the charges probably raised the total to over one hundred children. 

Seiragakis was conditionally released, according to the provisions of Greek law, at the end of April 2020, after serving eight years and five months. The conditions of his release stipulate that he cannot live in, or visit Rethymno. A few days later, he was arrested again for breaching the conditions of his release. The decision on whether he will remain free or return to prison is pending.

Inherent resistance

In mid December 2011, a conference on child protection took place in Heraklion, the capital of Crete, as part of the Council of Europe’s “One in Five” campaign. ((“One in Five” was a campaign by the Council of Europe to stop sexual violence against children, which was initiated in 2010 and branched out into national campaigns, which were handled by member-states, in the following years. Its title is based on data, which suggest that about 1 in 5 children in Europe are victims of some form of sexual violence.)) The conference had been planned before the Rethymno child abuse case was made public, but, as George Nikolaidis remembers, when he arrived in Crete, everyone was understandably talking about little else.  

“I went to Rethymno the following day,” Nikolaidis told us, “and because of my occupation, I attended a meeting with the municipality, the region and the local authorities. I was then asked to make a proposal, which I submitted both to the local authorities and the relevant ministries at the end of December 2011. It was a proposal on the actions that needed to be taken, given the scope of the case, whose extent we did not know, but it appeared to be a mass case.”

After a meeting of relevant ministries and authorities, it was decided that the proposal by the Institute of Child Health should be implemented. The lack of resources, exacerbated by the financial crisis, was addressed by allocating European Union NSFR funds to the programme. Still, it took about a year for the intervention to begin.

“This is indicative of how unwieldy the Greek public sector can be, even when it comes to projects it funds and the political will is present,” Nikolaidis said.

In the event, the unit for Comprehensive Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”. ((The unit’s website (in Greek) is still active, despite the programme’s termination.))

“At the same time,” he told us, “we ran a widely accessible health promotion campaign on the subject of child abuse, children’s sexuality, the children’s right to their body, and so on, at all levels of education in the whole of the Region of Rethymno, that is to say, primary and secondary schools, students, parents and teachers. We also trained personnel at various services, we held educational actions for coaches and sportspeople. Because we were immediately visited by the coaches’ association and told, “We don’t dare touch the children, you can’t coach children and be afraid to touch them at the same time.” Therefore, we had to impart all the international know-how about how it is possible to have both child protection processes in place and still function as a sports space.” 

Despite the obvious need for intervention in the consequences of a case that had affected dozens of families, Nikolaidis told us that the programme faced what he terms “inherent resistance”. “I believe,” he said, “that at least some of the local actors preferred to forget this incident had ever happened rather than work to enable the local community to get over it. There was a fairly strong tendency to sweep everything under the rug.”

Chara Vilara shared with us a similar perspective. “After the events came to light,” she said, “many parents punished their children, they beat them up, because they believed it had been the children’s fault. And other families never dealt with it at all. Like it never happened. Some, of course, did try to help their children, but what really made an impression on me was that when the police brought the coach to court, there was no one outside. Nobody went to protest, to vent, even. If it had been someone else, there would have been a crowd outside, there would have been shouting, all hell would have broken loose. This is telling, because these children belonged to the local social elite. These people want to cover up what happened.” 

Although Nikolaidis and his team managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, in the autumn of 2014 resources were exhausted. 

“We were informed by the political leadership,” Nikolaidis told us, “that their decision was to shut down the unit permanently, which was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field. There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health’s Action Plan on Children’s rights, which was published online for public debate during the pre-election period, in November 2014, included an extension of the Rethymno programme, funded through the NSFR 2014-2020. But the January 2015 elections brought a change of government, and any plans to extend the programme were quietly dropped.

Out of the sky

On the hill that overlooks Rethymno harbour stands an austere concrete building, which at the time of our visit temporarily housed the Rethymno Mental Health Centre. We were greeted by its director, psychiatrist, psychodramatist and actor, Antonis Liodakis.

He was of the opinion that the Rethymno programme had been “interjected”, and had “dropped out of the sky”. “In the sense,” he explained, “that these professionals from Athens were coming here to see children, parents, other cases, the whole thing functioned like a medico-paedagogic centre.”

Chara Vilara, on the other hand, points out that the children were under immense pressure, “because other kids knew and made fun of them”. “So, they went to private psychiatrists in Chania and Heraklion, because they were afraid of the stigma.”

George Nikolaidis’s experience seemed to echo Vilara’s observation: “One of the criticisms we received,” he said “was that the personnel employed in our intervention did not come from the local community, did not come from Rethymno. But I believe that was a very intelligent choice if anyone involved in the events back then recalls the mood of the local community at the time.  In every new incident, our personnel, the psychologists, the social workers, the child psychologists who worked with us, were asked by those they saw whether they were from Rethymno. The moment they heard, “No, I’m from elsewhere,” there was a huge wave of relief and then they shared their suffering, which they would probably not have done had the personnel been local. So, let’s just say there was some discontent that we did not support local employment. But we chose to make communication for the beneficiaries easier and more effective.”

Antonis Liodakis, however, pressed his point: “We had already identified the key issues since 2008,” he told us. “We have been asking for the creation of a medico-paedagogic centre with every opportunity.”

Nikolaidis makes no secret of his surprise that the programme was discontinued. “Until the very last minute,” he said “people close to the political leadership of the time, the political actors in Rethymno, were reassuring us that an extension would be granted, as there was evidently no other solution. I cannot know what could have possibly happened overnight to change that decision.” And he added: “All I know is that any efforts made in the immediate aftermath for questions on this matter to be tabled in Parliament by SYRIZA, the main opposition party at the time, ultimately failed. Incidentally, SYRIZA’s health coordinator in opposition was Andreas Xanthos, who subsequently became Minister of Health in the following government, and who is also the local MP for the Region of Rethymno.”

After SYRIZA came to power in January 2015, it took the new government two years to come up with its own “Action Plan” on child protection. The Rethymno programme was not a part of it, and it was never reinstated.

Antonis Liodakis started working in consulting groups in the Ministry of Health and joined Andreas Xanthos in official SYRIZA events on public health. In 2017, Xanthos approved Liodakis’s plans for the medico-pedagogic centre, with himself as director.

Katerina Papakosta

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• Deputy Minister (former) • Ministry for Citizen Protection
• Deputy Minister (former) • Ministry of Health
• Member of Parliament (former) • New Democracy, independent

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Modern Greek history has seen its fair share of brutalities, but few among them have been as little discussed as the ways in which children have been mistreated, abused, neglected and institutionalised by the State. From the late 19th century, when a prototype welfare system was first put in place under the Greek Royal Family, all the way to the nationalisation of welfare from the 1970s onwards, one constant has been that children have concerned the State as props in the political game or as potential perpetrators of crime — usually both. This chronic undermining of children’s rights affected most aspects of the public sector; and its traces are still visible today.

A recent video of a policeman beating up an eleven-year-old child in the outskirts of Athens, that surfaced on social media, raised the question of what ideas police and other authorities continue to have regarding the treatment of minors — whether suspected offenders or not. ((The video is available (in Greek) here, from ERT, the Greek Public Broadcaster.)) The Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, took to Twitter to condemn the incident, stating that “whoever hits minors does not have a place anywhere”. ((Tweet is available (in Greek) here.)) The speed of the Minister’s reflexes can perhaps be explained by the fact that the memory of the 2008 murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, shot by a police officer in downtown Athens, is still fresh. 

The consequences of Grigoropoulos’s murder were staggering: Athens, and other Greek cities, burned during spontaneous riots that lasted for weeks. But the mistreatment of children by officials has also been documented in many other, less explosive, instances: some research has shown that children victims of abuse have been made to recount their ordeal to authorities up to fourteen times, in what cleary amounts to secondary abuse in the hands of the State; children who have been removed from their families are kept in hospitals, despite not being in need of hospitalisation, sometimes for years; and at least one institution has been strapping disabled children to their beds and locking them in cages. ((See our detailed report on the Lechaina unit for children with disabilities: "Hell as an Institution".)) Authorities have described such practices as unavoidable, necessary, or “for the good of the children”.

It is impossible to explain the persistence of such practices, at least in part, without considering the way that historical events have shaped Greek authorities’ attitudes toward minors. 

In the Hands of the Lord

Institutionalisation of children had been introduced very soon after the foundation of the Greek State, with the City of Athens already operating an Orphanage for Abandoned Infants in 1838. However, a quasi-system of fostering also existed, with foster families often paid a meagre fee to host abandoned children, and institutionalisation was in part seen as a solution to abuse and neglect within this unregulated framework. 

The Athens Municipal Nursery was founded by the city’s Mayor in 1859, and brought under the auspices of the Royal Family in the 1870s. According to its own data, between its foundation and the mid 1960s, it hosted over 50.000 children. During its peak, it hosted about 600 at one time. As Maria Athanassopoulou and Marianna Drakopoulou write in their Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece, it was within the Municipal Nursery that the first attempts were made to systematically document child ailments and statistically study infant mortality. ((See Maria Athanasopoulou, Mariana Drakopoulou, A Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece (Istoriki anadromi gia ta ektheta vrefi stin Ellada), To Vima tou Asklipiou, tome 9, issue 1, Jan-March 2010, available online (in Greek) here.)) 

As was common in many countries — and remains today — the Municipal Nursery also introduced a vrefodohos, or baby hatch, where mothers could abandon their babies anonymously. On the outside, there was an inscription from Psalm 27: “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.” 

Also on the initiative of the Royal family, the Patriotic Foundation for Social Welfare and Perception, or PIKPA, was founded in 1914, initially as the “Patriotic Association of Greek Women”. Although its initial mandate was to cater for the families of soldiers fighting in the war, after the 1920s it gradually shifted to the sheltering of orphaned and displaced children. 

By the end of the 1930s, even the few progressive ideas about government and lawmaking that had emerged in Greece during the interwar period had been snuffed out — first by dictatorship, then by war and occupation. Civil war followed, then two decades of “feeble democracy” and a military junta, until a tumultuous return to democratic politics finally led to stability and the relative strengthening of public institutions. Only then, near the end of a seventy year period, did a political consensus appear that the State should provide a safety net for children, who had either broken the law or been neglected or abused. 

The Youth Problem

Dictator Ioannis Metaxas ruled Greece from 1936 to 1941, a period known as the 4th of August Regime. Although his legacy of oppression has been somewhat tempered by the fact that he denied fascist Italy’s demand to allow Italian troops to occupy Greek territory, his regime was totalitarian and he was an admirer of fascism. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had reciprocated Metaxas’s admiration in his official visit to Greece in 1936. Although the 4th of August Regime was not in the strictest sense fascist, and Metaxas personally was more influenced by Portugese dictator António Salazar, it did have common traits with fascism and nazism, including the targeting of youth for indoctrination. In 1936, Metaxas created the National Union of Youth, or EON, the Greek version of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio and the Hitlerjugend, which sought to shape minors into future supporters — if not functionaries — of the regime.

As was the case with every other fascist government in Europe, Metaxas’s policy choices often attempted to counter the voices pushing for progressive reforms, inspired by European Social Democracy that had bloomed in the beginning of the century. In her 2013 book “Youth in Peril: Supervision, Reformation and Justice for Minors after the War” ((«Νέοι εν κινδύνω»: Επιτήρηση, αναμόρφωση και δικαιοσύνη ανηλίκων μετά τον πόλεμο», Polis publications, 2013)), Efi Avdela, a Professor of Modern History in the University of Crete, has written about a number of progressive sociologists, legal theorists, feminists and socialists in the interwar era, who advocated among other things in favour of introducing welfare instead of penalisation for minors. According to Avdela’s account, the “criminalisation vs. welfare” debate would go on for decades after the war, although the scales would always tip heavily towards the former.

Two laws by the Metaxas government would cement the idea that children in peril should be treated as criminals (with all the implications that this word entailed at the time) to be reformed, instead of more progressive approaches to welfare. In December 1939, a law introduced Judges and Prosecutors for Minors. A year later, after Greece had entered the war against the Axis, a concise plan on operating reforming institutions was made into law, introducing two new entities subject to the State Prosecutor: the State Prefect for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors. They were both mainly tasked with guiding minors through the justice system, whether that meant carrying out social research on a minor’s background, or providing support for the minor that went through the system. They were mostly staffed by volunteers.

A month after passing the 1940 law, with Greece on the brink of Axis occupation, Metaxas died. But conservative conceptions of juvenile delinquency were crystallised in his laws, and the newly founded entities began working on minors, although their practices were modified to also address the humanitarian crisis caused by the occupation. According to Avdela’s findings, 4.600 minors went through the justice system in 1941 alone, but most of the volunteers’ work was focused on gathering and distributing food and clothing.

From 1947 onwards, some Societies for the Protection of Minors began operating their own institutions, which provided an interim shelter for rehabilitation between the time a minor was released from a reformation centre and the time they went free back to society. Until the fall of the Military Junta, in 1974, when Greek state institutions would gradually become more “liberalised”, the Prefects for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors would deal with all sorts of “moral panics” that focused on youth cultures: “teddy-boyism”, rock ‘n’ roll, sexual liberation and leftism — all filed under “anti-social behaviour”.

War, Children

During the Greek Civil War, the issue of child protection took a darker turn for both competing sides, and the particulars of what actually happened are subject to debate until today. In 1947, the United States of America began providing military, technical and financial assistance to the Greek government and its National Army against the Democratic Army of Greece, formed by the Greek Communist Party and former resistance guerrillas. The scale of U.S. military assistance meant that the government could now launch air attacks against guerrilla strongholds, which included the first documented use of napalm bombs. 

From 1948, when the war scales started tipping in favour of the government, the guerillas began transferring children away from the conflict zones of northern Greece that were being bombed, to countries of the Eastern Bloc. Pro-government voices named this paidomazoma (literally, “child-gathering”), after the much older practice of Devshirme, or “child levy”, in which Ottoman authorities abducted children from among their Balkan Christian subjects, converted them to Islam and trained them for military or civil service. Pro-Democratic Army voices, in turn, countered by calling the practice paidososimo (“child-saving”) or sotiria (“salvation”). Up to this day, left-wing and progressive historians have been debating with conservatives, as well as the far-right, on whether this was a humanitarian operation or recruitment.

A year earlier, Paul I had ascended the throne of the Kingdom of Greece and his wife, Frederica of Hanover, had become Queen. More than any of her predecessors or successors, Frederica was actively involved in politics and was often in the public spotlight.

Τhe Royal Family of Greece had patronised all sorts of high-society philanthropic societies since the 19th century, among which several devoted to children, with a special focus on juvenile delinquency. Frederica combined the Royal Family’s tradition of philanthropy with her own penchant for politics, and began an operation parallel to the guerrillas’ paidomazoma, thereby removing children from conflict zones and placing them in special institutions that she founded, called Paidopoleis (“Child cities”). 

This operation, introduced by Royal Decree in 1947, was named the “Charity Drive ‘Welfare for the Northern Provinces of Greece’ Under the High Authority of Her Majesty, the Queen”, although everyone would refer to it simply as Charity Drive (Eranos in Greek), or after 1955 as Royal Welfare. It was carried out by the National Army. Fifty-two such Paidopoleis were opened all over Greece, all working under a similar model: a strict upbringing, and a daily military-style regimen that would inscribe “proper values” to children.

During her youth in Hanover, Frederica had been a member of the Hitler Youth, and in Greece she was considered sympathetic towards the Nazi regime (as well as the United States). In his book on the children of the civil war ((Λουκιανός Χασιώτης, Τα Παιδιά του Εμφυλίου, Βιβλιοπωλείο της Εστίας, 2013)), historian Loukianos Hasiotis claims that the Charity Drive was at least partially modelled after the Franco regime’s Auxilio Social, which employed similar messages. 

Since the Greek Civil War is now widely accepted as the first episode of the Cold War, it should come as no surprise that the conflict over children was also played out on an international level. The Greek government branded the removal of children from conflict zones by the guerrillas as a “genocide”, a position accepted by the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) in its 1948 report. The idea was also promoted by officials with prominent positions on the international stage, like the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul. The United Nations Committee was tasked with investigating what the guerrillas were doing — but, naturally, not what was happening in the Paidopoleis. 

Thus, until historical research caught up, what is known about the Paidopoleis of the era mostly came from oral narratives of the children that grew up in them. In 2007, when a popular historical programme on Greek television, The Time Machine, aired two episodes about the children of the Civil War, the testimonies of people that had lived in the Paidopoleis during their childhood were divergent even within the same episode. This disagreement in testimonies of the children, now in their old age, persists in the popular press to this day.((See, for expample, Marina Karpozilou, “Growing up in Frederica’s Pedopoleis: The ‘Guerrilla-striken children of the ‘Big Mother’” (in Greek: “Μεγαλώνοντας στις παιδουπόλεις της Φρειδερίκης: Τα 'ανταρτόπληκτα' παιδιά της 'Μεγάλης Μητέρας'”), News247.gr, 9/1/2016)) Some reminisce about their time in the Pedopoleis with nostalgia and others with a more critical view, even sparking literary debates: in his 2009 book, The Blurry Deep ((Γιάννης Ατζακάς, Ο Θολός Βυθός, Άγρα)), author Yiannis Atzakas recalls his time in a Paidopoli as trauma haunting him well into his middle age, while Antonis Venetis, in his 2014 book Letters ((Αντώνης Ν. Βενέτης, Επιστολές, Αρμός)) considers Frederica’s Drive beneficial to children and states his belief that “the ‘blurry deep’ can only be found in fixations, prejudices and obsessions”.

Under Frederica, the PIKPA became the second pillar of childcare, a sort of supplement to the Paidopoleis, housing children that had been orphaned in the war. PIKPA structures followed a similar regiment of strict, military-style upbringing and carried out adoptions, as well as absorbed some of the prominent figures of Frederica’s Charity Drive. Lina Tsaldari, the widow of former Prime Minister Panagis Tsaldaris, was one of the aristocratic “Appointed Ladies” who actively participated in the Charity Drive. Ιn 1950 she became the President of PIKPA.

The third pillar of Frederica’s childcare initiatives was the “Houses of the Child”. These were small daycare centers in the villages of rural Greece (mainly in the north) that after 1950 started taking in children while their parents were working. Without a public education system in place, especially in these remote areas, the Houses of the Child, 140 in total, acted as a nursery or elementary school — with a twist. In them, children would be taught farming and technical skills, while also being indoctrinated with “religious and patriotic values”.

The Eranos might have been Frederica's personal project, but its funding was very much public. Royal Welfare was funded by special import taxes, tariffs on cigarettes (two cigarettes in every pack), percentages of cinema tickets, a part of workers’ wages, and other measures. Researchers have calculated that between 1949 and 1956, the Royal Welfare Foundation took in more than 186 million drachmas — and a lot more after that.((More information on relevant activities by the Greek Royal Family is available (in Greek) in research by the Ios journalistic outfit.))

For the majority of children that were taken to Eastern Bloc countries, it wasn’t until the 1980s and the campaign of the centre-left PASOK government for the right-of-return of political refugees that they would see Greece again.

Leftists and progressives have been claiming for decades that the Charity Drive was the real paidomazoma. In any case, after the Democratic Army’s defeat and the end of the Civil War, only 14 of the paidopoleis continued to operate. Nowadays, four of them are still working as institutions for children without families.

Searching for Roots

Mary Theodoropoulou runs “Roots”, an NGO, from a small apartment in Kesariani. Historically known as the place where in 1944 the Nazis executed 200 communist political prisoners that had like many others been handed over to them by the collaborationist authorities, Kaisariani is a working class neighborhood in Athens, where the Communist Party still gets one of its highest percentages. 

Abandoned as a newborn in the Athens Municipal Nursery baby hatch, Theodoropoulou has often appeared in the media talking about her quest to find her biological parents, after she discovered in her twenties that she had been adopted. Her efforts to date have not been successful. She and seven others, all of whom had also stayed at the Municipal Nursery as children, founded the NGO in the late 1990s, to help people search for their biological parents.

Theodoropoulou has done extensive work on institutions. Not only did Rizes produce the only comprehensive study that looked into the state of Greek institutions for children in 2015, but her work on tracing the roots of adopted children means she has heard a massive amount of personal stories about what has been happening inside these institutions.

After World War II, according to Theodoropoulou, there was a further, major shift towards institutionalisation. “The practice of trofoi, foster mothers that were paid to breast-feed and take care of babies, had been in place since the late nineteenth century,” she said. “A shortage of milk and absolute poverty meant that babies would die otherwise”. State institutions mostly acted as halfway houses that would assign a newborn to a trofos after a short stay. Later, after the War, the trofoi acted as a means to relieve the institutions from the strain caused by the huge numbers of children.

Theodoropoulou told us how, after the war was over, the trofoi framework was expanded. PIKPA, which took care of many of the orphaned or abandoned children, would now hand them over to families, some of whom took in numerous children. “But there was no framework,” she said. “There were no rules on hygiene, no supervision and the remuneration of foster parents was low and infrequent. A trofos would bring back the body of a baby she had taken in and say to the Nursery staff that ‘this is frozen’ — meaning dead. In other cases, foster families abandoned children all over again. There were also cases of abuse, even rape. All these things undermined foster care and institutions gained ground.”

The suffering of children that went through the foster care system unsupervised could be prolonged even after they were out of it. Theodoropoulou told us the story of a boy who tried to report that his foster parents had sexually abused him. He was deemed mentally ill and forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution. In other cases, disabled children, and children with mental illness or developmental problems, would end up in the PIKPA of Leros, founded in 1963 to take in children from the Public Pediatric Neuropsychiatric Hospital “Daou Pentelis”, as part of the overall project of transferring — and isolating — the mentally ill from all over the country to Leros. The PIKPA of Leros formed part of the so-called “Psychopath Colony”, established on the island in 1957, and now known as the infamous kolastirio (“hellhole”). Many of those committed to the kolastirio would not leave until an international deinstitutionalisation initiative in the 1990s, funded by the EU, after a series of stories in the international press and a documentary had revealed the horrible conditions to which patients had been subjected. ((Deinstitutionalization in Leros has been documented in various sources. Psychiatrists who participated in the process like Ιοannis Loukas, Ιοannis Tsiantis, Theodoros Megalooikonomou and Felix Guattari, among others, have all written their own accounts and commentaries on it.))

Since 1939, when it came under the authority of the Ministry of Health, PIKPA has gone through a great number of changes in administrative structure and oversight, but by the 1950s and 1960s, it expanded almost to the size of a full healthcare and welfare system for minors. At its peak, its services included everything from schools for medical personnel and mobile medical units to clinics, hospitals and nursery schools. Since 1925, it had also been operating summer camps from June to the end of September for quality time and healing for children suffering from tuberculosis. The “exoches”, as they were called, stopped during the war, but began operating again after 1945. In 1948, their mandate was expanded to accept impoverished children with problems in development, or any chronic disease, and in 1951 to include working children, and all children monitored by doctors. In 1956, PIKPA put together its first structure for disabled children in Voula. Gradually, it would end up running most of the institutions for disabled children in Greece. 

Institutionalisation in the Paidopoleis, the orphanages and the nurseries gave rise to a different problem that haunts families until today: illegal adoptions. In her memoirs, Frederica had claimed that communist women had been abandoning their children and even that she witnessed a woman literally throwing her baby away, which was supposedly picked up by an army officer and handed over to her. After the military junta of 1967-1974 fell, communist guerrillas that had been exiled in camps in the islands reported that their children were abducted from there. In fact, the children were taken to the Paidopoleis or the PIKPA, and were then sold to foster parents in the United States, often assisted by officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, as well as Greek-American Organisations ((The Greek-American Organization AHEPA was found to have been involved in a trafficking ring for children - see, for example: The adopted Greek children of the Cold War, Margarita Pournara | Kathimerini)). Although the Greek press had published stories on the issue since the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1996 when U.S. media would start digging into the story and get to the bottom of it, that the full extent of what had happened would be revealed.

Discovering the Victim

After King Constantine’s failed counter-coup attempt against the Military Junta, in December 1967, the Royal Family was forced to flee the country. So, in a strange twist of fate, it was the dictators who brought welfare, including child protection, under the purview of the State. With a Law Decree, in 1970, all the Royal Foundations and Charities — along with their funding provisions — were absorbed into the National Welfare Organisation. Their role did not change significantly for the next decade, although Greece’s evolution into a more advanced economy, after the long and tumultuous process of post-war reconstruction, meant that the numbers of children in peril would gradually start to decrease.

It wasn’t until 1981, when centre-left PASOK came to power, that the welfare system would advance into the next phase. One of PASOK’s most important and enduring achievements was the creation of the National Healthcare System, or ESY, in 1983, which put in place a concise framework for healthcare that also included aspects of welfare. The Ministry overseeing it was now renamed the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The first eight years of PASOK in power, from 1981 to 1989, included many decisive progressive reforms in worker’s rights, civil rights and education, but welfare was still mostly understood as benefits, and were lagging behind the drastic changes overtaking Greek society. Not only did the National Welfare Organisation go through no significant change in the 1970s and 1980s, but especially with regard to child protection, the idea of preventing victimisation and abuse, although gaining traction in Europe, was not present in any sector of the Greek state.

Xeni Dimitriou, the former Chief Prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court, has served three tenures as a State Prosecutor for Minors over three different decades. She has gone through thousands of pages of legal theory on children, attended hundreds of conferences and exchanged opinions with dozens of other prosecutors all over the world. When we met her, shortly after her recent retirement, she spoke to us about her firsthand experience of what Greece’s long refusal to acknowledge the victimisation of children had led to. In her early days as Prosecutor for Minors in the 1980s — ”an unprivileged position, almost a punishment back then” — she witnessed time and again policemen marching into her office with arrested children that had been severely beaten. One boy came in with massively swollen ears. He told her that they had put clothespins in his ears to interrogate him and had hanged him upside down from the precinct’s balcony to scare him into confessing. In other cases, following the letter of the law, she was forced to put six and seven-year-old kids on trial, or send underage lawbreakers away in institutions that were practically prisons.

Dimitriou referred to Kalliopi Spinelli, a well-known criminologist as her “teacher, the teacher of all of us”. Spinelli is credited, among many things, with proposing the replacement of the term “juvenile criminals” with “juvenile offenders”, and with advocating for a pedagogical instead of a penal approach to justice for the underage. A few other prominent legal theorists and professionals gradually began to advocate for a different relation between the children and the State.

Modern international ideas on children’s rights speak only of “victims,” Dimitriou insisted. “We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking,” she said. “Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who took that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world. The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold aspect. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold aspect. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim. Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.”

In a conference speech Dimitriou gave in 1991, in-between her tenures as Prosecutor for Minors, she said that a bill for “Units of Care for Minors” had been drafted since 1984. The purpose of the plan was to set up a structure so that “juvenile offenders until 12 years of age would not be involved in any way with suppression mechanisms such as the police, the Prosecutor and the Court for Minors, but would be taken care by welfare services instead”. She then went on to describe best practices found in existing institutions — stopping at one point to wonder whether “it’s time to legislate that juvenile delinquents could be placed into foster families. The society responds positively. Why delay any more?”

Dimitriou’s 1991 speech echoed the ideas that would start to shape new concepts of child welfare. In 1985 and 1990, the UN had published guidelines on handing justice to juvenile delinquents and the prevention of delinquency in minors respectively. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was also signed at the time.

Things were changing, but in the case of Greece, the pace was and remains slow. The Greek governments of the 1990s made a few attempts to modernise the welfare system, or rather to establish one, since throughout their evolution the various services had operated independently. In 1992, a law practically dissolved the National Welfare Organisation and the PIKPA, in an attempt to create a unified system that was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. 

Another law, in the same year, introduced legal procedures for foster care and was amended in 1996, by adding a stricter framework for the role of social investigations in adoption and foster parenting procedures. That law also took an important step by changing Metaxas’s laws to introduce social services in the courts and the State Prosecutor offices, although their mandate remained to handle the delinquency of minors. 

Probably the most important step at the time was taken in 1998 by another PASOK government, this time under Prime Minister Kostas Simitis, when the creation of a National System of Social Care was attempted. In the following years, the former PIKPA units were successively centralised, then decentralised again. Generally under the oversight of regional administration, these units followed divergent courses. One post-PIKPA incarnation, the Lechaina unit for disabled children, achieved world-wide notoriety for its horrific conditions.

The new system gave explicit roles to regional governments, but also cleared up the terms under which private NGO’s could carry out welfare programmes. Thus, the 1990s was also the decade when NGOs would increasingly start to step in and cover for the shortcomings in child protection. The Greek branch of SOS Children’s Villages had been active since 1975, but now non-government care for children would diversify. The Smile of the Child was created in 1995 and The Ark of the World would follow in 1998. All three of these organisations would grow in the years that followed and actively supplement state welfare. 

The decade ended with a presidential decree in 1999 that attempted to contain illegal adoptions by also giving all oversight responsibilities to regional welfare services — Regional institutions and Directorates of Social Care. With an amendment in 2003, even more welfare responsibilities would be directed to the Regional Health Services that had been created a year earlier. According to the explanatory report that came with the draft of the bill, this would allow for “better coordination, monitoring and evaluation” of social welfare services. The UN Committee overseeing the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child noted this attempt, but still found it fell short of a coherent Child Protection System. Some of the problems highlighted by the Committee included the lack of a clear mandate between authorities and a central body that would coordinate all services, problems that are still partially present to this day.

Xeni Dimitriou’s 1991 speech ended by saying that “maybe it is time for juvenile law to grow up”. It marked the beginning of a period of intense pressure by child protection professionals for a proper children’s welfare system to be designed and implemented. But in the 1990s, a welfare system that would address problems that could not be solved with benefits was still a challenge. Also, the word deinstitutionalization had just been popularised for the first time after the attempts to change conditions in Leros, but that programme, which continued for the best part of the decade, would suffer setbacks. Voices of experts speaking about the need to address different vulnerabilities or how institutionalised child welfare could actually be harmful, were only just beginning to be heard.

As it happens, the regressive character of children’s welfare was officially, albeit mostly symbolically, challenged in 2010, by an amendment to a law of the Metaxas regime, mandating the Societies for the Protection of Minors to not only deal with “delinquency”, but also the “victimisation” of minors.

However, just as the need to shift the focus of the child protection system was becoming obvious to policy-makers, Greece found itself in the throes of a terrible financial crisis. Successive governments have since then introduced a variety of “plans” for children’s welfare, which have one thing in common: almost none of their provisions have been implemented.

Anastasios Papaligouras

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Over a year ago, an unprecedented advertising campaign appeared in the streets of Athens: part of it was authorless and guerrilla-like, graffiti or banners hanging on road bridges and overpasses with slogans such as “joint custody” and “dads are not visitors, they are parents”; and part of it had the hallmarks of high-powered lobbying, with posters calling for “equal time with both parents” and “alternating homes” covering advertising spaces in bus stops all over the city.

The bus stop posters, sponsored by Politis Group, a major street advertising company, bore the logo of an organisation named “Active Dads for Children’s Rights”. Other organisations, such as the “Joint Custody Association”, and the Association GON.IS., also became more vocal in the press and in social media in advocating for the overhaul of child custody laws. 

A few months previously, the minister of Justice, Kostas Tsiaras, had appointed a legislative committee tasked with drafting a bill that would reform Greek family law. Konstantinos Bogdanos, a member of Parliament for New Democracy, whose candidacy and parliamentary tenure have been as controversial as his preceding journalistic career, boasted in a social media post that it was thanks to his own efforts that the protection of "dads' rights", to be achieved through the new bill, came to the attention of the minister. Bogdanos claimed he had been alerted to the issue by Nikos Tsilipounidakis, a journalist connected with the Joint Custody Association. Bogdanos called him a "dynamic dad".

The street campaign turned the pressure up. As the Joint Custody Association was quick to point out to its followers, there was no guarantee that the committee would move in a direction favourable to the association’s demands. 

These demands targeted what the Joint Custody Association and the other groups considered unjust privileges accorded by the courts to mothers after a divorce, such as exclusive custody over the children. Their proposed solution was for the government to legislate that children after a divorce would by default spend equal time with both parents, within a regime of “shared parenting”, meaning that a child would live half the time with one parent and half with the other. 

Through the efforts of such groups, similar legislative measures, concisely known as “joint custody”, had been pursued by some sympathetic — or misled — politicians over the years, but they never went beyond the stage of an informal meeting, a proposed amendment or at most a draft bill that never left a minister’s desk drawer.  

The danger that the same would happen in this case, according to the Joint Custody Association, lay in the fact that Ioannis Tentes, an emeritus chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court and chairman of the Society of Family Law, was appointed to head the legislative committee. Members of the Society of Family Law, a scientific association of legal scholars, lawyers and judges, some of whom are also former politicians, had previously taken a public position against “joint custody”.

According to official sources, 70% of divorces during 2017 in Greece were consensual. Members of Parliament both for the government and the opposition cited additional evidence during parliamentary discussions on the new bill, which brings the number of consensual divorces up to 86%. Of the remaining 14%, only about half proceed to a full lawsuit and of those only 3% reach an appellate court. It is therefore evident that even if the grievances proponents of “joint custody” have against court decisions are justified, they only concern a very small proportion of divorces that are highly acrimonious.

The start 

While officially they appeared to advocate for the benefits of both parents participating in child rearing, some media appearances and a multitude of social media posts began to reveal that the groups pushing for “joint custody” formed a burgeoning “men’s rights” lobby, representing divorced fathers who believed that the courts had wronged them in awarding custody of the children to their former spouses. 

The Association GON.IS., which was approved as a “primary social care” institution by ministerial decision in 2015 and claims that it supports “both parents”, was founded by former members of an older organisation, named SYGAPA that tellingly translates as “Association for Male and Paternal Dignity”. 

Nikos Tsilipounidakis, the journalist who Bogdanos said had enlightened him about "dads' rights", famously quipped during a TV interview: “There are many dads who pay too much rent for nine months of pregnancy.”

Increasingly after the summer of 2020, the lobby succeeded in placing more interviews by its representatives in mainstream media, and enjoyed favourable coverage of its positions in articles not only by journalists, but also by psychologists and legal scholars. This was accompanied by increased activity in social media.

Despite the Joint Custody Association’s professed worries about the composition of the legislative committee, two prominent figures of the lobby, Marios Andrikopoulos and Patrina Paparigopoulou, were also appointed as members. Andrikopoulos is a legal director for a major energy company who runs a popular Facebook page, “Act against Parental Alienation". Paparigopoulou is a law professor and sister of Ioannis Paparigopoulos, frontman of Joint Custody Association, board member of the International Council on Shared Parenting, former member of “Male Dignity” and co-founder of GON.IS.

The legislative committee presented its draft and report to the Ministry of Justice in November 2020. Unbeknownst to the wider public, the majority of the committee’s members had rejected some of the more radical provisions advocated by the men’s rights lobby. (As the minister is not legally obligated to publish the legislative committee’s draft, this only became evident much later — when the minister was compelled to disclose it after the opposition had filed an official request.)  

This led to disagreements within the lobby on whether the proposed bill, which was soon leaked to the press, was worthy of their support. In the event, the Joint Custody Association published its own draft bill in December 2020 and sent it to the ministry, which rejected it.

During an online panel discussion organised by the Joint Custody Association in February 2021, Marios Andrikopoulos claimed that the majority of the committee was intent on “letting the proposal rot away”, and that he and Patrina Paparigopoulou “put up a great fight”.

Ioannis Paparigopoulos, who is apparently regarded as the éminence grise of the lobby and had expressed doubts about the leaked bill, retorted that “if the bill that you [Andrikopoulos] prepared is voted in, you still won’t see your children”.

Nikos Tsilipounidakis challenged Paparigopoulos by claiming that they should all support the minister of Justice. “Last Monday,” he said, “I personally called Mr Paparigopoulos and told him that Mr Tsiaras wanted to see him. When I called him, I was in Mr Tsiaras’s office.”

He went on to say that Tsiaras has been facing heavy opposition within his own party, New Democracy, but he was the first minister of Justice in recent years that had agreed to meet with “their group”.

Tsilipounidakis identified the Society of Family Law as the scourge of the new bill, and claimed that “they” (presumably the society) enlisted the help of Giorgos Gerapetritis, the minister of State, to plant doubts about the bill in the Prime Minister’s mind. He claimed that he knew this because he was “virtually present” at a teleconference between Tsiaras, Gerapetritis and Mitsotakis, where the minister of Justice defended his bill.  

Andrikopoulos argued that the spirit of the new law was in the right direction, particularly in providing that the two parents exercise their parental function after the dissolution of marriage “in common and equally”. “You have won,” he said to Paparigopoulos.

Tsilipounidakis also argued that the bill was “a start” and that they should now “organise their attack” during the public consultation process.  

The attack

When the draft was presented for public consultation on March 18, some members of the Legislative Committee protested that it exhibited important deviations from their recommendations. Some of the provisions advocated by the men’s rights lobby had found their way back into the draft, despite the committee not including them. Although legislative committees’ reports are not binding, deviating from them widely when a draft law is reviewed by a ministry is not only less than transparent in terms of who influences the final draft, but also entails the risk of technical mistakes, such as vague or unenforceable provisions, which was one of the issues some committee members protested about. 

Close to 15.000 comments were posted in all articles of the draft bill, the public consultation platform. The Active Dads Association announced, in its memorandum to the Parliamentary Committee, where the bill landed after public consultation was concluded on April 1, that “out of 15.230 comments submitted, 12.289 were IN FAVOUR of joint custody”. And they concluded that “the consultation has spoken loudly and given a popular mandate for a self-evident change”.

The same argument was employed by Kostas Tsiaras, both in an interview and during discussion in Parliament, where he said that a “record breaking number of comments” signalled a “favourable reception” of the bill. 

However, Aggeliki Adamopoulou, an MP for Mera25, disputed the minister’s claim and said that according to an analysis conducted by her staff, one supportive comment had been copied and pasted over 1200 times, while 6 supportive sentences appeared in identical form up to 1400 times. 

“Is this what overwhelming support means?” Ms Adamopoulou said. “Out of 15000 comments, 9200 at a minimum, that is 61%, are copied and pasted again!”

We decided to check the accuracy of these claims by conducting an analysis of the comments on the public consultation platform. The result supports neither the minister’s claim nor that of the Active Dads Association, being much closer to the numbers cited by Adamopoulou, but it also raises significant questions about the vulnerability of the public consultation process. 

After scraping the comments on the 23 articles of the draft bill (14.814 in total), we trained a machine learning model in order to categorise comments according to whether they were in support or in opposition to the bill. According to our model, within a +-3% margin of error, it does initially appear that out of 14.814 comments, το 77% (approximately 11.500) indeed is supportive, whereas 23% (approximately 3.400) is in opposition. However, out of the 14.814 total comments, only 47% (6.920) are original, whereas 53% (7.894) are copies of other comments. The picture therefore changes considerably if we only take into account original comments and not copies. In that case, the percentage of comments that support the bill falls to 60% and the percentage of those that oppose it rises to 40%. 

Out of approximately 11.500 comments that we estimate to be in support of the bill, 63% (more than 7.200) are copies of other comments, and only 37% (more than 4.100) are original. 

The 7.200 comments in support of the bill that have been copied essentially correspond to only 658 original comments that have been pasted multiple times. For example, just one of the 658 original comments has been copied and pasted 343 times, while two variations on it have been pasted 358 times (for a total of 701 copies).  

Conversely, out of approximately 3.400 comments that we estimate to be in opposition to the bill, 80% (more than 2.700) are original and 20% (about 670) are copies. The 670 copies correspond to 225 original comments.

Our analysis therefore shows that not only the numbers of supportive and opposing comments are more balanced that the minister and the supporters of the bill claimed, but also that:

Firstly, over half of the comments in the public consultation are misleading, being simply repeated up to hundreds of times each.

Secondly, the majority of these misleading comments are in support of the bill.

Thirdly, there appears to have been a major intervention in the consultation, as the volume of the supportive comments that were copied and repeated (over 7.200 or 63%) is enormous.

The criticism

During public consultation, as well as during discussion in the Parliamentary Committee and in the media, the draft bill was heavily criticised by a wide range of experts, organisations, institutions, feminist groups and NGOs, including the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls and the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; the Hellenic Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; the Family Law Society; the gender equality organization Diotima; the Lawyers Committee on Legal Issues of Co-Custody; and Bar Associations across the country.

The overarching issue for those opposing the new law was that it departed from the child-centered approach of previous legislation, prioritising instead the rights of parents. This was particularly evident in its definition of “the best interest of the child” as equal co-custody between parents, as opposed to a provision that it needs to be defined on a case-by-case basis, as required by international law. 

Another major point of contention was that the bill did not limit visitation/communication rights, even if a parent was accused of child abuse, unless there was an irrevocable conviction for the act. This seemed to reflect a view, espoused by men’s rights groups but also shared by some child protection professionals, that many allegations of child abuse are false and are employed by mothers against fathers in order to alienate them from their children. The Active Dads Association highlighted data from a child abuse hotline run by The Smile of the Child, a prominent child protection NGO, that appeared to show that most abuse allegations are made against mothers. And Maria Kaperoni, a clinical psychologist with Ippokrateio General Hospital in Thessaloniki, who supported the new bill in the media and has been cited by men’s rights groups, has said that she has been asked to provide mothers with reports stating that their children are being sexually abused by their father. “Very often,” she claimed, “the accusations are false.”  

Giorgos Nikolaidis, a psychiatrist who heads the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate at the Institute of Child Health, and an internationally acknowledged expert on the psychosocial support of child abuse survivors, told us that in Greece there is no unified system for recording reported incidents of child abuse and neglect, and therefore partial data and statistics published by individual services or institutions bear little relation to the characteristics of the totality of incidents in society, as they emerge from studies in random segments of the general population. He went on to say that “using such ‘evidence’ to create a certain impression just before a new family law reform is to be enacted, is plainly a communication game, and has no value for designing social policy for families”.  

Critics of the new bill further noted that in Greece, where court delays are a persistent problem, a provision requiring an irrevocable conviction would mean that a potential abuser could remain in unsupervised contact with their victim for a period of up to ten years. 

This was the only part of the bill that was partially amended in the face of expert criticism. After the changes, the visitation/communication provisions made no mention of the issue of child abuse, while the provision about the loss of “parental responsibility” called for a “first instance conviction”.

Further criticism of the new bill focused on both substantial and technical matters, the most important of which were:

• Τhe bill provides that after separation parents continue to exercise their parental function “in common” and “equally”. The meaning of “equally” (whether, for example, it refers to “equal time”) is vague, which according to opponents of the bill will lead to confusion in the courts. The same provision extends to children whose parents have not married or entered into a cohabitation contract, and were not living together after the recognition of the child by the father. Opponents of the bill pointed out that this essentially awards “equal” custody to a parent — usually the father — who never provided care for the child, without any obligation to prove their suitability or interest.  
• The bill provides that if the child after separation is living with one parent, then the other parent is by default entitled to visitation/communication amounting to ⅓ of the “total time of the child”. Opponents of the bill pointed out that the term “total time” is vague, as it can be interpreted to mean 8 hours per day, 10 days per month, 4 months per year, or even calculated based on weekends, holidays, and spare time, thus leading to the so-called “⅔ parent” assuming full responsibility for care and the “⅓ parent” becoming a “holiday parent” without responsibilities. Opponents also pointed out that the bill allows the ⅓ parent to actually request less time, leading therefore to a situation where visitation/communication is determined by the needs of the parents instead of the children, contravening international law.   
• The bill obliges the parent who lives with the child — the ⅔ parent — to inform the other parent — the ⅓ parent — about every decision relating to the care of the child, prior to acting upon it. Opponents of the bill pointed out that this constitutes a violation of the ⅔ parent’s private life, and can be used as a means of harassment or revenge in cases of particularly strained or hostile relations between former partners. 
• The bill provides that parents have an obligation to “maintain and strengthen  the relationship of the child with the family of the other parent”. Opponents pointed out that this broadens the obligations of the parents towards the child to an unlimited number of other persons, while leaving no room for appreciation of the best interest of the child in relation to its contact with the extended family members of the other parent.
• The bill makes mediation mandatory, a violation, opponents say, of the Istanbul Convention to which Greece is a party. 
• The law relies on the “parental alienation syndrome” theory for the determination of the best interest of the child, the description of child care, and the regulation of communication and visitation. Opponents of the bill pointed out that the theory is disputed.

The support

Even before the draft of the new law was revealed, it was evident that the “parental alienation syndrome” theory was employed by the men’s rights lobby as a scientific argument in support of the reform. According to the theory, the “syndrome” occurs when a child becomes alienated from a parent as a result of the psychological manipulation of another parent, particularly in the context of conflictual family separation. Interestingly, during discussions in the Parliamentary Committee, the “syndrome” was not only defended, but presented as the prevailing academic consensus, by Marieta Papadatou-Pastou, a professor of psychology representing the Hellenic Psychology Society. 

When asked to cite her sources, Ms Pastou pointed to what she calls “the Warshak report”, meaning a 2014 paper by psychologist Richard Warshak, titled Social science and parenting plans for young children: A consensus report. The conclusion of the paper was that equal time spent between parents was beneficial to the child. The “consensus” part of the title was based on the fact that the paper was accompanied by a list of 110 scientists that endorsed its findings. As the paper itself admits, this is “a rare occurrence in social science”. Both for the author of the paper and Ms. Pastou in the Greek Parliament seven years later, this was an advantage of the paper that allowed it to support its claim of offering a “consensus”. In truth, it did not make Warshak’s view any less controversial.

Richard Warshak has picked up the mantle of child psychologist Richard Gardner, who proposed the “syndrome” in 1985. He is considered his scientific successor, so much so that after Gardner’s passing, Warshak inherited his unpublished instructional video and audio tapes from his family. Warshak is the author of a best-selling book titled Divorce Poison and more importantly, he has inspired a business as an applied version of his ideas called Family Bridges, where he holds a role as scientific advisor.

Family Bridges are often called by their opponents “reunification camps”. They are workshops that aim to heal “parental alienation” and repair the relationship with both parents. In reality, according to a series of stories told by outlets such as The Atlantic, NBC and Reveal, multiple testimonies of children that have been through these camps tell a different story, accusing the programme of manipulating them and traumatising their relation with the parent who had custody. An expert was quoted in The Atlantic calling them “torture camps for children”. And since these workshops are quite expensive and mandated by judicial orders, a lawyer involved in a legal battle against Family Bridges told the Washington Post in 2017 that “the programs are basically shams. It was clear to me what they were doing was reaping massive fees by selling a custody change”.

According to psychiatrist Giorgos Nikolaidis, the claim that the existence of the syndrome in question is widely accepted is false. “This so-called syndrome,” he told us, “is a communication tool, systematically promoted by various organisations of divorced men. It has never been recognised as an actual clinical entity by prestigious international or national scientific institutions. Recently, in order to clarify the issue and avoid misinterpretation, the World Health Organisation decided to omit any mention of deprivation of contact with a parent in its most recent revision of the International Classification of Disorders.”

Another source of support for reforming family law in the direction espoused by the Ministry of Justice was the Greek Ombudsman, or Citizen’s Advocate, an independent authority, headed by lawyer and law professor Andreas Pottakis. As early as August 2020, Pottakis addressed a letter to the minister, where he argued for the benefits of “joint custody” and “shared parenting”, citing Council of Europe resolutions of 2013 and 2015 that urged member-states to legislate providing an "option for common custody in case of separation" and introduce "the principle of alternating habitation".

In May 2021, when the draft bill was being discussed in the Parliamentary Committee, the Ombudsman addressed another letter, this time to the chairman of the committee, Maximos Charakopoulos, where he reiterated his approval of the ministry's efforts to reform family law, but criticised it for not going far enough in legislating "alternating habitation".

Yiota Masouridou, a lawyer who also serves as the general secretary of European Democratic Lawyers and a vocal critic of the bill, told us that "the Council of Europe’s recommendations are non legally binding policy agreements which constitute soft law. They are often used for political pressure on governments to act or regulate an issue according to a specific guidance."

"Lobbies supporting changes on family law, as well as institutions such as the Ombudsman," said Masouridou, "recall specific extracts from selected CoE’s recommendations, causing, deliberately, confusion over the scope and the context of Greece’s obligations deriving from international law. It should be clarified at all levels that the protection of victims of domestic violence is absolute and does not allow for any measure that protects or covers the perpetrators at the detriment of the rights of the victims."

According to Nikolaidis, who is also a member and former chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, the Council of Europe body responsible for monitoring the Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse,  there is now a tendency in various European countries to revise “shared parenting” or “alternating habitation” measures, as they are proving “non viable”. 

“The same is true,” Nikolaidis told us, “for international institutions such as the Council of Europe and its various committees: in a recent discussion of the committee for the protection of the rights of children who are deprived of parental care due to divorce or other causes, any mention of such measures was omitted to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations.”  

“There is a confusion,” he said, “between the widely accepted benefits for a child of continued contact with both parents and the dubious promotion of the spurious ‘alienation syndrome’ or ‘alternating habitation’ as a general rule. It is one thing to observe that children of separated couples can benefit from quality contact with both parents. But this is achieved primarily by former couples that find a way to communicate for the benefit of their children. To apply findings based on this observation to cases of separated parents in conflictual divorces and legal battles, and to use them to support legal and administrative measures, such as those we saw in Greece, is a leap of logic and a methodological sleight of hand.”

“It is a shame,” Nikolaidis concluded, “that even respected academics, but also institutions like the Greek Ombudsman, have had such a lapse of judgement.”

The split 

In the days leading up to the Parliament Plenary Session debate, the disagreements over the bill that had been brewing within the governing party became public. Two New Democracy MPs, former ministers Marieta Giannakou and Olga Kefalogianni, publicly expressed their objections to the bill, reiterating the main points of criticism that had emerged during public consultation.

Τhe minister of Justice retorted in an interview that the two MPs’ objections were rooted in their “personal experiences,” which was “no way to legislate”. Giannakou countered with the question if the minister would have said as much if the objections had been raised by men. 

The two MPs then went on to file a proposal for ten amendments to the bill, tackling the most problematic points. It was the first instance of such determined opposition to government policy during New Democracy’s two years in office. The ministry rejected the amendments.

During discussion in the Parliamentary Committee, Giannakou criticised the ministry for not meeting with established women’s organisations and excluding them from the dialogue on family law reform. “By contrast,” she said, “we saw improbable organisations, such as GON.IS., Joint Custody, Active Dads, tremendous adverts in support of the bill, which means a lot of money, and an identical letter emailed to us with various names but no actual identification. All these people love their children so much that they can’t write a letter about this issue? Or is it a company, which has the money to send all this with false names? I believe it is the second.” 

At the Plenary Session debate, on May 20-21, the opposition vigorously opposed the bill. There were some differentiations: Andreas Loverdos, former minister and MP for KINAL (Movement for Change) voiced his support for shared parenting. And Elliniki Lysi (Greek Solution), a far-right party, opposed the bill on homophobic grounds, as in their opinion it does not safeguard the traditional family. Although a few more New Democracy MPs expressed reservations about it, notably former minister of Justice Charalambos Athanassiou, most defended it strenuously — some a little too strenuously, as evidenced by one parliamentarian’s opinion that “a woman may hate her ex husband, who cheated on her, beat her and abused her, but still the child has the right to grow up with both parents”.

In an unusual turn of events, at least for parliamentary norms, when the minister of Justice was confronted by criticism that the civil code does not include a provision to the effect that parents exercise their parental function “equally” during marriage, and therefore the bill’s provision that they are to “continue” doing so when divorced is nonsensical, he decided to amend the civil code on the spot, and add “equally” to the relevant article.

It was also revealed during the debate that the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women and girls and the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, had addressed a letter to the Prime Minister on May 17, which was highly critical of the bill and recommended “review and reconsideration of those provisions in the Bill taking into account Greece’s international human rights obligations”. It also requested that its contents “be shared with the Parliament at the earliest”. The government had not disclosed the letter to Parliament, and when confronted with it by the opposition, the Minister of Justice denied knowledge of it. 

The bill was finally enacted on May 21, with opposition parties either abstaining or voting against it. No corrections were made, despite the extensive criticism. The new legislation is the first to radically change provisions regarding the custody of children after a divorce, since the modernisation of family law that took place in 1983.

Barely a few minutes after the voting was concluded, Act Against Parental Alienation, the facebook page run by Marios Andrikopoulos, shared a curious post: a photograph of Grigoris Dimitriadis, General Secretary to the Prime Minister. No explanation was offered.

Other social media accounts associated with the lobby celebrated their victory in more overt ways: 

“The battle was triumphantly won, gentlemen,” one post read. “We move ahead according to the basic plan, without a STEP back. We turn our heavy artillery against the judiciary, we load, we lock and we WAIT! Let the members of this group who leak things tell the Union of Judges and Prosecutors that we have them in our sights.”

Ioannis Paparigopoulos

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In the spring of 2011, the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, was running the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect. As they were processing their results, during the summer, they noticed what seemed like an anomaly. In the results from the Region of Rethymno, in Crete, there appeared an extremely high rate of self-reported sexual victimisation of boys and almost a complete reversal of the boy to girl ratio.

“We could not explain it,” George Nikolaidis, Director of the Department, told us. “We speculated it must be due to a technical error.”

It was not an error. On December 1st, 2011, the police arrested a school basketball coach, Nikos Seiragakis, who also coached the local youth basketball team, AGOR. He was charged with molesting dozens of children.

It was this man’s activity that produced the “anomaly” in the BECAN results.

A methodical police operation

A few days after the coach was arrested, the Rethymno police chief, Manolis Paradoulakis, told the press that this was “a systematic and methodical police operation,” which “happened in the shortest time possible”.((The statement is available (in Greek) via the <em>local</em> TV <strong>Creta</strong> station.))  

The chief’s emphasis on the “shortest time” seemed to anticipate the question that soon emerged, why there had been a thirteen-month interval between the time when two families went to the police with allegations that the coach was abusing their children, and the time of the arrest. 

The chief maintained that there had been “rumors” rather than allegations, despite the fact that the two families of immigrant workers had eponymously denounced the coach to the police. He then explained that the police investigated the “rumors” and “discreetly” gathered evidence, in order to determine whether there was any merit to the case. When they found that there was, they proceeded to build the case in collaboration with the Rethymno prosecutor at the time, Maria Dimitriadou, a process which took more than a year, because they wanted to make sure the evidence was solid. “The arrest,” the chief said, “was made in the shortest possible time, as soon as there was complete corroboration of the case with incontrovertible evidence.”

When, during our visit to the Department for the Protection of Minors in the General Police Directorate of Attica, we discussed police handling of child abuse cases, we were told that from an operational point of view, a coach is one of the “easiest” types of perpetrator to catch. “If he is a coach,” the officers told us, “there are more victims”. When, however, we specifically referred to the Rethymno case, the officers said that they had not personally conducted the operation, so they could not comment in detail. 

The possibility that the authorities attempted to preempt any discussion on the police’s choice of timing is strengthened by the fact that Manolis Othonas, Deputy Minister for Citizen protection and Member of Parliament for Rethymno at the time, was already reassuring reporters that there had been no delays, two days before the police chief officially briefed the press on the operation. He commended the police on turning “whispers” into “a case”, and dismissed allegations that the coach had enjoyed some sort of “protection” due to his supposed standing in Rethymno society.

This was contradicted by the Manager of AGOR at the time, Vassilis Theodoroulakis, who stated in an interview that he had been unofficially informed by a police officer about the allegations against the coach, about three months after they happened. He then informed the team’s Board of Directors, who he says did nothing, in order not to damage the team’s reputation. The Board has denied the accusation.  

What is undisputed, however, is that during the time that elapsed between the allegations of the two migrant families against the coach and his arrest, no child protection official or professional was alerted to protect the interests of the children. The decision to prolong the children’s plight for over a year was made without the intervention of any part of the child protection system.

An esteemed member of local society

When we visited Rethymno, in autumn 2018, the weather was rainy. The wet buildings in the old town, dating from Rethymno’s Venetian period, the castle, the lighthouse hidden in the fog, all painted a highly unusual picture for non-locals who stereotypically associate Crete only with summer tourism. We kept wondering how in this town of 40.000 people, which looked even smaller without the summer crowds, it was possible for someone to systematically abuse dozens of children for years, without anybody ever noticing a thing? 

In the old town, opposite the renowned Rimondi fountain, we met with Chara Vilara, an experienced local journalist, who had followed the case closely.

“It was a chronic situation,” she told us. “Obviously, it wasn’t going on for just one or two years, it went back quite a lot. Some of the children had grown up when it became public. There were many children who knew, who weren’t a part of it, but knew and didn’t speak. It touched many families, both directly and indirectly.”

Everyone we spoke with agreed that coach Nikos Seiragakis was an important member of Rethymno society. He had been one of the organisers of the “Treasure Hunt”, a popular yearly event. He was esteemed in the “old town”, meaning the circles of Rethymno’s aristocratic families, and he was well connected in local politics. His contacts reached into the Greek national basketball team, and even the American NBA. Those who know say that children thought of him as a mentor. He was a good speaker, and when he coached, nobody made a sound.

Under strict discipline, the coach had created a kind of “sect”. He approached his students with the promise of admittance to an inner circle, to which only a select few could belong. He used pseudo-historical references to military training in ancient Greece, in order to convince them that in this way they would form a tighter bond with their teammates and become better athletes. Through a series of “trials”, aimed at wresting a kind of “consent” from the children, a process known as “grooming”, the coach initially encouraged them to sexually engage with each other, and subsequently molested them himself. His influence on them was so strong that some students actually defended his actions.

“The big question,” Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, told us, “is how the perpetrator selects the children, how the grooming actually happens. Which children does he choose? Well, he chooses vulnerable children, ones without strong family bonds. Children with certain disadvantages, foreigners, the disabled, or children who are emotionally neglected. He finds cracks. He comes as a mentor. As a protector. Then comes the second step: trust. Privileges. And then comes submission. This can take a long time. At that point, children gradually realise what is going on. So, there is a stage of transferring responsibility: whoever doesn’t want this, can get up and leave now. That’s the transfer: it is you who wants this. And when there is a collective situation, a sharing within a group, it is even more difficult to break this chain. Children understand they are trapped. They stay at this stage of entrapment for many years. This can happen in any abusive relationship. We call it ‘learned helplessness’. Most children will never tell. Some will tell when they cannot bear it any longer. Or because they may see their younger siblings or other loved ones victimised. Or a random event may trigger it off. And then, after a long time, they will tell. Some will have already become adults.”

Coach Nikos Seiragakis was initially charged with 53 counts of child molestation, and convicted on 36 counts. His sentence of 400 years imprisonment was upheld by the Appeals Court, which heard his appeal in 2016. 

During our visit to Rethymno, we were told by people, who spoke to us on the condition of preserving their anonymity, that the number of victims not included in the charges probably raised the total to over one hundred children. 

Seiragakis was conditionally released, according to the provisions of Greek law, at the end of April 2020, after serving eight years and five months. The conditions of his release stipulate that he cannot live in, or visit Rethymno. A few days later, he was arrested again for breaching the conditions of his release. The decision on whether he will remain free or return to prison is pending.

Inherent resistance

In mid December 2011, a conference on child protection took place in Heraklion, the capital of Crete, as part of the Council of Europe’s “One in Five” campaign. ((“One in Five” was a campaign by the Council of Europe to stop sexual violence against children, which was initiated in 2010 and branched out into national campaigns, which were handled by member-states, in the following years. Its title is based on data, which suggest that about 1 in 5 children in Europe are victims of some form of sexual violence.)) The conference had been planned before the Rethymno child abuse case was made public, but, as George Nikolaidis remembers, when he arrived in Crete, everyone was understandably talking about little else.  

“I went to Rethymno the following day,” Nikolaidis told us, “and because of my occupation, I attended a meeting with the municipality, the region and the local authorities. I was then asked to make a proposal, which I submitted both to the local authorities and the relevant ministries at the end of December 2011. It was a proposal on the actions that needed to be taken, given the scope of the case, whose extent we did not know, but it appeared to be a mass case.”

After a meeting of relevant ministries and authorities, it was decided that the proposal by the Institute of Child Health should be implemented. The lack of resources, exacerbated by the financial crisis, was addressed by allocating European Union NSFR funds to the programme. Still, it took about a year for the intervention to begin.

“This is indicative of how unwieldy the Greek public sector can be, even when it comes to projects it funds and the political will is present,” Nikolaidis said.

In the event, the unit for Comprehensive Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”. ((The unit’s website (in Greek) is still active, despite the programme’s termination.))

“At the same time,” he told us, “we ran a widely accessible health promotion campaign on the subject of child abuse, children’s sexuality, the children’s right to their body, and so on, at all levels of education in the whole of the Region of Rethymno, that is to say, primary and secondary schools, students, parents and teachers. We also trained personnel at various services, we held educational actions for coaches and sportspeople. Because we were immediately visited by the coaches’ association and told, “We don’t dare touch the children, you can’t coach children and be afraid to touch them at the same time.” Therefore, we had to impart all the international know-how about how it is possible to have both child protection processes in place and still function as a sports space.” 

Despite the obvious need for intervention in the consequences of a case that had affected dozens of families, Nikolaidis told us that the programme faced what he terms “inherent resistance”. “I believe,” he said, “that at least some of the local actors preferred to forget this incident had ever happened rather than work to enable the local community to get over it. There was a fairly strong tendency to sweep everything under the rug.”

Chara Vilara shared with us a similar perspective. “After the events came to light,” she said, “many parents punished their children, they beat them up, because they believed it had been the children’s fault. And other families never dealt with it at all. Like it never happened. Some, of course, did try to help their children, but what really made an impression on me was that when the police brought the coach to court, there was no one outside. Nobody went to protest, to vent, even. If it had been someone else, there would have been a crowd outside, there would have been shouting, all hell would have broken loose. This is telling, because these children belonged to the local social elite. These people want to cover up what happened.” 

Although Nikolaidis and his team managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, in the autumn of 2014 resources were exhausted. 

“We were informed by the political leadership,” Nikolaidis told us, “that their decision was to shut down the unit permanently, which was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field. There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Nevertheless, the Ministry of Health’s Action Plan on Children’s rights, which was published online for public debate during the pre-election period, in November 2014, included an extension of the Rethymno programme, funded through the NSFR 2014-2020. But the January 2015 elections brought a change of government, and any plans to extend the programme were quietly dropped.

Out of the sky

On the hill that overlooks Rethymno harbour stands an austere concrete building, which at the time of our visit temporarily housed the Rethymno Mental Health Centre. We were greeted by its director, psychiatrist, psychodramatist and actor, Antonis Liodakis.

He was of the opinion that the Rethymno programme had been “interjected”, and had “dropped out of the sky”. “In the sense,” he explained, “that these professionals from Athens were coming here to see children, parents, other cases, the whole thing functioned like a medico-paedagogic centre.”

Chara Vilara, on the other hand, points out that the children were under immense pressure, “because other kids knew and made fun of them”. “So, they went to private psychiatrists in Chania and Heraklion, because they were afraid of the stigma.”

George Nikolaidis’s experience seemed to echo Vilara’s observation: “One of the criticisms we received,” he said “was that the personnel employed in our intervention did not come from the local community, did not come from Rethymno. But I believe that was a very intelligent choice if anyone involved in the events back then recalls the mood of the local community at the time.  In every new incident, our personnel, the psychologists, the social workers, the child psychologists who worked with us, were asked by those they saw whether they were from Rethymno. The moment they heard, “No, I’m from elsewhere,” there was a huge wave of relief and then they shared their suffering, which they would probably not have done had the personnel been local. So, let’s just say there was some discontent that we did not support local employment. But we chose to make communication for the beneficiaries easier and more effective.”

Antonis Liodakis, however, pressed his point: “We had already identified the key issues since 2008,” he told us. “We have been asking for the creation of a medico-paedagogic centre with every opportunity.”

Nikolaidis makes no secret of his surprise that the programme was discontinued. “Until the very last minute,” he said “people close to the political leadership of the time, the political actors in Rethymno, were reassuring us that an extension would be granted, as there was evidently no other solution. I cannot know what could have possibly happened overnight to change that decision.” And he added: “All I know is that any efforts made in the immediate aftermath for questions on this matter to be tabled in Parliament by SYRIZA, the main opposition party at the time, ultimately failed. Incidentally, SYRIZA’s health coordinator in opposition was Andreas Xanthos, who subsequently became Minister of Health in the following government, and who is also the local MP for the Region of Rethymno.”

After SYRIZA came to power in January 2015, it took the new government two years to come up with its own “Action Plan” on child protection. The Rethymno programme was not a part of it, and it was never reinstated.

Antonis Liodakis started working in consulting groups in the Ministry of Health and joined Andreas Xanthos in official SYRIZA events on public health. In 2017, Xanthos approved Liodakis’s plans for the medico-pedagogic centre, with himself as director.

Manolis Paradoulakis

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• Major General (retired) • Hellenic Police
• Director (former) • Rethymno Police Directorate

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How did you start work at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors?

The Greek Code of Criminal Procedure provided for the existence of Public Prosecutors for Minors, and they were already in place in Athens, Patras, Thessaloniki and Piraeus, but they were not functioning as an office. In the summer of 1983, when I was a young Deputy Public Prosecutor, having joined the public prosecution service in 1978, I ran into my supervisor, Mr Toumpanos, in Omonia. He told me, “Xeni, would you like to join the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors in September?” I knew what the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors was, but I had no idea of what it entailed, no relation to the various bodies and services, nothing other than the articles of the Penal Code pertaining to juvenile offenders. But I did not hesitate to accept. My agreement was driven by my love for children. I was already a mother of two and at an age where I was becoming more sensitised to issues affecting minors, in part due to motherhood.

At the time, the Public Prosecutor’s Office was housed in the Ambassadeur Hotel, an old hotel next to the IKA on Socratous Street, pending our move to the Evelpidon court complex. We were waiting for the construction of Evelpidon to be completed and office space to become available, so the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors was located there in the meantime. An office with a single secretary, who used to send summons and subpoenas to juvenile offenders. The incumbent Public Prosecutor for Minors would study the case briefs and then go try the cases at the Minor's Court, which was located on Feidiou Street at the time.

As soon as I received the proposal, I began my research. Whenever I am faced with a challenge in life, I want to get a firm grasp on the situation, to know what the new job entails. During my career, I have been called to serve at other posts too, and you don’t just turn up. You must look into things, research the field or the object of the post you have been called to serve. I did the same in anti-terrorism, where I worked for ten years. I tried to do the same when I was informed that I would be joining the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors.

Was there material available for research at the time?

I visited the Institute of Greek and Foreign Law because there was no internet at the time, or at least we did not have the skills for that kind of research. I went to the Institute and asked them to give me the international literature on the subject. They even had to order some of the books. Also, when I was officially appointed in September, someone else was appointed as my supervisor at the same time. I was a Deputy Prosecutor, so a Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance had to be appointed Supervisor, and I would be second in command. The Public Prosecutor appointed resigned. He did not want to be involved in such mundane matters, he wanted something more high-profile, he was not interested. Another prosecutor was appointed then, and our collaboration was excellent.

So, when I was appointed Deputy to the Public Prosecutor for Minors as a Deputy Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance, I went to the office to get a feel for the situation. There, I met the secretary I mentioned, who is now retired and lives in Thiva. She was very aware of the issues involved; a lot of things had registered on her radar during her time there…

Let me tell you the first thing she told me. I asked her, “What does the Public Prosecutor for Minors do here?” She said, “That is two separate questions. One question is, what does the Prosecutor do? The other question is, what can the prosecutor do?” I asked her to explain. She said, “This is what he does: here are the case briefs, theft, rape, juvenile homicide and the trial court dates for Minors' Court. But a Prosecutor can do a great many things here, Mrs Dimitriou, if they are so inclined.” A light bulb went off inside my head as I listened. In fact, while we were talking, a child entered carrying a suitcase, like a duffle bag. He had been sent to the Public Prosecutor for Minors. He walks in, the secretary asks him what he wants, and the child says, “I’ve left home, I’m not going back there, the police told me to come to tell you.” I do not remember the exact reason; he was beaten by his father or had a dispute with his father. He was a young child around twelve years old. The secretary then turned to me and said, “There you go.”

So, the secretary planted the idea of how active a role a Public Prosecutor could play for victims.

Not quite. I was cognizant of it thanks to the international literature on the subject. We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking. Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who taken that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world.

The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold mission. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold mission. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim.  Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.

Addressing the juvenile exclusively as an offender dominated at the time?

Yes. Child abuse began to be viewed as a syndrome in 1962. “Syndrome” means a condition; it now means a pathological condition with multiple repercussions. It is not a one-off event that ends with the act, its consequences extend into the future. This is what I had in mind at the time: Janus with his two faces. They are the two sides of the same coin, perpetrator and victim, and my subsequent experience showed me that such was the reality. No juvenile offender, even a juvenile traffic offender, has not previously been victimised in some way by family, friends, school, classmates etc. No one goes suddenly from being a "good kid" and so on to become an offender. They have previously been the victim of certain circumstances themselves.

You mentioned that the Public Prosecutor for Minors used to try cases in an office on Feidiou Street at the time. Why was that the case? Was it to protect minors, to avoid exposing them in a courtroom?

That was part of the thinking behind it, which persists in many provincial towns to this day. Minors' Courts inside office premises, meaning that the juvenile defendant is physically on the same level as the judges, there is no judge’s bench. That is what we saw at the time, Minors' Court Judge Maria Vasilakis and me. She was a Judge at the Court of First instance and is also a friend; we have always had a good understanding on these matters that so passionately concern us. We agreed that we did not like those premises; that it was better if the child understood that they were in a space which, while being friendly, was also a special kind of space, that they were an offender. We often tried homicide cases, children who had robbed elderly ladies or killed them, we tried murders. You cannot have the offenders in an office, the lawyers in an office, everyone sitting around a table casually, it needs to look like a courtroom.

So we made sure to move the Minors' Court to Omonia, to the building that housed the District Civil Court. The District Criminal Court and the District Civil Court, before its move to the Court of First Instance, were housed there. We requested the use of a floor and succeeded in getting it. We remodelled a room, installed a low judge’s bench, unlike other courtrooms where the judge and the prosecutor and the secretary look down on everyone. Then we moved the whole service from 8, Feidiou Street to that floor. Staff found offices where they could interview the children whose case briefs they were preparing for court or supervise them afterwards, and a more concrete service came into being. The Minors' Court became more respected and more concrete.

The courtroom, then, had a low judge’s bench, had places for the juvenile offenders, seats for the parents and the Prefects for Minors, the juvenile probation officers who assisted the minor during the trial.

We also tried to implement what the literature had taught us, namely, to have a female Public Prosecutor - male Judge on the bench and vice versa. In other words, not to bring the child before an all-male or all-female bench, to have both sexes present, because we were often dealing with a child that had a very bad relationship with their father or mother, and the child would react negatively by judging you. The child would personalise the relationships of the people judging it there and then.

Or fear on the other hand, if the parent had been abusive…

Indeed, often the parent had been abusive. We had a mother who used to beat her children mercilessly. If the child saw a female judge, they would have a terrible reaction, so we always ensured that the ratio was present. Also, after we set up the new offices in late 1985, we managed to set up a Juvenile Police Service, as we used to call it. Ultimately, it was a Subdivision in Athens with two units. There were two units in Thessaloniki and Crete respectively too, one for juvenile victims and one for juvenile offenders. In Athens, the Subdivision eventually became a Division.

So we did not confine ourselves to the Minors' Court. We were fully aware of the need to open up to other bodies and services, that a Public Prosecutor or a Judge cannot deal with delinquency or victimisation on their own. We were aware of our weaknesses and the fact that we were insufficient to handle these incidents, that we needed the assistance of people from other sectors.

In this context, we also visited the General Secretariat for Youth many times, asking it to allocate us programmes that our children from the Minors' Court could be enrolled in. 

There we met General Secretary Anna Diamantopoulou. When the opportunity for an exchange with Germany on juvenile matters arose, she called us and asked us if we wanted to participate. Of course, we wanted to go, no question about it.  She would also provide us with an interpreter because we did not speak German. The interpreter was always with us. There were five of us altogether: two of us from the judiciary corps and the rest from the General Secretariat for Youth.

That trip was a turning point. We began with a visit to the Ministry of Justice of Land Nordrhein-Westfalen and then toured all the facilities for minors in the Land. We stayed there for several days. We visited juvenile prisons and saw how they operated. We attended juvenile courts, visited “reformatories”, other detention facilities. First, we met with professionals active in the field. We saw the training they received, particularly judicial and non-judicial personnel—social workers, psychologists and child psychologists naturally, but also correctional officers, workers inside the institutions. Anyone who came into contact with the minors. Because you cannot have one service building something up and another service tearing it down. Everyone must have the same training about behaviour towards juvenile offenders. They must understand what it means to be a minor, to understand the minor’s profile, to show self-restraint.

I remember one of the workers would teach a group of children house painting. For the Germans, that is a science. There was another team learning meat cutting, the Germans see that as science too. You don’t just go to a butcher and learn to cut meat there, you have to learn the theory first, what kinds of meat there are, what beef is, the parts of the animal, how to carve it, what products you can manufacture. So, there is a science to it.

All these people had been trained in how to treat the children in question. They could be interacting with volatile children, who came from families with no boundaries, so they had to be tolerant, to be educated on juvenile issues.

To know how to set boundaries in a healthy manner?

Of course. The same applied to the correctional facility staff we met at a juvenile prison we visited. They had all received training for the specific demands of their job, it was not just a case of "you’re hired, get on with it". It was done for the juveniles concerned.

Another eye-opening experience, for me at least, was that we used to believe that this was a matter for us State bodies to deal with and no one else. There, we learned that there is room for other actors in this field, for NGOs, for private entities and individuals that can do the job well and are certified. That there is room for other bodies that can help you in the matters that arise during the handling of cases, whether they concern victims or perpetrators.  

I remember arriving in Frankfurt during the evening and being driven to Cologne. We arrive at night, and we have our first working dinner. We meet at the hotel where our German colleagues from Cologne are already waiting. We have a light dinner and the Germans instantly set to work. We almost had no time to eat, there was an agenda stating that matters were scheduled to be discussed that evening. At the hotel, as we dined, I hear them announce the schedule for our visit and find out that we will be visiting an organisation working with juvenile offenders, offenders who have committed serious acts at that. They tell us what services the organisation provides. What was that organisation? Today you would probably call it an NGO, they were called something different back then. Actually, it was a private organisation that had been set up by a former Prosecutor upon retirement.

Then they tell us that we will visit a Catholic institution that cares for victims and provides such and such things. I was in shock from the start. I used to think these were matters for the State, and I suddenly saw that they did not have to be, that we needed to open up more. And we did, my colleague and me when we returned to Greece. We said, “that’s it, we are reaching out.” We contacted universities, hospitals, private individuals and entities, institutions; we began to expand the reach of protection and come into contact with other professionals.

Up until that time, the child would come into contact with just the police officer or the judicial or correctional officer...

The correctional officer, the Prefect for Minors. Anyone who fell within the public sector would either be sent to a state institution — a place would be found if they needed protection — or to the educational institutions which existed at the time. They were akin to detention centres, one step below a detention centre if you will. There were many at the time and later they were shut down, again following our initiative.

The detention centres were the juvenile prisons, the equivalent to the current special juvenile detention establishments. At the time, there was the Korydallos Correctional Centre, and there were the reformatories. They used to be called educational institutions, and they were intended for younger children and juveniles committing minor offences. There was one for minors over sixteen at Korydallos; one for minors under twelve, situated in a building that has now been taken over by the Municipality of Korydallos. There was another educational institution, as we used to call them, for children under twelve at Kaminia. There was also the Educational Institution of Papagou for girls and the Volos Educational Institution for Minors for boys.  The Volos institution is the only one still open today, although its philosophy and the age of its inmates have changed.

How is it called today?

It is still called an Educational Institution, back then it was called the Volos Elementary Education Institution because children below the age of twelve were detained there, elementary school children. Now its orientation has changed. I visited it in 2015 because the situation was at breaking point, and I found youths up to the age of twenty-one there. The ages spanned from twelve to twenty-one. The Paraskevopoulos law rectified that.((The so-called "Paraskevopoulos law" is Law 4322 of 2015, introduced by the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Nikos Paraskevopoulos. The law provided for, among other things, changes in the Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure regarding minors (Article 7). It was also controversial, because of Article 12, which provided for the "decongestion of detention facilities" through the release of prisoners who had served portions of their sentences. The latter provision was a major point of contention between the SYRIZA-led government and the major opposition at the time, New Democracy, as well as their respective friendly media. Conflict over the provision persisted until the July 2019 national elections, which were won by New Democracy.))

Consider the age-gap, imagine the sexual and all kinds of abuse taking place there. Most importantly, some of the children were held there because the investigating magistrate had imposed their stay at the institution as a restrictive condition.  This means that the magistrate had imposed a restrictive condition on youths under twenty-one, the obligation to stay there. In other words, it had been turned into a prison. A closed prison at that, nothing like I had known it in the old days when it was open to the community, just a simple institution for children under the age of twelve.   It was nothing like it, the conflicts inside were nonstop.

By then it housed 110, 120 inmates, an inconceivable number if you are talking about providing any care, no one could provide anything for them. At the time I was Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court and Mrs Koutzamani had made me responsible for minors, so with great effort and repeated visits and meetings and talks and so on, we changed the law.

For a start, no investigating magistrate can now place such a restrictive condition, it is prohibited. All the restrictive conditions placed on children detained at Volos were revoked, and the children left, except for a few cases aged 16-18 that concerned very specific offences. So an end was put to this situation, which had become a breeding ground for violence.

Were these children orphans?

They are children without a family, without a real family. They are not orphans in the sense of parental death, they are children with an inadequate parental environment. I found two brothers who had been there since the age of eight because the age range for juvenile offenders was six and a day to twenty-one years old, up until 2003, I believe. Then it became six and a day to eighteen. I tried children aged six and a day when I was the Public Prosecutor for Minors between 1983 and 1990, my first tenure at the Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. I tried first and second graders because one had blinded the other with a pen or hit them. You cannot imagine what ensued, it was a real battle to change this. My belief, which I fought for, is that ten should be the lower age limit; ten to eighteen. Anyway, there was a vehement reaction, so the minimum age was raised to eight. As we speak, the age range is eight to eighteen. For those aged eight to fifteen, only reformative sentences are passed, which exclude sentences to the Volos Educational Institution for Minors. Thankfully we have shut down the other educational institutions.

What you have just described is the recurring issue: the penal management of minors. Following your return from Cologne, where the way forward became somewhat more evident, who did you start speaking to about this issue?

We addressed the ministries, the Ministry of Justice; they grew tired of seeing us all the time. We brought it to everyone’s notice, including our Supervisors. Let me give you an example. The Public Prosecutor’s Offices were moving to Building 16 of the Evelpidon court complex, where they are still housed. I campaigned for a coveted slice of the new offices to be given to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors. They are the Offices of the Public Prosecutors for Minors to this day, three rooms which used to fit us all back then, I don’t think they fit everyone now. I don’t know if you have seen the premises, but to secure three rooms in such a coveted part of the building was no small feat. When the Prosecutor in charge of allocating office space to the various services managed to give me those premises, I grabbed a mop and bucket, so happy was I. At last, we would be housed in a respectable environment, we could set it up so that it was accessible to children, we could have it decorated in a way that made it accessible to the ages that would reach out to us.  That was probably one of the best moments of my life.

I remember saying, “No one touch this! I’ll clean it.” I’m not renowned for my housekeeping skills, I might ignore my own house, but I cleaned the office bathrooms, I scrubbed the windows until they sparkled, before our staff moved in. I was also given staff. Before 1990, we had grown to four Public Prosecutors for Minors, two of whom worked in juvenile justice full time. There was no such thing until then.

The other step we took was to start keeping social case files, using index cards. There was no computerisation at the time. The first approach to computerisation then was using index cards, to keep your case files referenced, as in the old movies.  The police must also keep the cases similarly filed and then, once the data can be processed, you have a computerised system. We, at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors, were the first prosecution service to implement this system. The other Public Prosecutor’s Offices, the other Departments, would not do it. We were the first to implement this kind of record-keeping, and we began to keep social case files.

What are social case files? Social case files are briefs that have nothing to do with juvenile offenders or juvenile victims. They are usually files of children in danger of either becoming offenders or being victimised by families facing problems. Children that are brought to our attention via anonymous or identified reports to various helplines, or sometimes identified reports made by neighbours, relatives or one of the parents, where the conditions at home are such that the child is led to one or the other direction.

I have to say that it was us, in Athens, who hesitatingly began to terminate parental responsibility and take children into care. Up until then, parental responsibility was never terminated. The children continued to reside with the abusers, various welfare interventions would then take place, and that was all. Parental responsibility termination by a court was implemented by us for the first time. Now it is widespread, and all the Public Prosecutor’s Offices in the country do it. They might not be experienced in these cases, but they will call Athens or Thessaloniki and ask, acquire templates, find out how this or that is done.

This happened with great difficulty over the years. To terminate parental responsibility was unthinkable at the time. The home was considered sacrosanct, the mentality was “I will do as I please in my own home, I lay down the law in my home, my child belongs to me and is not subject to rights, I will do as I please with it, I will discipline it as I please.” Let us not kid ourselves, discipline meant and still means bodily harm and demeaning conduct towards the child, verbal violence, emotional and psychological violence. Even as we speak the best families, not the families that first come to mind when you think about child maltreatment, do not know how to behave towards children.

So, you gradually start to reach out to other services.

I had done that even before 1990, before my initial seven-year tenure at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors ended. I had reached out. It was a huge step toward openness. My colleague Mrs Vasilakis and I used to visit the Korydallos Correctional Centre every week. On Wednesday or Sunday afternoons, we would go to Korydallos, without our families even knowing. We used to joke that if anything happened to us along the way, they would wonder, “How did they end up in Korydallos?” Once a week without fail, we would go to the Correctional Centre and talk with the juvenile detainees who were aged between twelve and twenty-one at the time. In fact, the talks would take place without the presence of correctional officers.

The Korydallos Correctional Centre was one of the wings of the Korydallos prison. It had a large room where the children gathered to eat all together, unlike the Avlona Special Juvenile Detention Establishment today, where every child eats in their cell, where the food is delivered to the cells. There was just a single dining space. Other than that, it was a correctional facility with terrible conditions, which we used to observe and of course, advocate for changes. We kept going to the ministry and changes were indeed made at the time. I remember the cells had a toilet in full view, there was not even a curtain to hide it. One child could be using the toilet while another child was in their bed or sitting at the table, the conditions were appalling. We could not believe it and, after a lot of pressure on our part, they placed screens at first and then doors, so that at least the children could enjoy some privacy.

We also used to visit the Correctional Centre of Kassaveteia and Volos too; mostly Kassaveteia. There, we were really disheartened, disappointed. By some stroke of luck, Kassaveteia had been operating on the German model. In other words, there were cells, each cell housing one or two children. Suddenly, during one of our visits, we saw them demolish cells to convert them into dormitories. Just when we were saying that we have at least one correctional facility that is tolerable – because being in a room with eight to ten people and being in a room alone or with another child makes a big difference to the children—we saw that that facility had deteriorated. That institution, too, had failed.

During our visits then, we used to talk with the children, some of whom we might have sentenced that very morning or most of whom we had possibly sent there. They never harmed or bothered us. Not only were they welcoming, not only were they hugging us, children who are now grey-haired, middle-aged adults, parents themselves, still come see us. I think our visits were a boost, a spark of hope. We gave them hope: “do this, enrol in that program.” There were a few programmes run by the Regional Committees for People’s Education (NELE), who ran various actions in prisons. There were no schools in prisons like there are in juvenile and youth prisons today.

We had also continued the education of police officers for several years and that, too, was a very important step.

How did the juvenile police units come into being?

Around 1983, 1984, we had instances of abused minors coming to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors from the police stations. I will never forget one child, a young boy named Fotis. When Fotis came, I looked at him and noticed his ear lobes were swollen, like red spheres. I took a closer look; the child looked like an alien. I asked him, “Fotis, what happened?” The police had brought him in for theft, detention in flagrante delicto. For a small child. I asked him, “What happened to you?” “The police,” he said. I asked him what the police did to him. He told me the officer had pinned his ears with clothespins to make him confess to other thefts. Then, he said, they grabbed him by the feet and suspended him from the balcony. I listened to what they had done, the slaps and the suchlike, and I could feel my rage mounting.

The memory of that boy has never left me. There was another juvenile, too, whom I will always remember. He was a minor who had appeared often before the Juvenile Court in the past. We used to let him go because you do not incarcerate a minor for a first offence, you help them find their way through the Supervisor of Minors. You don’t immediately send them to juvenile prison.

So he arrives, accompanied by the police, and a part of his body is wrapped in bandages. I ask him what happened. He would not speak before the police officers. I take him aside, we were in our Evelpidon offices, just the two of us, and I ask him again what happened. He tells me he has been shot, that the bullet came out the other side but did not harm any organs, but he was injured. I sent him to a forensic physician, and he did indeed have a bullet wound because the police had chased him for thefts, you can imagine the kind of theft we are talking about, nothing significant. It’s just that the child was a repeat offender.

When you become a witness to such incidents, you realise something must be done, that the police force must also be sensitised. It’s not enough to raise the awareness of judges or prosecutors. So, in the summer of 1985, we began to visit the Ministry of Public Order. We met with the Minister at first, then he referred us to the General Secretary, Mr Morphopos, who was ex-military. I will never forget his name because he was the one who agreed to our proposal for a police corps for minors made up of trained policemen. He agreed despite the objections of the police as a whole, the Chief of Police and his deputy chiefs who believed it was an impossible objective, that it would never materialise, that it was unnecessary.

At a meeting with Juvenile Court Judge Mrs Maria Vasilaki, who is currently with the Supreme Court, Mr Morphopos sat us down and said, “I am not asking you whether a juvenile police service will be set up. We are gathered here to figure out how it will be set up.” He had already made the decision, in other words. The meetings we had previously held had convinced him, and this great step forward was taken. Initially, a ministry circular was sent to all Police Departments and Services in Greece for the first time. It advised police officers how juvenile offenders should be treated, following our input too. After that, the space that would house the Division for Minors, which was a Subdivision back then, was chosen. At the time, we demanded that it contain two units, one for juvenile offenders and an equally important one for juvenile victims, who also required a specialised approach.

Back then, it was not a given that victims needed special treatment too and that you needed specialised training to avoid revictimisation through the procedure and secondary abuse during the collection of evidence. Two units were also set up in Thessaloniki and in Heraklion in Crete respectively. These still exist today, and special training was provided following the request of the police officers who wished to join those units.

Was that also your proposal?

Our proposal was that the officers should not be chosen by the police force. That the hierarchy should not appoint the officers, but that the officers themselves should express interest in joining those units first. Then, a selection could be made if the number expressing interest was greater than the number of posts.

Also, we trained police officers from all over Greece on matters pertaining to minors in the three to four years that followed. We held week-long training workshops. We used to go and teach them—myself, Mrs Vasilaki, Supervisors of Minors, psychologists and Mrs Spinelli, Professor of Criminology at the University of Athens, who is our teacher to this day. She was not only highly sensitised to issues affecting minors, but extremely knowledgeable too.  

You said that the juvenile police units were founded in 1986. That leaves another four years until the end of your first tenure at the Office of the Public Prosecutor for Minors in 1990. During those four years, then, an autonomous Police Service for minors came into being. Did you see any progress?

Yes, of course. First and foremost, the abuse of juvenile offenders stopped. Juvenile offenders used to come to us having been slapped, punched; they had black eyes. It was a noticeable change because up until then, anything involving minors, offenders or victims, in Attica, used to end up at the General Police Directorate of Attica (GADA). Nowadays, minors still get taken there– of course, there has been an increase in the number of incidents too – but they only send the most serious offences to GADA.

However, both during my first tenure until 1990 and during my second tenure between 1995 and 1998, I handled juvenile victims, particularly sexual abuse victims, myself. I did not send them to the police. I used the police as my assistants, to remove the children from the abusive environment where needed, to visit them in institutions that would subsequently accommodate them or at Children’s Hospitals where they would often be temporarily accommodated. The police would help us with all that. But, particularly in cases involving the sexual abuse of minors, I would take their statements following the example of the Germans. The international literature on the subject also informed us that that was the procedure followed in the USA too.

The only thing we did not, and should not, follow was the Code of Penal Procedure, which stated that when you question a juvenile witness – the victim is also considered a witness by the Code – you should ask a question and get an answer, ask a question and get an answer and so on. But that is not appropriate in cases of child sexual abuse. You must allow the child to narrate. Closed-ended questions are prohibitive. Questions must be open-ended, or you should allow the child to narrate and only interrupt in a very specific manner if you need to ensure that you have understood what is being said correctly. “You are telling me such and such, did I understand correctly, is that what you are telling me?”

When did you first encounter the idea of the House of the Child?

By 1989, I had received the whole text of the “Procédure MELANIE” which a colleague from the island of Réunion had forwarded. By late 1998, early 1999, I had completed my second tenure as Public Prosecutor for Minors and was Deputy Public Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal of Patras. Around that time,  I attended a conference for professionals in the field which was co-organised at a very high level – suffice it to say that the meetings were held at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the session was opened by the Prime Minister himself. The participants were Greece, France and Italy, and it was a conference on child abuse. I spoke about Greek Law and how it approached and dealt with abuse.

Talking of that conference, I just remembered something that shook me. They had drawn up a comparative table for the three countries. There, the legal provisions concerning violations of children were listed to allow a comparison between the laws of the three countries. Mostly violation of their bodies, their life, neglect, but also other provisions, such as labour law, administrative law and civil law provisions in each country’s codes and statutes. My turn to complete the comparative table comes; France and Italy had already completed it. It was my turn to complete whatever provisions the Greek law made. That was when I realised the poverty of our system in legislating to protect children.

I saw that most of our rules and laws applied to both children and adults. Be it bodily harm or rape or anything of that nature, whatever provisions applied to adult victims applied to juvenile victims too.

The child did not exist as a legal subject.

No, nowhere. I still have that table somewhere. I was so ashamed for my country when I saw it. The undisputed fact is that if you do not come out of your national shell, you cannot see your weaknesses, you cannot become aware of the steps that others have made. You think everything is fine and what goes on here is happening everywhere.

That was when I saw the deficiencies of our system. Labour law? I had no idea what to write in that box. If you see the table, I filled the box with “same as provisions applying to adults”, when the other countries had already incorporated provisions that we eventually passed in 2006, as part of the law on domestic violence.

What had changed in your absence, between your departure in 1990 and the beginning of your second tenure in 1995. When you left in 1990 the foundations had been laid, something was beginning to materialise.

When I left there was juvenile police, a public prosecution with its own offices, the social case files I mentioned ready to be computerised, we were the first service to be computerised. All of that was working, those that came after me moved things forward. We held hearings for minors every day. Currently, that is not the case. Now they have diminished; the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors has declined. It has suffered a decline.

I will tell you what changed then, what we did during my second tenure. Actually, let me go back to 1990 because it illustrates a point. In 1990, I left the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors because I was promoted to Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance and posted to Chalkida. At the time, Chalkida was an industrial zone, full of factories, poultry plants, and so on, cement plants, shipyards, anything you can imagine. It was a difficult post and I would also be the Supervisor as I was the Public Prosecutor at the Court of First Instance. At the time, the Office there had a Public Prosecutor at the Court of First Instance, and the rest were Deputy Prosecutors and an Associate Judge. It was a large service that dealt with two felonies a week, usually sent by Athens. The trials had to be attended by the Public Prosecutor of the Court of First Instance, no one else can attend these trials. The same applies today.  So, the post was very demanding.

As a result, I dreaded it a little. I wondered how I would cope. Well, let me tell you that compared to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors, my work in Chalkida felt so light. For the first time, I realised the pressure I had been under at my previous post, the psychological damage I had suffered. I did not feel it while I was there, I was unaware of it, but once I left, I understood what the Germans had told us, that professionals in this field, dealing with these matters, can end up being burned out.

Remaining a good professional and mentally healthy in this field to avoid burnout is a delicate balancing act. I was supervising the whole of Euboea, dealing with two serious felonies a week, I often slept on a couch at the office rather than return to Athens, I was commuting, arriving at the crack of dawn and being the last to leave, literally locking up the Chalkida Public Prosecutor’s office and still, it all felt easier than my time at the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Minors.

The incidents I had been seeing there, especially the sexual abuse cases which I had opted to deal with on my own. The Germans had warned us, “You need to look after yourselves. In this field, it is essential to have outlets, to do things for yourself, to have a hobby, a sport, something that takes you outside the job, that clears your head.”

They had taken us to a room where Public Prosecutors for Minors, Supervisors of Minors, Juvenile Judges had group therapy every month. I remember they all sat in a circle, and everyone aired their grievances about the other: In such and such case I told you to do this, but instead, you did what you wanted to do or in this or that instance you were wrong. Everyone aired everything they had bottled up inside.  We had also joined the circle, all five of us and our interpreter, and watched the session. At the end of the group therapy session, they picked up pillows and flung them at each other. They had a pillow fight to vent their anger and be more effective afterwards.

What did you do after you saw these examples?

When I returned from Germany, I did the following. I made a deal with the Institute of Child Health, which was headed by Eleni Agathonos at the time and is now headed by Giorgos Nikolaidis. I made a deal, like a memorandum of cooperation.  I told them, “Whenever I get a sexual abuse case, one of you, a social worker or a psychologist or a psychiatrist, whoever is available at the time, will come to my office before I initiate proceedings and talk with the child. That way, I will learn something, and the procedure will be easier for the child.”

So I used to notify the Institute, because I had child abuse cases, involving victims of both sexes. I would notify the Institute and keep the child there, give it a glass of juice, sit it down to draw or do something suited to their age. Also, if the child was accompanied by the mother, I would allow them to sit together in my office. In other words, I would give children time to become familiar with the environment they found themselves in. These were approaches used by the Americans and the Germans, which I was trying to implement on my own in Greece.

But we know that Greece is not just Athens – that’s what used to bother me the most. If something is not institutionally enshrined, it is pointless. People come and go; you can’t rely on individual actions. Of course, things depend on people too, but that is not the point. There have to be laws and institutions that both oblige you and train you how to act.

So, the people from the Institute would come and talk with the child and so on, and this way I would get a first impression. Then, my examination would follow. I always used the same secretary, who was very aware and very intelligent. She now works in Piraeus. We used to carry out the examinations together, in the presence of the people from the Institute. By then, I would have a rough idea of whether what was said was true or not. Usually, children do not lie, but there is a small percentage that might. I have had instances of Munchausen syndrome, of lying, but there was an explanation for the lying too. You need to find that reason; you must identify that, too.

We have heard professionals speak of “service chauvinism”, i.e. that the services are so confident that what they are doing is right that they are incapable of listening to criticism. Systemic abuse, however, is occurring to this day.

That is the case, unfortunately. It still occurs because we have not decided who does what, we have not acknowledged that some professionals think we are better than others. Even public prosecutors have an attitude that they are superior to the child psychiatrist, superior to the social worker. We are overweening, Judges too.

The other reason is that we have not learned to cooperate from a young age. We are not taught how to cooperate in school. Everyone gets tested individually, does homework on their own, reads out their assignment, does this and that on their own. They have not been taught to cooperate the way it is done abroad.  I experience Germany through my grandchildren, who are in German schools, and I see what they are taught once they are enrolled in the schooling system. The first thing they learn is how to cooperate. Group projects, group activities. One person looks this up, another person looks up something else, they pool their work and present it together as a team.

We are not even aware of the concept of inclusivity. As we speak, inclusivity is possibly the uppermost concept in child protection, the uppermost concept in child-friendly justice. In other words, the child must participate, even in the Juvenile court’s sentencing of the juvenile offender. You must include the minor; the minor should make that decision with you. You can guide them in deciding what the right thing is, but first, you must persuade them or choose the measure that would suit the offender best. You don’t get to decide just because you are the judge, just because you say so, that the sentence should be conciliation or compensation or something else. You will pass the sentence that you will jointly reach with the juvenile offender. The same applies to victims and everything else.

So that is the one thing we lack as professionals, we are incapable of sitting around the same table, or we think we are superior to the doctor or the medical examiner or the police officer. It will not happen unless we understand that interdisciplinarity is essential in caring for minors at any level, both for victims and offenders. You cannot stay holed up in your own bastion….

The Public Prosecutor cannot replace the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist cannot replace the social worker.

And yet we make that mistake. I see well-intentioned colleagues of mine who appear to be sensitised to issues affecting minors, but they meddle in what should be the work of others. And that is a mistake. I cannot draw a conclusion; the child psychiatrist will do that. I should stay within my area of expertise; stick to the area I know. I will not intrude in another’s field; I will respect them.

Let us broach the subject of the legal duties of other professionals. Shouldn’t the state encourage professionals whose work brings them into contact with children to report their suspicions?

When I was Deputy Prosecutor of the Supreme Court responsible for Minors, we held a meeting at the Department of Child Psychiatry of the “Agia Sofia” Children's Hospital. It was attended by child psychiatrists, social workers etc. from other hospitals that have children’s units, such as the Tzaneio Prefecture General Hospital of Piraeus, The Panagiotis & Aglaia Kyriakou Children's Hospital and the General Hospital of Attiki “Seismanoglio”.

These people stayed for a whole morning, and we spoke about many things. About how they, the psychologists, the psychiatrists and the social workers, could be protected. In many instances, they are dragged through the courts, sued for libel, for false accusations etc. because they were obliged to submit a report stating which parent is to blame or if both parents are to blame. They face years of litigation, legal fees, it is terrible.

Following that meeting, I went to the Ministry and asked it to legislate a provision that would grant them immunity. The law was passed, but it only applied to social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists and child psychiatrists working in public hospitals, child protection institutions etc.

However, other professionals are involved in this field too.  For example, municipal social workers who carry out investigations following a public prosecutor’s order. Medical-educational centres also carry out investigations and submit reports to the public prosecutor. Then, there are the professionals who carry out psychiatric evaluations. The teachers also came to see us. Then, the Hellenic Association of Social Workers (SKLE) too, came to see us. I was Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court at that time. The social workers visited my office, the Children’s Ombudswoman Mrs Koufonikolaou attended too. We agreed that as we were considering expanding the provision to include teachers, then it might as well be expanded to provide immunity for professionals working for municipalities and social workers etc. working at medical-educational centres. This would mean that no one could bring a lawsuit against them unless they could establish wilful misconduct. If I am acting deceitfully or with malice and it is proven, for example, that I was related with the person initially filing the report or I was the school principal, but I also had something to gain from filing a report, then we have wilful misconduct.

We submitted it to the Ministry, but it has not been passed yet. The government changed too, and at present, the expanded provision has not yet been passed into law.

Mrs Koufonikolaou told us that the Minister, Mr Kalogerou, had made a commitment back then.

Yes, he was on board but did not have enough time. The previous government had also been on board for the initial provision; it got passed into law by Mr Athanasiou, so then it just needed to be extended. Mr Kalogerou did not have enough time to address the matter, so it is now pending. It would act as a safeguard for teachers, a guarantee of legal protection that would make them more open to coming forth. At the moment they are reticent.

They should also receive training.

On Saturday, we held a Conference in Aigio. The conversation that followed went on until two, three am. They could not get enough of the conversation, they had questions, they wanted answers. They want us to return and continue the conversation. It is natural that they have queries. These are things they are hearing for the first time. They had not even heard of the Convention on the Rights of the Child before. Can you imagine that? Aigio is not an isolated spot in the mountains. So imagine what the situation must be like in more distant places… in Orestiada, in the islands.

In 2014, I asked the National School of the Judiciary to introduce a course on the powers and responsibilities of the Public Prosecutor for Minors. That way, upon graduating the School, everyone would have some knowledge on these matters. I taught that course until this July, without remuneration, of course. I refuse to accept payment for anything that I willingly offer our country and our community. I consider it part and parcel of what I do, so although teachers at the school are remunerated and have their travel and accommodation expenses covered and get compensated for teaching, I decline all of that. Moreover, during my final three years there, I taught by inviting other experts in the field as speakers, so that the students could become familiar with other sectors.

This year I invited Mr Nikolaidis, I invited Ms Olga Themeli, I invited Ms Artinopoulou, Mrs Mpeka, the child psychiatrist, from Thessaloniki, Mr Anagnostopoulos from the Department of Child Psychiatry of the “Agia Sofia” Children's Hospital… Over the years, I invited many others, such as Ms Paris Zagoura, to speak.  At least three guest speakers joined me every year to teach the students, to allow them to hear other professionals and to role-play. Seeing how well the information you are trying to impart gets assimilated during role-play is quite something.

So public prosecutors need training, but I had also asked for the same to apply to Judges. When the Judge tries a minor or tries the adult who has abused a minor, he needs to have a broader awareness, otherwise, how can he do it? Should not there be an equivalent course for Judges? Family Law is not enough.

Isn’t there?

No, it is pure, dry Family Law. It is not an education in abuse and delinquency. The Judge needs a different kind of training. If we were to introduce such a course, we would get a different kind of judge, someone who would then pursue some kind of continuing education to enrich their knowledge.

We held so many Conferences across Greece during my three-year tenure as Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court. I visited all our Public Prosecutor’s Offices, both at the Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal, covering my own expenses, that goes without saying.

So, I visited them all over Greece. We held training workshops where we did not just invite my people. I invited police officers, port authority officers where available, judges. I trained nearly all the military judges, they were invited to the training, as were judges and public prosecutors of the Court of Appeal and the Court of First instance, everyone I could reach in each location I visited. The aim was to allow them to at least reflect on certain matters; it was not comprehensive training, but you still came away with something. At least you became aware of everything you did not know. You might not have learned a lot, but at least you came to the realisation that you should thoroughly think before you act, that you do not know everything.

Have such initiatives been continued by other prosecutors?

Yes. It touches me when I say it because they are my children, I see them as my children, and I think they see it that way too. They have dedicated books to me, they refer to themselves as my children, all these students of mine who went on to become Deputy Public Prosecutors and Public Prosecutors. Most of my children, whatever post they now find themselves in, can recognise abuse, know how to take steps, find out more, they call me to this day and  ask, “I have this case, this incident, what should I do, how should I proceed?”

I am genuinely moved when I see my children everywhere, in Kavala, Thessaloniki, Heraklion in Crete, Veria, Alexandroupoli, Edessa, Florina, Ioannina, Patras, Piraeus, Kos, Zakynthos, handle juvenile cases which they could not have handled back in my day. Thessaloniki has an incredible Public Prosecutor, Mrs Dimitra Tsiardakli, who is a mother of four herself, so she is not someone who has no other obligations, and still, she made a difference. What did Dimitra do? She gathered all the relevant bodies and services and created a Network. We will now showcase this network abroad too, with Mr Nikolaidis, in a programme Mr Nikolaidis is currently running, about how services can work in tandem across the whole of the EU.

So, we have this Network created by Mrs Tsiardakli, which I brought to Giorgos Nikolaidis’ attention, he had not been aware of it. But I have been following Tsiardakli’s work. In fact, she recently managed to obtain a decision by the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (KEDE) that Municipal Social Services will assist the removal of children into care on a twenty-four-hour basis. Before, they used to tell us, “It’s three am, I am not going to go take the child into care right now, I won’t do this or that.” KEDE issued a decision following Mrs Tsiardakli’s initiative. The hospitals too. No child stays at a hospital for more than twenty-four hours. They are immediately given to families, there is a list of available foster parents.

So it’s not that difficult.

Nothing is difficult.

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Nikos Paraskevopoulos

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• Member of Parliament (former) • SYRIZA
• Minister (former) • Ministry of Justice

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Modern Greek history has seen its fair share of brutalities, but few among them have been as little discussed as the ways in which children have been mistreated, abused, neglected and institutionalised by the State. From the late 19th century, when a prototype welfare system was first put in place under the Greek Royal Family, all the way to the nationalisation of welfare from the 1970s onwards, one constant has been that children have concerned the State as props in the political game or as potential perpetrators of crime — usually both. This chronic undermining of children’s rights affected most aspects of the public sector; and its traces are still visible today.

A recent video of a policeman beating up an eleven-year-old child in the outskirts of Athens, that surfaced on social media, raised the question of what ideas police and other authorities continue to have regarding the treatment of minors — whether suspected offenders or not. ((The video is available (in Greek) here, from ERT, the Greek Public Broadcaster.)) The Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, took to Twitter to condemn the incident, stating that “whoever hits minors does not have a place anywhere”. ((Tweet is available (in Greek) here.)) The speed of the Minister’s reflexes can perhaps be explained by the fact that the memory of the 2008 murder of fifteen-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, shot by a police officer in downtown Athens, is still fresh. 

The consequences of Grigoropoulos’s murder were staggering: Athens, and other Greek cities, burned during spontaneous riots that lasted for weeks. But the mistreatment of children by officials has also been documented in many other, less explosive, instances: some research has shown that children victims of abuse have been made to recount their ordeal to authorities up to fourteen times, in what cleary amounts to secondary abuse in the hands of the State; children who have been removed from their families are kept in hospitals, despite not being in need of hospitalisation, sometimes for years; and at least one institution has been strapping disabled children to their beds and locking them in cages. ((See our detailed report on the Lechaina unit for children with disabilities: "Hell as an Institution".)) Authorities have described such practices as unavoidable, necessary, or “for the good of the children”.

It is impossible to explain the persistence of such practices, at least in part, without considering the way that historical events have shaped Greek authorities’ attitudes toward minors. 

In the Hands of the Lord

Institutionalisation of children had been introduced very soon after the foundation of the Greek State, with the City of Athens already operating an Orphanage for Abandoned Infants in 1838. However, a quasi-system of fostering also existed, with foster families often paid a meagre fee to host abandoned children, and institutionalisation was in part seen as a solution to abuse and neglect within this unregulated framework. 

The Athens Municipal Nursery was founded by the city’s Mayor in 1859, and brought under the auspices of the Royal Family in the 1870s. According to its own data, between its foundation and the mid 1960s, it hosted over 50.000 children. During its peak, it hosted about 600 at one time. As Maria Athanassopoulou and Marianna Drakopoulou write in their Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece, it was within the Municipal Nursery that the first attempts were made to systematically document child ailments and statistically study infant mortality. ((See Maria Athanasopoulou, Mariana Drakopoulou, A Historical Account of Abandoned Infants in Greece (Istoriki anadromi gia ta ektheta vrefi stin Ellada), To Vima tou Asklipiou, tome 9, issue 1, Jan-March 2010, available online (in Greek) here.)) 

As was common in many countries — and remains today — the Municipal Nursery also introduced a vrefodohos, or baby hatch, where mothers could abandon their babies anonymously. On the outside, there was an inscription from Psalm 27: “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.” 

Also on the initiative of the Royal family, the Patriotic Foundation for Social Welfare and Perception, or PIKPA, was founded in 1914, initially as the “Patriotic Association of Greek Women”. Although its initial mandate was to cater for the families of soldiers fighting in the war, after the 1920s it gradually shifted to the sheltering of orphaned and displaced children. 

By the end of the 1930s, even the few progressive ideas about government and lawmaking that had emerged in Greece during the interwar period had been snuffed out — first by dictatorship, then by war and occupation. Civil war followed, then two decades of “feeble democracy” and a military junta, until a tumultuous return to democratic politics finally led to stability and the relative strengthening of public institutions. Only then, near the end of a seventy year period, did a political consensus appear that the State should provide a safety net for children, who had either broken the law or been neglected or abused. 

The Youth Problem

Dictator Ioannis Metaxas ruled Greece from 1936 to 1941, a period known as the 4th of August Regime. Although his legacy of oppression has been somewhat tempered by the fact that he denied fascist Italy’s demand to allow Italian troops to occupy Greek territory, his regime was totalitarian and he was an admirer of fascism. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had reciprocated Metaxas’s admiration in his official visit to Greece in 1936. Although the 4th of August Regime was not in the strictest sense fascist, and Metaxas personally was more influenced by Portugese dictator António Salazar, it did have common traits with fascism and nazism, including the targeting of youth for indoctrination. In 1936, Metaxas created the National Union of Youth, or EON, the Greek version of the Gioventù Italiana del Littorio and the Hitlerjugend, which sought to shape minors into future supporters — if not functionaries — of the regime.

As was the case with every other fascist government in Europe, Metaxas’s policy choices often attempted to counter the voices pushing for progressive reforms, inspired by European Social Democracy that had bloomed in the beginning of the century. In her 2013 book “Youth in Peril: Supervision, Reformation and Justice for Minors after the War” ((«Νέοι εν κινδύνω»: Επιτήρηση, αναμόρφωση και δικαιοσύνη ανηλίκων μετά τον πόλεμο», Polis publications, 2013)), Efi Avdela, a Professor of Modern History in the University of Crete, has written about a number of progressive sociologists, legal theorists, feminists and socialists in the interwar era, who advocated among other things in favour of introducing welfare instead of penalisation for minors. According to Avdela’s account, the “criminalisation vs. welfare” debate would go on for decades after the war, although the scales would always tip heavily towards the former.

Two laws by the Metaxas government would cement the idea that children in peril should be treated as criminals (with all the implications that this word entailed at the time) to be reformed, instead of more progressive approaches to welfare. In December 1939, a law introduced Judges and Prosecutors for Minors. A year later, after Greece had entered the war against the Axis, a concise plan on operating reforming institutions was made into law, introducing two new entities subject to the State Prosecutor: the State Prefect for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors. They were both mainly tasked with guiding minors through the justice system, whether that meant carrying out social research on a minor’s background, or providing support for the minor that went through the system. They were mostly staffed by volunteers.

A month after passing the 1940 law, with Greece on the brink of Axis occupation, Metaxas died. But conservative conceptions of juvenile delinquency were crystallised in his laws, and the newly founded entities began working on minors, although their practices were modified to also address the humanitarian crisis caused by the occupation. According to Avdela’s findings, 4.600 minors went through the justice system in 1941 alone, but most of the volunteers’ work was focused on gathering and distributing food and clothing.

From 1947 onwards, some Societies for the Protection of Minors began operating their own institutions, which provided an interim shelter for rehabilitation between the time a minor was released from a reformation centre and the time they went free back to society. Until the fall of the Military Junta, in 1974, when Greek state institutions would gradually become more “liberalised”, the Prefects for Minors and the Societies for the Protection of Minors would deal with all sorts of “moral panics” that focused on youth cultures: “teddy-boyism”, rock ‘n’ roll, sexual liberation and leftism — all filed under “anti-social behaviour”.

War, Children

During the Greek Civil War, the issue of child protection took a darker turn for both competing sides, and the particulars of what actually happened are subject to debate until today. In 1947, the United States of America began providing military, technical and financial assistance to the Greek government and its National Army against the Democratic Army of Greece, formed by the Greek Communist Party and former resistance guerrillas. The scale of U.S. military assistance meant that the government could now launch air attacks against guerrilla strongholds, which included the first documented use of napalm bombs. 

From 1948, when the war scales started tipping in favour of the government, the guerillas began transferring children away from the conflict zones of northern Greece that were being bombed, to countries of the Eastern Bloc. Pro-government voices named this paidomazoma (literally, “child-gathering”), after the much older practice of Devshirme, or “child levy”, in which Ottoman authorities abducted children from among their Balkan Christian subjects, converted them to Islam and trained them for military or civil service. Pro-Democratic Army voices, in turn, countered by calling the practice paidososimo (“child-saving”) or sotiria (“salvation”). Up to this day, left-wing and progressive historians have been debating with conservatives, as well as the far-right, on whether this was a humanitarian operation or recruitment.

A year earlier, Paul I had ascended the throne of the Kingdom of Greece and his wife, Frederica of Hanover, had become Queen. More than any of her predecessors or successors, Frederica was actively involved in politics and was often in the public spotlight.

Τhe Royal Family of Greece had patronised all sorts of high-society philanthropic societies since the 19th century, among which several devoted to children, with a special focus on juvenile delinquency. Frederica combined the Royal Family’s tradition of philanthropy with her own penchant for politics, and began an operation parallel to the guerrillas’ paidomazoma, thereby removing children from conflict zones and placing them in special institutions that she founded, called Paidopoleis (“Child cities”). 

This operation, introduced by Royal Decree in 1947, was named the “Charity Drive ‘Welfare for the Northern Provinces of Greece’ Under the High Authority of Her Majesty, the Queen”, although everyone would refer to it simply as Charity Drive (Eranos in Greek), or after 1955 as Royal Welfare. It was carried out by the National Army. Fifty-two such Paidopoleis were opened all over Greece, all working under a similar model: a strict upbringing, and a daily military-style regimen that would inscribe “proper values” to children.

During her youth in Hanover, Frederica had been a member of the Hitler Youth, and in Greece she was considered sympathetic towards the Nazi regime (as well as the United States). In his book on the children of the civil war ((Λουκιανός Χασιώτης, Τα Παιδιά του Εμφυλίου, Βιβλιοπωλείο της Εστίας, 2013)), historian Loukianos Hasiotis claims that the Charity Drive was at least partially modelled after the Franco regime’s Auxilio Social, which employed similar messages. 

Since the Greek Civil War is now widely accepted as the first episode of the Cold War, it should come as no surprise that the conflict over children was also played out on an international level. The Greek government branded the removal of children from conflict zones by the guerrillas as a “genocide”, a position accepted by the United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans (UNSCOB) in its 1948 report. The idea was also promoted by officials with prominent positions on the international stage, like the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul. The United Nations Committee was tasked with investigating what the guerrillas were doing — but, naturally, not what was happening in the Paidopoleis. 

Thus, until historical research caught up, what is known about the Paidopoleis of the era mostly came from oral narratives of the children that grew up in them. In 2007, when a popular historical programme on Greek television, The Time Machine, aired two episodes about the children of the Civil War, the testimonies of people that had lived in the Paidopoleis during their childhood were divergent even within the same episode. This disagreement in testimonies of the children, now in their old age, persists in the popular press to this day.((See, for expample, Marina Karpozilou, “Growing up in Frederica’s Pedopoleis: The ‘Guerrilla-striken children of the ‘Big Mother’” (in Greek: “Μεγαλώνοντας στις παιδουπόλεις της Φρειδερίκης: Τα 'ανταρτόπληκτα' παιδιά της 'Μεγάλης Μητέρας'”), News247.gr, 9/1/2016)) Some reminisce about their time in the Pedopoleis with nostalgia and others with a more critical view, even sparking literary debates: in his 2009 book, The Blurry Deep ((Γιάννης Ατζακάς, Ο Θολός Βυθός, Άγρα)), author Yiannis Atzakas recalls his time in a Paidopoli as trauma haunting him well into his middle age, while Antonis Venetis, in his 2014 book Letters ((Αντώνης Ν. Βενέτης, Επιστολές, Αρμός)) considers Frederica’s Drive beneficial to children and states his belief that “the ‘blurry deep’ can only be found in fixations, prejudices and obsessions”.

Under Frederica, the PIKPA became the second pillar of childcare, a sort of supplement to the Paidopoleis, housing children that had been orphaned in the war. PIKPA structures followed a similar regiment of strict, military-style upbringing and carried out adoptions, as well as absorbed some of the prominent figures of Frederica’s Charity Drive. Lina Tsaldari, the widow of former Prime Minister Panagis Tsaldaris, was one of the aristocratic “Appointed Ladies” who actively participated in the Charity Drive. Ιn 1950 she became the President of PIKPA.

The third pillar of Frederica’s childcare initiatives was the “Houses of the Child”. These were small daycare centers in the villages of rural Greece (mainly in the north) that after 1950 started taking in children while their parents were working. Without a public education system in place, especially in these remote areas, the Houses of the Child, 140 in total, acted as a nursery or elementary school — with a twist. In them, children would be taught farming and technical skills, while also being indoctrinated with “religious and patriotic values”.

The Eranos might have been Frederica's personal project, but its funding was very much public. Royal Welfare was funded by special import taxes, tariffs on cigarettes (two cigarettes in every pack), percentages of cinema tickets, a part of workers’ wages, and other measures. Researchers have calculated that between 1949 and 1956, the Royal Welfare Foundation took in more than 186 million drachmas — and a lot more after that.((More information on relevant activities by the Greek Royal Family is available (in Greek) in research by the Ios journalistic outfit.))

For the majority of children that were taken to Eastern Bloc countries, it wasn’t until the 1980s and the campaign of the centre-left PASOK government for the right-of-return of political refugees that they would see Greece again.

Leftists and progressives have been claiming for decades that the Charity Drive was the real paidomazoma. In any case, after the Democratic Army’s defeat and the end of the Civil War, only 14 of the paidopoleis continued to operate. Nowadays, four of them are still working as institutions for children without families.

Searching for Roots

Mary Theodoropoulou runs “Roots”, an NGO, from a small apartment in Kesariani. Historically known as the place where in 1944 the Nazis executed 200 communist political prisoners that had like many others been handed over to them by the collaborationist authorities, Kaisariani is a working class neighborhood in Athens, where the Communist Party still gets one of its highest percentages. 

Abandoned as a newborn in the Athens Municipal Nursery baby hatch, Theodoropoulou has often appeared in the media talking about her quest to find her biological parents, after she discovered in her twenties that she had been adopted. Her efforts to date have not been successful. She and seven others, all of whom had also stayed at the Municipal Nursery as children, founded the NGO in the late 1990s, to help people search for their biological parents.

Theodoropoulou has done extensive work on institutions. Not only did Rizes produce the only comprehensive study that looked into the state of Greek institutions for children in 2015, but her work on tracing the roots of adopted children means she has heard a massive amount of personal stories about what has been happening inside these institutions.

After World War II, according to Theodoropoulou, there was a further, major shift towards institutionalisation. “The practice of trofoi, foster mothers that were paid to breast-feed and take care of babies, had been in place since the late nineteenth century,” she said. “A shortage of milk and absolute poverty meant that babies would die otherwise”. State institutions mostly acted as halfway houses that would assign a newborn to a trofos after a short stay. Later, after the War, the trofoi acted as a means to relieve the institutions from the strain caused by the huge numbers of children.

Theodoropoulou told us how, after the war was over, the trofoi framework was expanded. PIKPA, which took care of many of the orphaned or abandoned children, would now hand them over to families, some of whom took in numerous children. “But there was no framework,” she said. “There were no rules on hygiene, no supervision and the remuneration of foster parents was low and infrequent. A trofos would bring back the body of a baby she had taken in and say to the Nursery staff that ‘this is frozen’ — meaning dead. In other cases, foster families abandoned children all over again. There were also cases of abuse, even rape. All these things undermined foster care and institutions gained ground.”

The suffering of children that went through the foster care system unsupervised could be prolonged even after they were out of it. Theodoropoulou told us the story of a boy who tried to report that his foster parents had sexually abused him. He was deemed mentally ill and forcibly committed to a psychiatric institution. In other cases, disabled children, and children with mental illness or developmental problems, would end up in the PIKPA of Leros, founded in 1963 to take in children from the Public Pediatric Neuropsychiatric Hospital “Daou Pentelis”, as part of the overall project of transferring — and isolating — the mentally ill from all over the country to Leros. The PIKPA of Leros formed part of the so-called “Psychopath Colony”, established on the island in 1957, and now known as the infamous kolastirio (“hellhole”). Many of those committed to the kolastirio would not leave until an international deinstitutionalisation initiative in the 1990s, funded by the EU, after a series of stories in the international press and a documentary had revealed the horrible conditions to which patients had been subjected. ((Deinstitutionalization in Leros has been documented in various sources. Psychiatrists who participated in the process like Ιοannis Loukas, Ιοannis Tsiantis, Theodoros Megalooikonomou and Felix Guattari, among others, have all written their own accounts and commentaries on it.))

Since 1939, when it came under the authority of the Ministry of Health, PIKPA has gone through a great number of changes in administrative structure and oversight, but by the 1950s and 1960s, it expanded almost to the size of a full healthcare and welfare system for minors. At its peak, its services included everything from schools for medical personnel and mobile medical units to clinics, hospitals and nursery schools. Since 1925, it had also been operating summer camps from June to the end of September for quality time and healing for children suffering from tuberculosis. The “exoches”, as they were called, stopped during the war, but began operating again after 1945. In 1948, their mandate was expanded to accept impoverished children with problems in development, or any chronic disease, and in 1951 to include working children, and all children monitored by doctors. In 1956, PIKPA put together its first structure for disabled children in Voula. Gradually, it would end up running most of the institutions for disabled children in Greece. 

Institutionalisation in the Paidopoleis, the orphanages and the nurseries gave rise to a different problem that haunts families until today: illegal adoptions. In her memoirs, Frederica had claimed that communist women had been abandoning their children and even that she witnessed a woman literally throwing her baby away, which was supposedly picked up by an army officer and handed over to her. After the military junta of 1967-1974 fell, communist guerrillas that had been exiled in camps in the islands reported that their children were abducted from there. In fact, the children were taken to the Paidopoleis or the PIKPA, and were then sold to foster parents in the United States, often assisted by officials in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, as well as Greek-American Organisations ((The Greek-American Organization AHEPA was found to have been involved in a trafficking ring for children - see, for example: The adopted Greek children of the Cold War, Margarita Pournara | Kathimerini)). Although the Greek press had published stories on the issue since the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1996 when U.S. media would start digging into the story and get to the bottom of it, that the full extent of what had happened would be revealed.

Discovering the Victim

After King Constantine’s failed counter-coup attempt against the Military Junta, in December 1967, the Royal Family was forced to flee the country. So, in a strange twist of fate, it was the dictators who brought welfare, including child protection, under the purview of the State. With a Law Decree, in 1970, all the Royal Foundations and Charities — along with their funding provisions — were absorbed into the National Welfare Organisation. Their role did not change significantly for the next decade, although Greece’s evolution into a more advanced economy, after the long and tumultuous process of post-war reconstruction, meant that the numbers of children in peril would gradually start to decrease.

It wasn’t until 1981, when centre-left PASOK came to power, that the welfare system would advance into the next phase. One of PASOK’s most important and enduring achievements was the creation of the National Healthcare System, or ESY, in 1983, which put in place a concise framework for healthcare that also included aspects of welfare. The Ministry overseeing it was now renamed the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The first eight years of PASOK in power, from 1981 to 1989, included many decisive progressive reforms in worker’s rights, civil rights and education, but welfare was still mostly understood as benefits, and were lagging behind the drastic changes overtaking Greek society. Not only did the National Welfare Organisation go through no significant change in the 1970s and 1980s, but especially with regard to child protection, the idea of preventing victimisation and abuse, although gaining traction in Europe, was not present in any sector of the Greek state.

Xeni Dimitriou, the former Chief Prosecutor of the Greek Supreme Court, has served three tenures as a State Prosecutor for Minors over three different decades. She has gone through thousands of pages of legal theory on children, attended hundreds of conferences and exchanged opinions with dozens of other prosecutors all over the world. When we met her, shortly after her recent retirement, she spoke to us about her firsthand experience of what Greece’s long refusal to acknowledge the victimisation of children had led to. In her early days as Prosecutor for Minors in the 1980s — ”an unprivileged position, almost a punishment back then” — she witnessed time and again policemen marching into her office with arrested children that had been severely beaten. One boy came in with massively swollen ears. He told her that they had put clothespins in his ears to interrogate him and had hanged him upside down from the precinct’s balcony to scare him into confessing. In other cases, following the letter of the law, she was forced to put six and seven-year-old kids on trial, or send underage lawbreakers away in institutions that were practically prisons.

Dimitriou referred to Kalliopi Spinelli, a well-known criminologist as her “teacher, the teacher of all of us”. Spinelli is credited, among many things, with proposing the replacement of the term “juvenile criminals” with “juvenile offenders”, and with advocating for a pedagogical instead of a penal approach to justice for the underage. A few other prominent legal theorists and professionals gradually began to advocate for a different relation between the children and the State.

Modern international ideas on children’s rights speak only of “victims,” Dimitriou insisted. “We were not aware of it in Greece, but the protection of victims was not a new topic internationally speaking,” she said. “Although in the USA, victim protection started to become systematic around that time too, in 1985, with the creation of Victim Services Units that operate in juvenile courts over there. It was a Public Prosecutor who took that initiative in 1985. So back in 1983, these ideas were beginning to develop around the world. The truth is that Professor Spinelli had also spoken to us about the victims, within the framework of the protection of minors.  In other words, we did not think of them as something separate. I just did not know that the Prosecutor’s office did not cover that field too. So, when I started work there, I said that the Public Prosecutor’s office will have a twofold aspect. Subsequently, we asked that the police follow suit and they did. Everything coming through the judiciary and police services should have a twofold aspect. One aspect is the juvenile offender and the other aspect the juvenile victim. Both because juveniles often switch between these two roles and because, at the time, matters were not viewed in that light, even globally. Even the USA was still in the early stages.”

In a conference speech Dimitriou gave in 1991, in-between her tenures as Prosecutor for Minors, she said that a bill for “Units of Care for Minors” had been drafted since 1984. The purpose of the plan was to set up a structure so that “juvenile offenders until 12 years of age would not be involved in any way with suppression mechanisms such as the police, the Prosecutor and the Court for Minors, but would be taken care by welfare services instead”. She then went on to describe best practices found in existing institutions — stopping at one point to wonder whether “it’s time to legislate that juvenile delinquents could be placed into foster families. The society responds positively. Why delay any more?”

Dimitriou’s 1991 speech echoed the ideas that would start to shape new concepts of child welfare. In 1985 and 1990, the UN had published guidelines on handing justice to juvenile delinquents and the prevention of delinquency in minors respectively. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was also signed at the time.

Things were changing, but in the case of Greece, the pace was and remains slow. The Greek governments of the 1990s made a few attempts to modernise the welfare system, or rather to establish one, since throughout their evolution the various services had operated independently. In 1992, a law practically dissolved the National Welfare Organisation and the PIKPA, in an attempt to create a unified system that was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. 

Another law, in the same year, introduced legal procedures for foster care and was amended in 1996, by adding a stricter framework for the role of social investigations in adoption and foster parenting procedures. That law also took an important step by changing Metaxas’s laws to introduce social services in the courts and the State Prosecutor offices, although their mandate remained to handle the delinquency of minors. 

Probably the most important step at the time was taken in 1998 by another PASOK government, this time under Prime Minister Kostas Simitis, when the creation of a National System of Social Care was attempted. In the following years, the former PIKPA units were successively centralised, then decentralised again. Generally under the oversight of regional administration, these units followed divergent courses. One post-PIKPA incarnation, the Lechaina unit for disabled children, achieved world-wide notoriety for its horrific conditions.

The new system gave explicit roles to regional governments, but also cleared up the terms under which private NGO’s could carry out welfare programmes. Thus, the 1990s was also the decade when NGOs would increasingly start to step in and cover for the shortcomings in child protection. The Greek branch of SOS Children’s Villages had been active since 1975, but now non-government care for children would diversify. The Smile of the Child was created in 1995 and The Ark of the World would follow in 1998. All three of these organisations would grow in the years that followed and actively supplement state welfare. 

The decade ended with a presidential decree in 1999 that attempted to contain illegal adoptions by also giving all oversight responsibilities to regional welfare services — Regional institutions and Directorates of Social Care. With an amendment in 2003, even more welfare responsibilities would be directed to the Regional Health Services that had been created a year earlier. According to the explanatory report that came with the draft of the bill, this would allow for “better coordination, monitoring and evaluation” of social welfare services. The UN Committee overseeing the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child noted this attempt, but still found it fell short of a coherent Child Protection System. Some of the problems highlighted by the Committee included the lack of a clear mandate between authorities and a central body that would coordinate all services, problems that are still partially present to this day.

Xeni Dimitriou’s 1991 speech ended by saying that “maybe it is time for juvenile law to grow up”. It marked the beginning of a period of intense pressure by child protection professionals for a proper children’s welfare system to be designed and implemented. But in the 1990s, a welfare system that would address problems that could not be solved with benefits was still a challenge. Also, the word deinstitutionalization had just been popularised for the first time after the attempts to change conditions in Leros, but that programme, which continued for the best part of the decade, would suffer setbacks. Voices of experts speaking about the need to address different vulnerabilities or how institutionalised child welfare could actually be harmful, were only just beginning to be heard.

As it happens, the regressive character of children’s welfare was officially, albeit mostly symbolically, challenged in 2010, by an amendment to a law of the Metaxas regime, mandating the Societies for the Protection of Minors to not only deal with “delinquency”, but also the “victimisation” of minors.

However, just as the need to shift the focus of the child protection system was becoming obvious to policy-makers, Greece found itself in the throes of a terrible financial crisis. Successive governments have since then introduced a variety of “plans” for children’s welfare, which have one thing in common: almost none of their provisions have been implemented.

PIKPA

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Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Aggeliki Pitsela

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How did the decision for the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance" to occupy the Lechaina Unit in November 2015 come about?

Zero Tolerance was formed in 2010 with a view to building a disability activist movement, a movement for the emancipation of disabled subjects, alongside the Movement of Disabled Artists. We began implementing actions, publishing articles, occupying premises, staging all kinds of interventions. And then came the time to emancipate ourselves so that we could deal with the grave issue of institutionalised life and deinstitutionalisation. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, unable to advocate for themselves, having no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present. So, we, their fellow disabled, began to advocate for their rights.

A two-day festival was held at the self-managed theatre “Embros” shortly before the occupation, a solidarity festival for the children and adults of Lechaina as well as all the other institutions. There were discussions, documentary screenings, plays. The groundwork for the occupation was laid there.

What was the aim?

To highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living.

What was the plan?

To occupy the premises in question and invite civil society to join us in becoming many. It did not happen. The response was not there. The cameras were there, in that there was widespread media coverage at the time.  All the TV channels, both public broadcaster ERT and private broadcasters, aired reports, each in their own manner. A lot of the coverage took on an anti-government bias. We were not focusing on that aspect at all, at the time. Besides, the SYRIZA-ANEL government had only been in power for two months. Our focus was to highlight what was a chronic situation. Lechaina had not been happening for two months, it had a history of 37 years.((For an in-depth account of the Lechaina Unit, read our case study: Hell as an Institution))

We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad. In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. In other words, we were not doing anything new, something that had never been done before. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, “Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.” We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside.  

Were you afraid?

No, no, no. Not at all. We were in the right, I had nothing to fear. None of us was afraid. We had already occupied the Social Insurance Institute (IKA) in 2011. When Syntagma Square was packed with half a million people, we went and peacefully occupied the IKA headquarters for four days. We stayed in Lechaina for four days, too; apparently that is how long our bodies can withstand being exposed to these conditions…

We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime, a total of nine people, most of us disabled, in four cars. We explained who we were. The Chairman of the Board of the facility said we needed a permit to enter – the police conveyed the management’s request to us. We were prepared, ID cards in our pockets. We told the policeman that the violations taking place here were far greater than any violation our presence might give rise to, that we had no intention of hindering the staff in their work but had no intention of leaving either. We went inside knowing what awaited there, but the reality is always much harsher than anything you could have imagined.

Did you have any run-ins with the authorities after the occupation?

We are the ones who went to the Public Prosecutor. Four of us left the unit and went to the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada and filed a complaint. To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify.((The Prosecutor's office archived the complaint in 2016. See our case study on the Lechaina Unit: Hell as an Institution))

The complaint was filed officially, not anonymously. There are specific liabilities at stake: who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed the medication? Specific criminal liabilities are pending, and, to date, they have not been investigated. Unless we are to accept that the disabled persons at the unit are unworthy of living, in which case no criminal liability arises.

The fact that no one is held accountable for this conduct, the fact that nobody seems to wonder about who is to blame for these people’s torture–it is just not possible that no one is to blame—is indicative of the treatment  of disabled subjects in institutions. Is the psychiatrist responsible? Did she prescribe by fax? Was she contacted at two in the morning and told “so-and-so is hitting themselves,” and did she reply, “I’ll fax you a prescription”? Did she do that? If so, is it allowed? Is it a punishable offence? Are prolonged physical restraint and/or prolonged chemical suppression scientifically accepted practices? Are they torture? The UN says they are. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed.

We met the psychiatrist, too, she came to the premises while we were inside. We wanted to speak to her. She did not.

Ideologically, we stand against doctors. Obviously, we do not refuse the intervention of medical science. At the same time, however, we are aware of the part that the medical field has played in us being disabled. By “disabled” in this instance I mean “oppressed”, I do not refer to the impairment. The initial impairment is a separate matter. But if you study the file of a person who has spent twenty years in an institution, his resulting state bears no relation to the initial impairment. Because the impairment of institutionalisation has been added on top.

Several other attempts had been made prior to your intervention and official complaint…

Are you asking why we left it for so long?

No…

I do wish to answer that, nonetheless. We have critically self-reflected on this, on why we left it for so long. Nine of us went there and did something. Why did we leave it so late, why did we not act sooner? We would have made a difference to more people. We looked away, we did not want to face it, we could not face it.

One in two people will project. One of our fellow disabled members, who has spastic quadriplegic cerebral palsy, had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation in the past. His mother had been told the all-too-frequent “Don’t make it harder on yourself. Send him to an institution so you can focus on raising your daughter”. It was hard. I, with my acquired disability, never felt that. I did not believe at twenty-one that my parents would lock me up in an institution. I was already a director; I was working in television. But for other members of the group, who were born disabled, that was one of the turns their life could have taken. We became wiser…

That is what our group is all about, the emancipation of the disabled. The first to become emancipated are the members themselves through this process. We did not want to face this harsh aspect of reality, this prospect that could have been ours. On the other hand, once we stepped outside this individualised perception of disability, once the personal became social, that is when we began to think about what we could do. Could our small band go inside and do something impactful? Not just take a couple of photos and then leave. Would we be taken seriously? Would there be news coverage? Would the ministry take note? Because frustration also plays a part. When you have experienced frustration so many times, over and over, you think it over and wonder, “Should I get involved or will it lead to yet more frustration?” In the end, we burst in and ultimately, some things were put in motion.

Therefore, in terms of a section of society staging an intervention, it was an action worth taking. At the same time, the self-criticism for the delay still stands. We had to fight against our own taboos. That is no small thing. It was a more painful process for our members who had been confronted with the prospect of institutionalisation at some point than for us. It was harder for them to cope with it. We used to meet, days later, not out of a need to discuss politics or organisational matters, but to talk. To cry, to drink, to cry again… mainly to be there for those who had found it most painful. If you talk to the fellow disabled member I mentioned, he will tell you this: “No matter where I find myself, a cage stands beside me. I carry it with me.” It was an experience that marked people, and I don’t just mean the members of Zero Tolerance. But we are not enough. For deinstitutionalisation to become a demand, for this monstrosity to stop being socially acceptable and normalised, we need to change the way society thinks of disability. We are not interested in everyone’s personal sensibilities. We are interested in mobilising civil society.

What we say applies to all institutions. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism, in living bereft of human dignity in a difficult part of the country, where people perceive disability in the manner stated by Minister of Agricultural Development Makis Voridis,  namely that there are disabled people who have the capacity for understanding and disabled people who do not.((Minister Voridis, during a TV panel discussion, had quipped that children at sixteen "are not disabled", meaning that at that age they have a capacity of adult communication. Video is available (in Greek) here.)) And as a society, we still hold on to the belief that the people in Lechaina do not have the capacity for understanding.

Lechaina must be shut down, the people there must leave. Four years to the day, however, we are still discussing what must be done.

Why do you think that is the case?

It is rotten from the start. Because when a child is born, the first thing the parents, where available, will hear is the medical opinion. It is rotten from the moment the obstetrician enters the room and tells the new mother, “Your child was born faulty.” He will not tell her, “Look, there are difficulties ahead, but you can do this and that.” He will only tell her about the difficulties. He will not offer comfort but launch into the medical script of “he will not be able to think, to see, to hear” and so on. That this child will be bad for her other children, that this child will ruin her relationship with her husband, so “Do not breastfeed, I will interrupt your milk-flow and we will send it to an institution. Your responsibility ends there, you do not need to concern yourself with the course of this child’s life.” That is the classic scenario.

In this instance, we are not talking about broken families, about offenders who are imprisoned, and whose children end up in institutions. We should note here that only fourteen to fifteen per cent of the institutionalised have absolutely no point of reference, in other words, a parent who could potentially take on some responsibilities. Therefore, we are talking about abandonment; about how a couple imagines the stork bringing a blond, green-eyed “normal baby” and then receives a “faulty baby” and decides to bin it.  In those cases, it is the doctor’s intervention that causes the initial damage. Add the way society espouses those same views and the parents freak out. They suffer too, of course, but that does not change the end result.

We saw this in the case of Maria in Lechaina, when we spoke to her mother. The moment her daughter was born, the doctors began to list everything that could happen, medically speaking. But a person is not a medical diagnosis. They are a person. And the problem arises when you start listing all the medical difficulties that lie ahead instead of how they could be dealt with in an organised society.

Does that organised society exist?

Well, people who, despite all these difficulties, make a choice that goes against the medicalised belief that a person who thinks differently ought to be normalised certainly do exist. People who, for example, do not try to normalise autistic children, who do not have a neurotypical brain but an autistic one, and make them be like us. Because that is the beginning of Nazism.

According to Lev Vygotsky, there is a belief that the disabled are a priori unhappy.((Lev Vygotsky was a Soviet psychologist. More info available in Wikipedia.)) It is a racist belief, this belief that our lives are lives of suffering, that sometimes they are lives not worth living.

Adriana, who recently passed away, was nineteen years old. I think Adriana’s original diagnosis was glaucoma, meaning she was blind. When we found Adriana, she did not speak, she did not walk, because she lived in a cage. She was restrained when she was around seven years old, because they had no way of confining her and because they could not “nurse” her. So, they put her in a cage because she was active, and no personnel was available to watch over her. The most common question in there is “What are you doing standing up?”. It’s like a regular barracks. Why must they be lying down all day long? Why must they be confined to their bed? Why can they not be outside on the swings?

The standard reply is that the unit is understaffed. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Why are they understaffed? Why are all the residents in diapers? Why do none of them know how to be self-reliant, to use the toilet on their own, to feed themselves? Because they have lost their skills due to institutionalisation and the complete deprivation of every social right. Therefore, the reason the personnel does not suffice is that all these people have been rendered incapacitated.

Is there some kind of logic in what the staff are claiming? There are two people per floor in each shift.

That’s true. But the conclusion depends on your starting point. Do you begin by examining why this happens, or are you only interested in examining the outcome you are dealing with? Two people per floor in each shift are obviously not enough. But why does that happen? How can it be possible for a person with spastic quadriplegia not to be autonomous? Not to be able to eat, drink, use the toilet on their own? How can the rest of us do all those things? They were never allowed to develop.

Or their abilities were “anaesthetised”. A child enters the institution mobile and within a week stops using the toilet. Then the child gets given a bedpan…

A bedpan, really? They soil themselves and then are cleaned with a wipe. They only rarely shower. If a minister is planning to visit, they’ll be given a bath, so they don’t stink. If anyone makes the mistake of soiling themselves after the diaper change, they must wait for the next round. There is no personalised care for this. That means someone can spend hours in a soiled diaper. That is why you end up with that pervading smell in institutions that they can’t wash away.

Have you seen their bodies? Have you seen how many functional deformities have resulted from the repeated adoption of certain postures? Would you like to hear something strange, which also demonstrates the oppression, the torment they have been subjected to? The persons freed by Nikolaidis’ team, unfettered, still slept at night in the same sleeping position they had been restrained in for years. Do you understand what that means? The most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured. That is why, in the early days, almost no one accepted the intervention. That is why it was such an enormous, difficult task for that team.  

Another scene I will never forget is the two young girls, Ellie and Maria, who were eleven years old at the time. When the intervention team arrived at Lechaina, these two girls, being the youngest, were removed to the Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children (PIKPA) in Voula. We used to go and visit them there. One day, they came to our home for a few hours, accompanied by PIKPA volunteers. I remember Ellie in particular, looking for a place to hide. Under the table… always a sheltered spot, away from people and animals. By the end of the day, they were crying because they did not want to leave. It was our understanding that they had never been in a house before. She lay down on our bed, she wanted us to tuck her in so she could sleep there. She saw a dog for the first time, she had never seen one before. She stared at the dog, watched it as if wondering what that strange creature was. We ate together, they had dessert, we danced… same as one would with any other child.

Except that these children had been deprived of love and care. Real love, not the care that an institution’s staff can give. I do not dispute that some of the staff may form emotional attachments with the disabled there, but the way of life in an institution is the very opposite of nurturing care. You spend your whole life being approached by someone in a laboratory coat. Why? They can’t even grasp the fundamental concept of turning up in your own clothes. The gloves, too. Wearing surgical gloves to feed the residents. Why? What are you going to catch? The whole set up of institutions is medico-centric.

You are not only an activist; you are a director too. You are currently working on a documentary about Lechaina…

The two roles are interconnected in any case.

So you enter the occupied building with a camera…

I was not the one holding it, but yes. Two cameras. We went to record what was happening. That’s how it started.

What was the initial purpose of filming? Did you take the cameras as protection?

On the one hand, it was to protect ourselves against anything that might happen, on the other hand, it was to record that moment. Film it and see what was happening there. What we encountered was beyond our worst nightmares.

Did you also take cameras to the occupation of the IKA headquarters you had previously staged?

Yes, small cameras then too, to record everything. As well as for protection, we use the cameras to film material that we can then upload on Zero Tolerance’s social media.  

After the press conference we held at the Lechaina Child Care Centre (KEPEP) on the third day and our departure on the fourth day, the first thing I did was to edit some early material, which is still available online, to accompany the press conference in Athens, to show the journalists and launch the discussion.

When did you decide that you wanted to turn this into a documentary?

I decided during the occupation. I realised that this was an issue I needed to follow up. So, I returned at various intervals, no longer as an “occupier” but first and foremost as a disabled person. And I kept filming. I stayed inside the unit for three, sometimes four days at a time, left, returned, again and again. These past four years, I have made 34 trips to Lechaina if my memory does not fail me. I keep a diary…

This allowed us…

You use the first-person plural?

Not out of politeness, but because I consider this to be a group project, not my work exclusively.

Anyway, this allowed us to observe how things evolved inside Lechaina because one year later, Nikolaidis’ team arrived to implement the interim intervention. The emergency relief intervention for the residents was introduced, and we began to see how these people changed thanks to it.

How their behaviour changed, how the residents we first met, who were uncommunicative, tied up, inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, eyes unfocused, began to blossom in the year and a half that followed the start of the intervention. We watched them develop their skills, we heard them speak, utter words, we heard others express specific requests, “I want a bedside table”, “I want my own clothes”, “I want a TV set”, “I want a remote control”. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving “the prescribed treatment for their own good”.

We saw them step outside. Leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, and that momentous occasion when they saw the front door, stepped outdoors. We witnessed their fears and inhibitions. They did not want to break their routine. For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps; “bed restraint” or “mechanical restraint” as they call it. Some did indeed refuse to cooperate. But that is perfectly normal. Fear was the cause.

But we also saw people suddenly use a spoon and feed themselves, it was incredible! Because up until then they had been bottle-fed, lying down, gulping down liquidised meals in seconds. They did not know how to use their mouths to eat. That is why the teeth of nearly all the residents are in a terrible state. This change took place inside the institution – we did not go to a new space where things were different. It was inside those premises, that place of torture, that the situation changed.

What I had not anticipated in the making of this documentary was filming the dead. People we had met. Attempts were made to remove them from the institution, but they subsequently passed away. I’m not talking about elderly people, they were young.

Take Panagiotis, for example, the oldest resident at fifty years old. It is a miracle he has managed to survive like this, staring at the ceiling. The people who died were much younger: Christos and Ellie and Adriana and Maria.  Ellie was fifteen. Adriana had just turned nineteen. She was the blind girl.

We imagine you have spoken to the staff during your visits. You must have interviewed some of them…

They did not want to be interviewed. Now that they have found out I’m not filming for the sake of it, that I am creating something specific, they might change their mind. I never film with any formality; I do not shout “action!” I prefer things to be spontaneous, a recording of reality without altering the environment so that the actual circumstances remain unchanged. This means that the set up must be minimal. Small cameras to avoid creating a sense of occasion, no boom mics, no lights, no large crew wearing headphones.

So, I met them as individuals first and foremost, learned about their lives, their stories, how they ended up working at the unit since most of them had no previous background, no connection to this field. That did not surprise us, they are locals who found work. Some of them have been working there since the very first day, so we heard about how they were thrown in at the deep end when the institution opened, without any organisational setup. They brought the residents there without any idea of how to deal with them. The staff told us how they ended up organising themselves and creating these conditions, meaning the beds that they enclosed in bars, turning them into cages.

Which they refer to as cots or playpens among themselves.

 Yes. Of course, the term was coined by the former Minister of Health, Katerina Papakosta. “Playpens” then, and that “strapping them down is for their own good” so that “they cannot harm themselves”. Once again, was it the chicken or the egg? When you are enclosed in a confined space for a prolonged period, without any stimulation, no sensory stimulation, no psycho-emotional stimulation, then you begin to hit yourself, to drink your own urine, to eat your own faeces and all the other things you hear about. But this applies to every human being subjected to these conditions, you do not need to have an impairment to reach that point. The institutionalisation makes you impaired. Of course, all behaviours are attributed to their disabilities, it is the easiest narrative to adopt. They tell you, “Can’t you see what they are like?”.

We imagine you have also wondered how these people accept to subject other human beings to this abuse. Do you have an answer to that?

I know that they struggled at first, at least according to their narratives.

Morally?

Morally, I would say yes, they morally struggled with strapping people down. The system is set up in such a way as to render them responsible for some people. But given that this conversation is constantly rehashed, the issue is not whether we can hire more staff so that the torture can go on, so that there is “better monitoring” and residents can continue to be drugged up to the eyeballs. The issue is that no matter how much personnel you hire, you are still running an institution. And the concept of an institution is not that far removed from the concept of a barracks or a prison. Wake up at set times, eat at set times, sleep at set times.

Were these people convinced by scientists that this is the appropriate approach?

Scientists prescribed both “mechanical restraint” and the drug dosages. With absolutely no supervision. In fact, in some cases, they added a new medication to the mix without discontinuing the previous medication. Without anyone ever checking drug interactions or potential side effects. We saw the end result. Zombies. That’s it.

For years the personnel refused to accept the new state of affairs. They did not want to accept that there is an alternative way to provide care. 

Because it meant stepping outside their comfort zones?

I think they did not want to accept that they might be doing something wrong. The prevailing attitude was “Are you here to tell me that what I have been doing for twenty-five, thirty years is not right? How dare you?”

But you are not just telling them this is wrong, you are saying this is inhuman, this is torture.

 “We love these children very much, but there is no other way to manage them. They are monsters. They are unpredictable. If we don’t restrain them, they’ll be climbing up the walls. They could eat the plaster. They could eat their own faeces. They could swallow a large object, choke and die.” These are all actual words we have heard. That is why our position is that none of these people should continue to work in this environment. I don’t mean that they should lose their jobs. I mean that they should go and work in a different environment, certainly not in an institution.

By talking to them, showing them examples from abroad, we managed to persuade a few of them, too few. We were thinking of organising screenings of foreign documentaries on deinstitutionalisation, where the residents themselves discuss life before and after the closure of their institution once they had lived in society and developed their capabilities. The response was, “You are in the Balkans now, this is all too European. Who will fund all this? They’ll run it for half a year and then back to the same old.”

The truth is that we went there having made the conscious decision not to go down that frequent route. Blaming personnel is the easiest thing in the world. That is not to say there is no personal accountability, but the main responsibility lies with the so-called, in our view non-existent, welfare state. It lies with the politicians, who have kept us trapped in a time warp all these years.

And when the issue was all over the news, they would come out with statements. Like former Health Minister Andreas Loverdos in 2011, who stated that he would grant access to any journalist who wished to visit an institution and report on the conditions. And former Deputy Minister of Health Katerina Papakosta, who visited Lechaina following the BBC report and informed us that the situation was not what had been presented, that the “cots” were used for the children’s own protection and that they were standard practice. Then, former Minister Effie Achtsioglou and Deputy Minister Theano Fotiou announced a deinstitutionalisation scheme, and for the first time in Greece, the word “deinstitutionalisation” was pronounced by someone in power.  

What was the reaction at the Lechaina unit?

Their first reaction when deinstitutionalisation was announced and I visited Lechaina was, “It’s going to be just like ERT. They are going to shut it down and fire us all.” They needed to hear reassurances from the ministry that they would not lose their jobs. Very few said, “OK, I can understand why this needs to happen, this situation cannot continue. What will our part be going forward? How will this thing work? What’s the next step?” I told them, “It would be far better to work in a real home in the city of Lechaina or a place nearby and work in more humane conditions.”

Moreover, the professional foster care scheme had been announced, which would enable some of the workers to foster a resident in their home. Some of them had, indeed, bonded with certain residents, bonded with the “children”, everyone is called a “child” there, even when they are fifty years old, so they could opt for professional fostering and work from home.

The SYRIZA-ANEL former government announced professional foster care but did not take the necessary actions to implement it. How did your interlocutors react to the idea, nonetheless?

I discussed this with a worker who calls one of the residents her “daughter”. I told her, “Why don’t you take your daughter home under the professional foster care scheme then?” She fell silent. She just gaped at me. Being in your workplace and having formed a bond with someone there is very different to transferring that relationship into your own home. I imagine that would require discussions with her husband, her children, her social circle. Even without the implementation of professional foster care, the option to take a resident home for the weekend was still there. All it required was the permission of the Board of Directors. No one ever did that.

Or for the holidays, Christmas…

Every Christmas they host an event for “normal” children who are allowed into the lobby, they do not go further inside, and sing Christmas carols.

There are children who have been inside the unit and decorated the cages...

Yes, from the American Community Schools of Athens (ACS), to brighten up the torture of the people kept inside the cages. Of course, the residents were not physically inside the cages while the students painted them.

Small mercies…

That was one of the most vivid contrasts that struck me as I entered the centre. The dystopian landscape. The stench of excrement, fettered residents moaning and groaning and “I love you” painted on the walls, signed by ACS. I really would like to know what on earth the educator in charge had been thinking.

Returning to the subject of the personnel, I have seen the extent to which they have accepted the work they are asked to carry out and the resulting way of life for the residents. It never ceases to astound me, in all the institutions I have visited, be it Crete, the PIKPA in Voula, Thessaloniki, Komotini, Rhodes… This situation is normalised. It might shock those of us witnessing it for the first time, but that is the reality as far as they are concerned. I was also astounded by the fact that few visiting relatives seemed to be astonished by what they saw. They found it normal too.

We have also witnessed an admission being deterred. A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. The reasoning behind the decision was to save her marriage and spare her other children. She was evidently being pressured by her husband to abandon the disabled child, so they could focus on their “normal” children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears.

Did she take the child with her?

Yes.

So at least one child was spared…

Maybe she split up with her husband. Who knows what kind of pressure she was under? The guilt she carried with her for giving birth to a disabled child. The belief that she was being punished by God for some previous sin… In any case, yes, we were glad that the admission was averted.  But they did admit a new resident recently. Various organisations were mobilised, we opposed the decision publicly, the ministry intervened, and the child was brought to Athens because the public prosecutor would not rescind the order. That is also a big issue. I do not know if a decision to prohibit new admissions at Lechaina has been officially made.

There is a Board of Directors decision to suspend admissions.

Only that. Theano Fotiou, Effie Achtsioglou or the General Secretary for Welfare, I do not think they ever issued a decision to ban new admissions when they decided Lechaina would eventually close. Of course, things are no better elsewhere in Greece. Lechaina differed in the use of those “cots”. But I have seen a resident fettered with ropes in another institution, I have seen those tall “cots” with high bars, allegedly to stop people from falling if they stand up on their beds. All institutions operate along the same lines. Even the smell is the same. They all smell the same.

What did you have in mind when you began working on this documentary?

Look, when you start a documentary, you are not in charge, the reality guides you. Going into Lechaina, I decided to do what the documentary title says: From Asylum to Society. In other words, we decided to take what society rejects by relegating it to an isolated building somewhere far away, record it and bring it before its eyes. I wanted to experience it, to go on this journey that I think is gradually coming to its end. I cannot sit and wait to see how the new government will act.  See if it wants to raze everything that happened before to the ground and do something entirely different. Many rumours are going around, some bordering on science fiction, but there are some others which may find us in agreement. I wanted to record this unbearable situation, which is one hundred per cent legalised and imposed by the state itself. A situation that is connected to the perceptions we all have, including the country’s politicians, about the lives of the disabled who find themselves outside the family circle for some reason, and that is the only protection we afford them.

Unfortunately, a documentary cannot communicate the smells, nor what being there does to someone like you or me. But the conditions… the conditions inside an institution. No matter how good you try to make them, an institution remains a place of torture. Torture that has been normalised using the physical impairments of the those confined there as a pretext.

You must have been hoping for something at the beginning of the documentary, however.

Yes, I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. I did…

Do you feel frustrated?

We are used to frustration… Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that Effie Achtsioglou’s announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the birth family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That they would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.

During the four days of the occupation there was tension, our interactions were formal, information would reach us, Theano Fotiou made a statement, we made a statement. In the end, we decided the pressure group must move from inside Lechaina to headquarters, we announced that we expected to be called to the Ministry to discuss everything we had recorded. At the same time, we sent all the material we had gathered abroad to spark a reaction in Europe, the bodies charged with welfare. We sent it to the UN, and they issued a recommendation that we read out during the press conference we held at Lechaina on the afternoon of the third day, inviting local press. The mayor came, along with various others.

 We broke down on the day of our departure. We broke down because we were saying goodbye to our fellow disabled, and we could not grasp that we were free to leave that place, but they would stay behind. We broke down. We wept. We sobbed. We said goodbye and gathered around a bench outside, by the olive trees and burst into tears. An olive tree is planted every time someone dies. All these people, they enter the institution as children and leave when they are adults… by dying. “Deinstitutionalisation” via movement to the great beyond, if you are a believer. We wept because we knew that we were going home and that from that day forth, we would have to find a way to change the reality we had experienced, no matter what.

I also feel great sadness. Because, for us, the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. They have been ready to leave the institution for a year now. Nikolaidis rightly said from the start that you cannot just take people out of a cage and simply transfer them elsewhere, there needs to be a training and transition process. That process has taken place.

So, I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen. But, sadly, society is not mobilising.  And that is the heart of the matter. The issue of deinstitutionalisation is vast, it concerns a great number of people. In 2014, the Roots Research Centre in Greece estimated that approximately 900 disabled persons are held in institutions. They enter as children and depart as olives. That is the Greek version of deinstitutionalisation. It is a massive issue. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.

The Covid-19 lockdown was challenging for everyone. What did it mean, however, for children faced with abuse or neglect? In Greece, where the child protection system is disjointed, understaffed and disorganised, how did the lockdown affect children who were forced to not have contact with anyone else apart from their abusers? How did State services respond during such a trying period? After the lockdown ended, were any measures put in place to assess and alleviate the consequences for vulnerable children? What is the plan, in case an increase in Covid-19 cases forces a new lockdown?

We sought answers to these questions through five interviews with child protection experts that were streamed live on The Manifold Facebook Page.

Interview #1: Theoni Koufonikolakou

Theoni Koufonikolakou is Deputy Ombudswoman for Children's Rights.

Interview 2: Antonis Rellas

Antonis Rellas is a film and stage director and a disabled activist with "Zero Tolerance". (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #3: Giorgos Nikolaidis

Giorgos Nikolaidis is a psychiatrist, director of the Mental Health and Social Welfare Directorate of the Institute of Child Health, and former chairperson and current member of the Lanzarote Committee. (You can also read his previous interview with The Manifold, here.)

Interview #4: Triantafyllia Athanasiou

Triantafyllia Athanasiou is a social worker, chairperson of the Association of Social Workers of Greece.

Interview #5: Stefanos Alevizos

Stefanos Alevizos is a psychologist with The Smile of the Child NGO.

The Unit stands at the exit from the town of Lechaina in the direction of the village of Myrsini, facing the substation pylons of the Greek public power corporation. The building, which belongs to the episcopal see of Elis, is a four-storied, cross-shaped construction crowned by a dome. Its design could hardly be described as suitable for its intended use.

Perhaps that was the reason it was deemed necessary to restrain the seven-year-old blind girl who had been admitted to the institution at the age of three. Fully mobile yet blind, brimming with the energy of childhood, she would have needed someone to watch over her constantly. Lechaina has always been understaffed. “For her own good”, then, someone decided that she should be locked up in a cage. By the time she was sixteen, she could not even articulate her own name.

The Lechaina Unit was founded in 1987 as a "Child Care Centre", or KEPEP, and began operating two years later, with the mandate of caring for disabled children between the ages of six and eighteen. In its initial conception, it was intended for the children of the Region of Elis and the wider Peloponnese. Progressively, disabled children from all over Greece were brought in, either following a request by their parents or a State Prosecutor's order. Formerly an independent institution, since 2013 it is one of the annexes of the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, which is supervised by the Welfare General Secretariat of the Ministry of Labour. As a rule, the care workers at the Unit are unskilled and their numbers insufficient: five healthcare workers, seven assistants and five auxiliary contract staff for 44 residents, at present. The carpenter who fashioned the cages is also considered institution personnel.

Frozen in Time

In the Lechaina Unit, disabled children were strapped to their beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. These practices were hardly a secret.

In 2008, a group of European volunteers who spent some time at the Lechaina Centre, shocked by the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children, drafted a report which they distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations.

In September 2009, a delegation from the Children’s Ombudsman's office, comprised of the Ombudsman himself, Giorgos Moschos, the Ombudswoman for Health and Social Protection, two scientific experts and May Papoulia, a psychologist and wife of the then President of the Republic, visited the institution for the first time. In March 2011, the Ombudsman issued a damning report on the Unit’s inhuman conditions.

Shortly before the publication of the delegation’s findings, in February 2011, the cameras of ERT, the Greek public broadcaster, entered the institution. The news story aired in the main evening news and Andreas Loverdos, the Minister of Health at the time, intervened on air.

After lauding the work of the manager of Lechaina, the minister announced his intention to allow journalists inside all of the country’s institutions to report on the living conditions. When the newscaster observed that journalists should shed light on issues, but it was the Minister's job to solve them, Loverdos promised that five more healthcare staff and an additional three workers would be hired by the end of the year, attributing the torture brought to light by the news report to understaffing. He also promised that new premises would be secured, so that minors could be separated from adults.

Three years later, pictures from Lechaina spread across the world, when the BBC published an article headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. A few days later, Katerina Papakosta, who by then had become Deputy Minister for Health in a new government formed by New Democracy, visited the institution in a move that seemed rather forced, after the outcry that followed the article’s publication.

In her statements to the media, she claimed that the Unit did not fall within her mandate but that of the Ministry of Welfare and stated: “I came here on my own initiative to examine (the situation), because I have been informed by scientific experts that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

Having normalised cages as “cots", Papakosta, too, promised the recruitment of qualified personnel.

It should be noted that the widespread use of chemical suppression through medication, the practice of restraining children to their beds using straps, the use of cages and electronic surveillance, were already condemned in the 2011 report of Children’s Ombudsman as “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions.”

As to the reassurances given to the Deputy Minister by "experts", it should be noted that in the course of the Ombudsman's investigation, which led to the aforementioned report, the Unit’s psychiatrist at the time, Dionysios Tsangos, was asked to submit a written reply. In it, he stated: “I clearly acknowledge that restraining a patient with straps largely violates individual human rights, but they are superseded by the right of life itself. Given the severity of the patients’ mental disability, it is absolutely necessary to restrain them with straps to avert any self-harming acts which the patient will naturally not become aware of due to their condition. The straps will continue to exist for as long as such severe, high-risk level cases continue to exist. As to the matter of the wooden enclosures, a proposal was submitted by the scientific team in April 2008 and a report by child psychologist Mrs Lolou will follow. Certainly, patient accommodation can be improved with the use of more suitable beds, successfully combining the goals of development and security.”

The Ombudsman's report noted that the Unit's psychiatrist had responded without submitting “any medical opinions on specific patient cases, nor any scientific evidence supporting the need for restraint”. It also pointed out that “the Recommendations of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture under The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment do not appear to justify physical restraint, with the exception of psychiatric units for adult patients and only under certain conditions. Confinement to beds/enclosures in particular, is considered an unsuitable psychiatric practice and constitutes degrading treatment.” As to the decision to “use means of ‘mechanical restraint’, such as straps, its appropriateness is decided on a case-by-case, mutatis mutandis basis and is used rarely and only when prescribed by a doctor (or following a doctor’s immediate notification and receipt of approval). Recourse to it should be made exceptionally, as a last resort and for the minimum duration necessary, while its long-term use has no therapeutic properties and is considered misuse in therapeutic terms. This practice cannot be excused by staff shortages, as every instance of restraint demands that a member of staff provide immediate personal assistance and constant supervision, while electronic surveillance cannot substitute the constant physical presence needed. At the same time, every such instance should be recorded in a special register and in the patient’s personal medical file with specific details, such as the start and end time of restraint, the doctor’s name etc. Staff must receive ongoing training in alternative, gentler methods of patient control and be educated in the effects the practice of physical restraint has on the patient.  The Authority believes that the practices chosen clearly fall outside the scope of legality and gravely contravene the duty to respect and protect the human rights of residents with serious mental disabilities.”

The situation in the Lechaina Unit, therefore, was not only fairly widely known, but also officially documented, by March 2011.

“From Asylum to Society”

Approximately a year after Deputy Minister Papakosta’s visit, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Mideniki Anohi” ("Zero Tolerance") occupied the Lechaina premises. The occupation, a protest against the abuse of disabled children taking place in the Unit, began on November 4, 2015, and lasted for four days.

We met with Antonis Rellas, a film director, disabled activist, and member of Zero Tolerance, in his apartment. He let us in himself and led us to his studio.

“We had done our research, observed what our fellow disabled had done abroad," he told us. "In Great Britain, this process had been initiated by the disabled themselves. We based our actions on this pre-existing model. We said, ‘Let’s go do this, same as everyone else.’ We, on the outside, must make a stand for the lives of those on the inside. Institutions are where the most vulnerable of vulnerable disabled persons are kept, those who are unable to advocate for themselves, have no one else to advocate for their rights, neither the personnel working in that field nor their parents, should they still be present.”

A video can be found on Zero Tolerance’s youtube channel, entitled From Asylum to Society. Rellas put the footage together immediately after the occupation, to be screened for journalists during the press conference Zero Tolerance held upon its return to Athens.

“We arrived at Lechaina during mealtime," he said, "nine people in four cars, with two cameras. We wanted to record what was happening and highlight those that society rejects by relegating them to an isolated building somewhere far away, turning a blind eye to these images. We wanted to highlight the horrors at the nucleus of disabilitisation, which is none other than institutionalised living. For us disabled activists, there is no such thing as a good institution. Even if Lechaina were the Hilton, it would remain a secure-type institution that violates every notion of human dignity. I have seen people restrained with ropes in other institutions too, not just Lechaina. Nonetheless, Lechaina is a case study in disablism. No matter how prepared we were, the reality exceeded our worst nightmares…”

During the occupation, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the State Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the human rights violations against the disabled children and youths kept at the institution.

“To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify," Rellas told us. In fact, the Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

"There are specific liabilities at stake," Rellas said. "Who prescribed physical restraint? Who prescribed prolonged chemical suppression?  Not holding anyone accountable is like asking us to accept that the disabled residents are not worthy of living and therefore, no criminal liabilities arise. The UN, who saw the material we gathered during the occupation, says this is torture. As do we. That was what we witnessed. Torture is what we witnessed."

On November 5, 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee publicised its concluding observations after examining Greece’s implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Regarding the situation at Lechaina, the Committee stated that “the State party should take immediate measures to abolish the use of enclosed restraint beds and systematic sedation in psychiatric and related institutions. The State party should also establish an independent monitoring and reporting system and ensure that abuses are effectively investigated, those responsible are prosecuted, and redress is provided to the victims and their families.” Similar recommendations had been made three years earlier, with specific reference to the institution at Lechaina.

On November 13, 2015, a few days after the occupation staged by Zero Tolerance, the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO human rights watchdog, filed a complaint at the State Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court of Greece. “In view of the fact," the complaint stated, "that the long-term torture of children took place with the knowledge of all authorities, from the Ministry down to the local prosecutor’s office, while the report of the Ministry’s Committee confirms that this is standard practice in psychiatric units across the country, the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court is asked to order the judicial investigation of the claims made here, instructing a public prosecutor in Athens to this end, and demanding that the Ministry of Labour immediately cease using these inhumane methods that amount to torture.”

None of this was enough to mobilise justice to pursue those responsible for the fact that disabled children and young people were being kept in confinement, physically restrained in cages of two by two by one metres, not being let outside even for an hour, medicated for psychiatric and other illnesses — despite the fact that, according to the study carried out by the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, out of the 78 people that have resided in the Lechaina unit over the years, only five had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital for psychiatric disorders. 

“In Greece today," Giorgos Nikolaidis, Director of the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, told us, "no court has the legal capacity to impose such a sentence on anyone. How is it possible to tolerate that a person be subjected to this confinement and not ask who ordered it and why? Which ministers, general secretaries, which of my colleagues gave instructions that these people be restrained? Who imposed this deprivation of their rights?”

Breaking the Cages

Shortly after the occupation by Zero Tolerance, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by Harry Potter writer J. K. Rowling to promote and advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises.

At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention, with an initial duration of six months. The intervention team would release the patients from their restraints, re-examine the use of medication, and prepare them through appropriate training, so that they could either return to their families, where possible, or otherwise move to smaller hostels, where the effects of institutionalisation would be alleviated. Meanwhile, the government was supposed to form a plan to radically restructure institutions, with the ultimate aim of deinstitutionalisation.

The emergency intervention was launched in July 2016, under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. It was to last six months, because, according to Nikolaidis, "rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?"

"Unfortunately," he said "the fact of the matter is that, after a lot of pressure, they simply gave an approval so that an initiative taken by other people and institutions, with the funding of others, could be implemented. A programme that enjoyed no jurisdictional backing vis-à-vis the unit in question, its personnel, the way it functions. The political leadership just said, ‘Great, you can go to the Unit and do what you think is best’.”

Two summers later, we visited the Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health for the first time. Giorgos Nikolaidis had just entered his office and was in the process of transferring a video from his phone to his PC. He invited us to view some of the material.

The first video was shot as the carpenter of the Lechaina Unit dismantled the wooden cage of a twenty-year-old man, who had been confined to it for years. The man's initial disbelief subsides, as joy and relief burst forth in almost ecstatic laughter. The camera turns back to the carpenter and switches off.

In the second video, someone else is holding the psychiatrist’s phone. The scene takes place in the sea. Nikolaidis is holding a pool noodle, the buoyant foam tube used to teach very young children how to swim. He has passed the tube under the waist of another Lechaina resident, stretched him out on his back, and sways him gently from side to side. Another outburst of joy is heard, as a long-suffering body finds relief in the water.

Antonis Rellas decided to follow the course of events from Zero Tolerance’s occupation to the promised closure of the institution not just as an activist, but as the director of a documentary about Lechaina. Having visited the Unit over thirty times these past years, he explained: “I had the chance to watch how behaviours changed. How the residents I first met, who were uncommunicative, eyes vacant as they lay strapped to beds or locked inside cages, chemically suppressed to the point of being unable to hold up their head, began to blossom. To watch them leave the narrow confines of the bedroom and venture into the dining room, go to the floor above for an activity, to develop their skills. We heard them speak, utter words. Some began to express specific requests, ‘I want a bedside table’, ‘I want a remote control’, ‘I want my own clothes’. That’s a huge leap for someone who has been utterly dehumanised, who has been turned into a zombie by receiving ‘the prescribed treatment for their own good’.”

“I witnessed their fears and inhibitions," he went on. "For them, normality was the bed, the cage, the straps. Even after the intervention team removed their restraints, do you know how they slept at night? In the sleeping position that they had been kept for years. For them, the most comfortable position was the position of torture. In other words, we made people feel comfortable being tortured.”

One of the many paradoxes of this story is that, despite the admission by the political leadership that institutionalisation must end, and more specifically that the Lechaina Unit must be shut down, a decision to prohibit new admissions to the institution was never officially made.

Rellas recalled such an incident: “A woman came to leave her child, accompanied by her mother and a friend.  The child was around twelve years old and high functioning. She was evidently being pressured to abandon the disabled child and focus on her ‘normal’ children. Her mother was even more adamant, saying the place looked great and the child would have a wonderful time there. Nikolaidis took her into his office, shut the door and they talked. He explained that in six months, the child would no longer be in the same state. She left his office in tears. She took her child and left.”

 “That was not the only incident where admission was averted,” explained Nikolaidis. “We had asked for admissions to be prohibited, everyone agreed, but that agreement never translated into a legal act. I used to arrive at Lechaina and be told that the Board of Directors had admitted a new child. Every time we had to rush to right things after the fact. I would meet the parents, explain the implications of such an admission, try to understand why the family was asking for this. Usually, there was a lot of hidden pain, the decision to leave their child at an institution was not sudden.  Therefore, we created the after-school clubs for many of them, activity clubs to occupy their children after special school. The aim was to offer families some respite so that the children did not end up in an institution.”

Most of the stories shared common ground. “These were children," Nikolaidis told us, "with mental disabilities that the family had kept until their preadolescence- adolescence and then found harder to manage. They usually had other children with typical development too and struggled to look after them all. We set up this service at Lechaina and Patras so that the child could stay at a space with qualified personnel who would occupy them, train them, and then be able to return home at night.”

Resistance

The emergency intervention that was intended to last six months ended up lasting for almost three years, after repeated extensions. Experts have pointed out that reintroducing people who had been subjected to extreme and prolonged abuse into humane conditions was always going to be difficult, but their task was continually complicated by the resistance that they met.

During one of our visits to the Lechaina Unit, we met Patty Sotiropoulou, special needs educator and member of the emergency intervention team. As introductions were made, we witnessed the following incident: one of the centre’s residents had undergone surgery following self-injury to his eye. The surgeon had recommended forty-five days of bed restraint to protect the wound. Our arrival at the centre coincided with the end of his confinement and the intervention team was asking staff to transfer him to a bed. The staff resisted this move, claiming that it could be dangerous because the resident had chewed on his mattress… ten years ago!

 “One day, members of the team took a girl outside for a walk in the courtyard," an exasperated Sotiropoulou told us. "The girl fell down and needed two stitches on her chin. Not only did the staff overreact due to their reigning fear of accountability, but the doctor who put in the stitches also instructed that she be kept inside a cage for ten days. Ten days confinement for two stitches! And when you point out the absurdity, you just get told: ‘doctor’s orders’.

Sotiropoulou said she had been exhausted by the constant battle over matters that should be self-evident. "No culture has been fostered," she said, "that it is unacceptable to keep children inside cages in an institution. If we had seen a child with typical development inside a cage in those news reports, the reaction would have been different. In the case of disabled children, both the system itself and, unfortunately, a large section of society accepts all too willingly that ‘there is no alternative’, that ‘the specialists say they need to be physically restrained so they must be right’, and ‘thank goodness there is an institution to house them’.”

The battle over matters that should be self-evident, as Sotiropoulou put it, rages at the Lechaina Unit even when the proposed changes are also intended to benefit the workers themselves. 

“During the intervention," Sotiropoulou told us, "we trained staff in the use of a small crane to lift people from the bed. It is essential that the residents change positions. It might not sound like that big of a deal, but there is a world of difference between spending twenty-four hours a day confined to a bed and getting up, both physically and in terms of receiving some stimulation. At the end of the day, only our team and the volunteers use the crane."

"It's a small example of the resistance here," she said. "You have a goal, to get people out of bed. And it can’t be achieved. You give them a tool that can help the carers, too. And I say this being fully aware that just changing the sheets and diapers of so many people is extremely taxing physically. And yet, they will not use it. So, on the one hand, you see a resistance to change, even when the change is beneficial to them, and on the other hand, you realise that they cannot appreciate the importance of people being out of bed.”

The deinstitutionalisation that never was

In December 2017, the Greek Government announced that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Unit and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future, setting out the transition process, the facilities to be developed, the timetable, etc.

 “Incidentally," Nikolaidis told us, "I should mention that we had already drafted such a detailed plan and submitted it to the government, as well as the board of directors of the Centre of Social Welfare, and the relevant services of the Commission and other bodies both within Greece and abroad. We had also discussed it with the permanent personnel of the Unit. I’m not saying that this was the best plan and should be adopted as the final detailed plan. I’m just saying that the commitment made by the government to form such a plan never materialised. The most disheartening aspect is that this time the funds are there, so that’s not the impediment.”

The emergency intervention ended in February 2019. When we asked Nikolaidis why the Institute of Child Health did not continue with the intervention, as well as why the collaboration between the Institute and Lumos was not renewed, he replied: “Because in February 2019, the representatives of Lumos visiting Greece met with the Minister for Social Solidarity Theano Fotiou and were informed that for as long as they cooperated with us, any cooperation with the Greek government was out of the question. So Lumos interrupted its cooperation with us and began working with NGO SOS Children's Villages, which was recommended to them.”

We went on ask why in Nikolaidis’s opinion the government, through its minister, would do this. 

“I think,” Nikolaidis told us, “it was because we kept raising the need to close down the unit, and for a number of real actions, not PR, leading to the residents’ psychosocial rehabilitation and deinstitutionalisation to be taken. Ms Fotiou had probably decided that she wanted to adopt ostensible rather than true actions. The timing also coincided with the completion of a phase of our actions in Lechaina, with the gradual and progressive transfer of all the residents out of confinement, be it cages, or straps or any of the other inventive methods used by the institution. Our task had been to provide interim emergency relief geared towards the abolition of confinement, pending the implementation of a deinstitutionalisation scheme. Having completed that work, having drawn up a plan for deinstitutionalisation and secured a budget for that purpose, and seeing that no steps were being taken in that direction, we had no intention of remaining at Lechaina to window-dress the perpetuation of institutionalisation.”

Former Minister Fotiou did not comment on these statements by Nikolaidis, despite our repeated requests. Lumos likewise did not reply to our request for comment. SOS Children’s Villages, which signed a cooperation agreement with Lumos in May 2019, replied that “after a request by Lumos and the Ministry, we agreed to become the organisation responsible for dispensing salaries to personnel that was hired for three months, without participating in any way in the scientific work, or observing its implementation on location”. 

In the event, personnel to staff the action team that would implement a three-year deinstitutionalisation programme was hired in June 2019 on twelve-month contracts. Selected by competition, team members have no work experience in matters of deinstitutionalisation. This move provoked the strong reaction of the institution’s staff, who once again reiterated their longstanding request for the recruitment of permanent personnel.

While time was again grinding to a halt in Lechaina, the Ministry of Labour and Social Solidarity came under increasing pressure to submit a long overdue general deinstitutionalisation strategy proposal, which was an obligation under the terms of 2014-2020 NSRF funding, and should in fact have been submitted since 2014. The Ministry asked for technical assistance from the European Commission and the Structural Reform Support Services (SRSS). A Brussels-based NGO, the European Association for People with Disabilities (EASPD), was awarded a 200.000 contract by SRSS to draw up a deinstitutionalisation plan for Greece.

In July 2019, national elections were called, SYRIZA lost power, and New Democracy found itself in government. Domna Michailidou became the new Minister. 

EASPD presented a draft paper on a national deinstitutionalisation strategy to the Ministry, as well as several experts, in January 2020. Presumably, somewhere at the end of this process, the promise made to the Lechaina residents through the emergency intervention, that they may have a chance to leave institutionalised living behind, might eventually be fulfilled. For the time being, though, they have to wait and endure - again.

When asked about the feelings their experiences at Lechaina have left them with, everyone we spoke to gave the same reply: frustration. Antonis Rellas’ response, when asked about his hopes at the start of filming the documentary, was riveting: “I was hoping that the final frame would be Lechaina closing. Yes, I feel frustrated. I had hoped that the announcement of the deinstitutionalisation scheme would be the turning point, that the moment was finally upon us. That it would start with Lechaina and spark the desire to do the same everywhere. That all institutions would be shut down and that no unprotected child would have to go through this again. That even the child’s hospital stay would be short-term, and it would be fast-tracked into foster care. That the conditions allowing the biological family to care for the child with the help of a welfare state would be created. That someone would explain that having a disabled child is not the end of the world.”

Frustration, then, and sadness. “For us," Rellas said, "the residents of Lechaina have a face, a name, a history. We got to know them; we became friends. I feel sad because we did not get to see them live in different circumstances. At least not yet, because we hope that someday we will. But we need the help of civil society for that to happen and sadly, it is not mobilising.  That is the heart of the matter. It would be a great step forward for society as a whole if we released the disabled from institutions.”

Greece is not short on child services. There are social services in municipalities, social workers in hospitals, child psychiatrists in schools. Some of these professionals are permanent staff or civil servants, others are contracted for months or years, depending on the funding of the position. There are Social Care Directorates on a regional level — a central one per region and one in every regional department. Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPA, are overseen by the Ministry of Justice. The National Centre of Social Solidarity, or EKKA, is overseen by the Ministry of Labour. Mental health services and other care facilities are overseen by the Ministry of Health. There are State Prosecutors for Minors and Prefects for Minors. The Hellenic Police has dedicated Minors Departments at the Attica and the Thessaloniki General Police Directorates. There are NGOs that collaborate with state authorities through agreements with the state. And, although we do not know the exact number, there are over eighty institutions and shelters for children, run by either the state, the church and a number of religious communities, or various NGOs.

Most, if not all, of these services are understaffed. Each has its own rules, protocols and priorities. In many of them, professionals are either not exclusively tasked with child protection, as is the case in many municipalities all over the country, or they are not specially trained. With very few exceptions, coordination between the services is not based on any coherent protocol, but is conditional upon each professional's sense of duty.   

This fragmentation obviously results in inefficiency. But especially where serious breaches of children’s rights are concerned, such as cases of grave abuse or neglect, experts agree that it directly contributes to a secondary victimisation of survivors.

Greek Traditions

The Department of Mental Health and Social Welfare of the Institute of Child Health, a research and clinical intervention centre overseen by the Ministry of Health, is housed in an apartment building in the Ambelokipi district of Athens. The apartment still looks like someone could be living there, except it now has a few desks and a huge amount of folders. The director, George Nikolaidis, has a small office next to a rather large kitchen. All the times we have had to meet with him, during this investigation, he has given us his time amply, answering our questions on issues that for us seemed complicated and often puzzling, but to him constitute daily struggles.  

According to Nikolaidis, “social welfare was never established as an independent sector of public administration in Greece. Consequently, all these networks of psycho-social and social services for children are subordinate to other sectors, and as a result, their prioritisations and priorities are subject to the prioritisations and priorities of the sector that they serve”. 

“Which service is called upon, which professionals, what they examine, how and when, unfortunately still varies according to the service or geographical location where a report or suspicion first arises,” he told us. “This means some children can be victimised multiple times for daring to reveal that they are being victimised. It is a well-known fact that in the case of sexual violation of children in particular, where objective forensic findings are usually absent, we have numerous such instances, which came to us with an already long  history of multiple evaluations, statements from related and unrelated persons, who asked and did relevant and irrelevant things.” 

“You can understand,” Nikolaidis added, “how this borders on a punitive stance on the part of the state towards the child that finds the courage to speak out. In all these years, I have seen incidents of anal warts in four- and five-year-olds, who by the time they came to our attention had been receiving treatment in public hospitals for one to two years, without any investigation, as one would expect, into how these children came to be ill. Because in this chaotic environment everyone can become entrenched in a role which they get to define. A doctor can say, ‘I’m a dermatologist, my job is to treat the damage I see, the rest is none of my business.’” 

State authorities have been under pressure to design a coherent child protection system for many years, not least by international bodies overseeing agreements that Greece has signed and ratified. Perhaps the most important international commitment arises from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Greece signed in 1990 — one of the first countries to do so. Greece also ratified the Council of Europe’s Lanzarote Convention on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse in 2009. This time it was the first country to do so.

Nikolaidis, who is also Chairman of the Lanzarote Committee, which oversees member-states’ compliance with the convention, sees the swiftness in signing these agreements as in keeping with a “long tradition of the Greek state to pass laws without any consideration as to how they will be implemented”. “In other words,” he told us “we passed it and left it, internationally we can hold our head high, we were the first to do so, and then we made no provision for what was to follow.”

The irony of Greece’s eagerness to put its pen on international paper becomes even sharper, if one considers that countries that ratify the UN Convention are legally bound to implement it, and their governments are required to periodically report to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child on the progress of implementation. 

After signing it in 1990, Greece ratified the convention in 1993. But although parties to the convention were obliged to file progress reports by 1995, it did not submit its first report until 2000. Feedback from the UN Committee on this first report noted that health services were still largely concentrated in cities and that the various new authorities that were instituted did not have a clear mandate. The PASOK government of the time committed to rectifying the situation and drafted some measures, but once the 2004 general elections were won by its rival, New Democracy, the measures were scrapped.

The Orange Book

We met Panagiotis Altanis at the cafe of a shopping mall. A stout man, he stood out in a red wind jacket, which he chose as the easiest sign for us to recognise him. A former visiting professor in the Greek National School of Public Health and until recently Head of the Department of Psychology and Social Work in Frederick University, Cyprus, Altanis has been a central figure in the effort to implement reforms in the Greek child protection system. 

Although eager to hear about developments since he stepped away from actively trying to overhaul child protection, he was happy to discuss his own involvement, which began in 2007, when he was still at the National School of Public Health. 

At the time, the Ministry of Health, under Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, had been urged to implement policy directives by the World Health Organisation and the European Union. So, it tasked the school with producing a National Action Plan for Public Health. This overarching plan outlined a further sixteen, specialised action plans on a variety of health issues from cancer and HIV/AIDS to smoking, alcohol, accidents, and mouth hygiene. Child protection was not one of them. 

But the pressure was mounting. Along with the overdue UN reports, which Altanis referred to as a “breach of duty”, the Greek Association of Social Workers, or SKLE, was pressuring the government, and so was the prominent and highly influential NGO “The Smile of the Child”, which already collaborated with ministries and authorities. 

There were other sources of pressure, too. The department of the Children’s Ombudsman had been established within the Greek Ombudsman independent authority, in 2003. Giorgos Moschos, who headed the department from its inception until 2018, had already been pressing for changes in child protection, and had already been successful in influencing the 2006 law on domestic violence, particularly with regard to the obligation of schools to report suspected physical abuse of children.  

In 2008, a report by a group of European volunteers, who had spent some time at the Lechaina Child Care Centre, an institution for disabled children in south-western Greece, was distributed to various European officials and human rights organisations. The volunteers expressed shock at the manner in which a modern European state was treating disabled children. In 2009, Moschos headed a delegation that visited the institution, and although his report was not issued until 2011, the visit documented the brutal conditions of child institutionalisation: in Lechaina, disabled children were strapped to beds or kept inside cages for years, never being allowed to get up or walk, not even for an hour. 

Unlike the other action plans drafted at the time, the one about child protection was the only one that was outsourced. With EU NSRF funds, the ministry asked The Smile of the Child to draft the plan; and the NGO, having worked with Altanis before, placed him in charge, in collaboration with Charalambos Economou, a lecturer of Sociology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.

“I think The Smile of the Child suited the state,” Altanis told us, “because the research cost more than the funds it received. If you add staff wages, time spent, how much work was done on a volunteer basis, how quickly, how little it cost, I think there was a lot of added value provided…”

“The Smile was useful,” he adds, “in that it had its own enclaves of decentralised structures throughout Greece, as well as a central scientific team which I could guide in taking decentralised actions.” 

Together with the scientific board of the organisation, Altanis put together a team of scientists in each region of the country that would oversee the researchers. The research covered most of the public, private and NGO welfare services in the country that dealt with children. The result, which was completed in 2008, but published in 2009, is now known among child protection professionals as “Altanis’ orange book”, because of its orange coloured cover. It is a thick, 500-page tome that graces the shelves of nearly every relevant service. Its first half is devoted to the study of existing child services in Greece, and best international practices. The second is an exhaustive guide to necessary reforms.

Even though The Smile of the Child was christened a “Supervised Entity” by the ministry, Altanis pointed out that credit for the plan should go exclusively to the NGO. “The Ministry,” he added, “would ultimately be judged by the extent to which it implemented the resulting proposals.”

It did not. But it did, after eight years since Greece had submitted its last and only report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, during which the committee had made repeated requests, submit a second and a third report together, based on The Smile of the Child action plan.

The reports were submitted only two months before, in October 2009, New Democracy lost the general election.

The First Attempt

Despite the turmoil caused by the financial crisis and Greece’s bailout agreement with the “troika” of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission, the new PASOK government, under Prime Minister George Papandreou, introduced two laws that attempted to build on the insights of The Smile of the Child action plan.  

The baton now passed to the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charis Kastanidis, which in 2010 put into law an obligation of state institutions for minors to not only address juvenile delinquency, as had been the case since the 1940s, but also the victimisation of children. This was important, at least philosophically, because the shift from delinquency to victimisation is considered by experts to be the foundation of a child protection system.

In the same year, Panagiotis Altanis was appointed president of the National Centre for Social Solidarity, or EKKA, a position from which he hoped to be able to implement some of the policies he had proposed in his action plan. Despite lacking a distinct mandate on the issue, EKKA had already been partially active in child protection: it operated shelters for mothers with children in need, as well as a social welfare phone line (197), and its social workers were executing orders by prosecutors to conduct social research in households.

“We were no strangers to this field,” Giota Manthou, Director of Operations at EKKA, told us. “At the time,” she said, referring to a wide-ranging study the centre had conducted in 2010, “we had researched state child protection institutions, collecting personnel data and resident data. We had also recorded the significant difficulties of institutionalised care.”

She added that during the same period there was an initial, unofficial attempt to network the social services of the municipalities — an initiative with which Altanis should be credited.

In the event, the 2010 law did two things: firstly, it tasked the Societies for the Protection of Minors, or EPAs, which were founded in 1940 by the Metaxas dictatorship and started operating during the Axis occupation of Greece, with “actively contributing to the prevention of the victimisation and delinquency of minors”. Attached to the offices of state prosecutors for minors all over the country, these societies’ mission had been to guide and support minors through the justice system. The new law retained their mission to provide material, social and psychological support to minors who were entangled in judicial processes (for example, by operating shelters for housing minors who were released from juvenile detention centres), but it added “prevention of victimisation” to it — a somewhat vague addition from a practical point of view, but still conceptually significant.  

Secondly, the law created within the Ministry of Justice a Central Scientific Council for the Prevention and Treatment of the Victimisation and Delinquency of Minors, or KESATHEA, an ad-hoc supervisory body comprised of scientists, academics, school teachers, a state prefect for minors and a state prosecutor. 

In a 2015 paper outlining the scope of KESATHEA as it was envisaged in 2010, Elisavet Symeonidou-Kastanidou, a Professor of Criminal Law at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (and Charis Kastanidis's wife), extensively discusses two studies on juvenile offenders and services for children victims of abuse, conducted by the university in 2004-2005. The implication appears to be that these studies had been points of reference for the new legislation. Perhaps this explains the decision to draw most members of the new council from universities in Thessaloniki and Thrace, including its President Aggeliki Pitsela, an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Thessaloniki, and co-author of the studies with Kastanidou and others. Presumably, also, it was to accommodate the members that it was decided to base the council in Thessaloniki, although the Ministry of Justice is located in Athens. 

Apart from its impractical location, the new council was also not helped by the vagueness of its mission: among other things, it was to “collect and process allegations of abuse of minors”; “study matters of victimisation”; “advise the minister on policy”; “organise volunteers”; and “observe the work of Societies for the Protection of Minors”. There was no provision in the law as to how these tasks were to be executed.

In the meantime, many health professionals and social workers received notifications that they had been appointed board members in Societies for the Protection of Minors, but they were never informed when, and even if, these boards would be convened. They never attended a meeting.

The Second Attempt

In February 2011, the cameras of ERT, Greece’s public broadcaster, entered the institution at Lechaina, and a diligent local journalist, Giorgos Marinopoulos, reported on the horrors taking place there. The story aired in the main evening news, and Andreas Loverdos, then Minister of Health, intervened on air, and promised that the situation would be speedily improved. 

In March, the Children’s Ombudsman issued a damning report on the inhuman conditions at Lechaina, describing “practices constituting the violation of the human rights of the patients and highlighting the problems of the institutions”. Despite this, the publicity from the ERT report, and the ministerial commitment on air, nothing was done.   

In June, however, the Ministry of Justice, still under Kastanidis, drafted a new law on child protection. This time, another body was created, called the National Coordinating Team for the Protection of Minors. It was to be presided over by the president of KESATHEA, and its mission was to coordinate the activities of KESATHEA with those of EKKA.

The 2011 law also provided for a National Register of Child Protection for all children that went through the system, and tasked EKKA with organising it. EKKA also had to set up a child protection hotline (1107), the second such line in the country, after the one (1056) that The Smile of the Child had been operating since 1997. 

Furthermore, the law officialized the networking of municipal social services that had been initiated by Altanis, by introducing Juvenile Protection Teams, or OPA, in all the municipalities of the country. Then, in a less than obvious move, it tasked KESATHEA with creating these teams in collaboration with the municipalities, and incorporating them in a network, which it was also supposed to create. In addition, this network, christened “Orestes”, was to digitally connect all services dealing with the protection of minors.

“The state can’t be absent in the protection of minors,” said Kastanidis in a joint press conference with Minister of Health Loverdos, announcing the new law. “It has to take responsibility and today it is taking it.”

Things turned out differently. As there was no mechanism or penalties to compel institutions to comply with the new law, most of them did not provide EKKA with the necessary information for the National Register. Only 37 complied, and only nine of these were state-run.

EKKA found that it needed 17 people to operate the new hotline, arguably the only moderately successful part of the whole plan, along with its already existing general welfare hotline. To this day, the phone centre is staffed by only nine people. What is more, there was no provision for promoting the hotline and making it known to the public. So, both private TV stations and the public broadcaster fulfilled their obligation to play public service announcements by sticking EKKA’s hotline ad in the middle of the night — among ads for “another kind of phone lines,” Manthou said. On the other hand, she pointed out, more promotion would increase the need for extra staff to manage the additional calls. As things stand, The Smile of the Child hotline, which is also “national” by a 2007 ministerial decision, remains the most well-known to the public.

As for the Juvenile Protection Teams, KESATHEA could not coordinate them, because it was never equipped to do so. Nevertheless, the Ministry of the Interior, to which Kastanidis was moved less than two months after issuing the law, sent a directive to all municipalities to immediately appoint Juvenile Protection Teams. The directive was marked “Extremely urgent - to be sent also with fax”. 

The task of organising the teams was taken up by EKKA, which had more resources, more experience and more expertise than KESATHEA. The results were mixed.

“The new law,” Manthou said, “did not provide for the recruitment of new personnel to staff the Juvenile Protection Teams, nor did it establish them as a distinct legal entity within the municipalities, not even as a separate legal service.” 

“Juvenile Protection Teams,” Nikolaidis said, “are the same municipal social services with a different name. In other words, the legislator’s fantasy that there would be teams comprising professionals from social services, the offices of the public prosecutor, local mental health care centres, etc., never became a reality.”  Moreover, in many municipalities all over the country, the social services consisted of a single person. “That person,” Nikolaides said, “is not only charged with matters of child protection but every social issue pertaining to minors, adults, the elderly… What we are actually doing, then, is taking a slice of the time of a single social worker at a municipality and renaming it a Juvenile Protection Team.” 

Still, as Manthou pointed out, the law “placed municipalities under the obligation to set up a Juvenile Protection Team. As we speak, 236 municipalities have obliged, participating with specified employees.”

EKKA also started to provide training for these municipal social workers, in collaboration with the Institute of Child Health and the Children’s Ombudsman. “We ran training sessions for them,” Manthou told us. “We sent, we still send, educational material. We consult colleagues at the municipalities on the handling of cases. That has been happening continuously since then.”

Training, however, was faced with a different problem: “Giorgos Moschos and I had gone to provide the training,” Nikolaidis said. “And I asked them, ‘Who is permanent and who is contract staff?’ More than half of them were contract staff. So, then I asked, ‘When does your contract expire?’ ‘In three months.’ ‘How about you?’ ‘In five months.’ I turn around and tell them — Panagiotis Altanis, the president of EKKA, which was coordinating the training initiative, was also there — what do we do now? Are we saying that we will give special skills training to people who will find themselves outside the system in three months?”

Meantime, KESATHEA, for all its expanded responsibilities on paper, never achieved much. When the term of its members expired in 2013, it was not renewed, nor new members appointed.

Symeonidou-Kastanidou, who despite not being a member of the council at the time had publicly and extensively advocated for it, attributes its lack of effectiveness in her 2015 paper to “bureaucracy, negligence and inflexibility of public services”, “competition issues”, “contestation of the intentions of KESATHEA”, and “mistrust” on the part of NGOs. Its demise was precipitated, according to Kastanidou, by the fact that the supervisory body that would network all services in the country lost its staff of two employees, who returned to their organic posts, and the ministry did not appoint replacements.

The fate of “Orestes” was even less distinguished: it never became anything more than an interesting choice of name. The National Coordinating Team that was supposed to coordinate KESATHEA and EKKA was likewise never heard of again.

An Attempt that Almost Was

A few months after the 2011 law on child protection was voted in, a massive case of sexual abuse of children shocked the country, and once again highlighted the failures of the system. In December 2011, police in Rethymno, Crete, arrested a school basketball coach, who also coached the local youth basketball team. He was charged with molesting dozens of children. 

The Institute of Child Health was invited to submit a proposal on how to organise a support structure for the children and their families. It took a year for the relevant ministries to take the necessary steps and redirect EU NSRF funds from the 2007-2013 cycle, so the Programme of Psychosocial Intervention in Rethymno was not set up until early 2013.

Meanwhile, after a turbulent three years in power, the PASOK government had fallen, and had been replaced by two successive coalition governments. The crisis deepened. Unemployment peaked at 27,8%, and 35% of the people were living at or below the poverty level. In 2013, 12,3% of the population was suffering from depression — four times the rate of 2008. Between 2010 and 2015, 150.000 civil servants were laid off, including medical professionals and social workers. Just as austerity was decimating the already problematic Greek welfare state, conditions were generating a need for increased welfare. 

Pressed by ever-tightening “troika” demands, the New Democracy-PASOK coalition government imposed cost-cutting policies, which included layoffs, mass privatisations, and a sudden shutdown of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT. In this volatile climate, a law to abolish all Societies for the Protection of Minors that were not attached to the office of an Appellate Court Prosecutor, went largely unnoticed. This, however, undid a big part of what remained of the 2010 child protection legislation, which tasked the societies with supporting child victims. 

At the same time, in an effort to streamline welfare on the regional level, a law merged a great number of welfare facilities into new “Centres of Social Welfare” — one per region. The 2013 law, however, also stipulated an “Organisation” attached to each of these centres, as an administrative authority, responsible for appointing directors and boards, hiring staff, procuring materials, and most importantly regulating and administering the foster care procedures. These “Organisations” were never created.

In 2014, the Lechaina Centre became world-famous, when the BBC published a report headlined The disabled children locked up in cages. Following the outcry, the Deputy Minister for Health at the time, Katerina Papakosta, visited the institution. In her statements to the media, she claimed that the institute did not fall within her mandate, but that of the Ministry of Welfare. “I have been informed by scientific experts,” she said “that the cots, where a number of children must be kept for their own protection, have been grossly misrepresented by others. I questioned the scientists, who are experts, and they told me that this is how children are protected in these circumstances, there is no alternative.”

In September 2014, Papakosta informed Nikolaidis and his team that the Ministry of Health was shutting down the Psychosocial Intervention programme that was supporting the child abuse survivors in Rethymno. Although the team had managed to prolong the Rethymno programme for a total of 22 months, by economising on funds that were supposed to last for 12, resources had been finally exhausted. 

In its less than two years of operation, the programme had received approximately 450 children, according to Nikolaidis, “not all victims necessarily, we also covered pre-existing mental health needs”.

The sudden and unexplained shutdown, said Nikolaidis, “was one of the most traumatic experiences I have had in this field”. “There were many children and families already in systematic therapy and who essentially had no other options, nowhere else to go. We were obliged to inform people that we would be closing, and they were literally crying.”

Despite the Deputy Health Minister’s announcement, two months later, the Ministry of Justice, under Minister Charalambos Athanassiou, included the extension of the Rethymno programme in its brand-new Action Plan on Children’s rights. 

The new plan was published online for public consultation in November. By the time the consultation was over in January 2015, New Democracy had lost the general election to SYRIZA. The plan never made it past the draft stage.

Unwanted Protocols

Perhaps the most acute failure, among a score of chronic problems that plague child protection in Greece, is that there is no unified way to monitor the system. The very services involved in protecting children have no reliable, comprehensive information on the extent of problems, like abuse and neglect; or on reported incidents at various points of contact, like schools and hospitals, or municipal social services, or the police and state prosecutors; or on the progress of incidents through the judicial system; or on shelters and institutional facilities and the welfare of their residents; or on the status of children going into foster care.    

There have of course been attempts by various actors to collect data and use it to design policy. The Institute of Child Health, for example, has run the Balkan Epidemiological Study on Child Abuse and Neglect, or BECAN, published in 2013, where it took a random sample of 15,000 children and found that eight in ten children have suffered some form of physical or psychological violence at some point in their lives, and one in five has suffered sexual violence.

EKKA has also been at the forefront of the effort to collect solid information on the state of the system. It welcomed the creation of the National Register of Child Protection, stipulated in the 2011 law, and when it failed, it still tried to collect data from municipal social services and public prosecutors. Then, in 2015, the Welfare General Secretariat addressed a request to both Regions and institutions to tell EKKA which institutions, starting with private institutions, are established and active in their area and provide information on their child residents. “Even then,” Manthou told us “not all bodies responded, such as shelters and most of the institutions run by the church. Some of the state institutions also did not respond.”

Private actors have also been trying to rectify the lack of reliable information. Roots Research Centre, an NGO, estimated in a study that 3000 children reside in over 80 institutions. But the fact that, according to Manthou, EKKA’s 2015 attempt to collect data from regions managed to record less than 1000 children in institutions, or 1/3 of the population estimated by the Roots study, is telling with respect to the need for a unified system.

After 2012, the Institute of Child Health developed, through its own initiative supported by EU funds, a national protocol for the diagnosis and verification of reported or suspected child abuse or neglect. According to Nikolaidis, it was developed “following a process that was as broad and consensual as possible, in other words, we consulted with actors and practitioners from the broadest range of both the state and the non-governmental sectors, who are involved in these processes in practice”. 

The protocol is designed to outline all steps that must be taken to cover every type of suspected child abuse, and to determine which professions must intervene and how they must do so. At the same time, the institute also created an incident-monitoring electronic tool, through which every reported incident could be registered. Professionals from different sectors could all have access to this computerised system.

In 2014, when the project was complete, the institute notified the relevant ministries that would have to ensure intersectoral cooperation. Since then, the protocol remains inactive.

Nikolaidis told us about this in a tone that was both bitter and ironic. Bitter because, as he said, in order for the protocol to function “it needs an administrative or legislative act that would give it formal status. In the Greek sphere, it is nothing more than a simple initiative at present”.

As for the irony: “Our institution,” he said “heading a consortium of academic bodies from other European countries, developed an equivalent system commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Justice, which could be implemented in all 28 Member-States of the European Union. We also received separate funding from the European Commission, from the same directorate-general, to implement the system for Pan-European epidemiological monitoring that we created in six Member-States of the European Union, with the aim of expanding its use to all Member-States. We have also given it to Greece, ready-to-use, and it is not being utilised.”  

For the Many, Not the Few

SYRIZA’s first months in power were mostly spent in intense negotiations with the “troika” over the future of austerity in the country. It wasn’t until SYRIZA won a second snap election, in September 2015, and voted in a third austerity “memorandum”, that the government would begin some legislative work with regard to welfare.

One of the most pressing issues was, as ever, Greece’s reliance on institutions, in order to house children who, for one reason or another, had been removed from their families — approximately 3000, according to the Roots study. 

In November 2015, the Emancipation Movement for the Disabled “Zero Tolerance”(“Mideniki Anohi”) occupied the Lechaina facility in protest for four days. With the occupation underway, four members of Zero Tolerance filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor’s office in Amaliada, denouncing the flagrant violation of the human rights of the disabled children and youths kept at the institution. “To this day, since 2015, we have not been called to testify,” Antonis Rellas, an activist with Zero Tolerance, told us. The Prosecutor’s office archived the complaint in 2016.

Shortly after the occupation, the Institute of Child Health submitted an intervention plan to the Centre of Social Welfare of Western Greece, under whose jurisdiction falls the Lechaina Unit. In March 2016, the Institute, along with members of Lumos, the British charity founded by author J. K. Rowling to advocate for deinstitutionalisation, visited the premises. At the meeting which followed at the Ministry of Labour, it was decided that Lumos would fund an emergency intervention. 

In July 2016, the emergency intervention was launched under the scientific supervision of Giorgos Nikolaidis. The initial intervention was due to last six months, “because, rather optimistically, we believed that by then, the government would do something to radically restructure these services, develop new facilities and permanently close this institution — how could they not?” Nikolaidis told us. 

Still, despite activist and legal moves by Zero tolerance and others (including a complaint to the Supreme Court Prosecutor filed by the Greek Helsinki Monitor, an NGO), despite the mounting pressure from child protection professionals, despite the repeated calls for immediate measures by the UN, which were reiterated in 2015, and despite the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health, the Greek State was once again failing to address either the specific problem of Lechaina, or the wider issue of deinstitutionalisation.

The government, nevertheless, did take some measures in child protection — with varying degrees of success. In 2016, Minister of Justice Nikos Paraskevopoulos revived KESATHEA, appointed new members, and moved its meetings inside his Ministry in Athens. Although its overall mandate remained ill-defined, partly due to its relocation and partly to its new members’ determination, it did take part in designing new legislation, in which it regained a supervisory role. 

Child protection legislation once again inched in the direction that experts had been calling for, but was once again fraught with discrepancies and half-measures.

A 2017 law introduced so-called “Houses of the Child”, long advocated for by professionals familiar with the plight imposed upon child victims of abuse by the judicial system. Modelled on similar facilities internationally, where they are known as Child Houses or Child Advocacy Centres, the Houses of the Child allow for an examination of children by trained professionals, which takes place only once and is as non-invasive as possible.

Olga Themeli, an associate professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Crete, and President of KESATHEA, seemed elated at the prospect, when we spoke to her — understandably so, as it was her research, which claimed that abused children in Greece are forced to repeat their story to the police "up to 14 times". "Our prospects are very good," she told us.

The law, however, instituted the Houses of the Child within existing Prefect for Minors services, in five locations: Athens, Thessaloniki, Piraeus, Patras, and Heraklion. A strong reaction from the Prefects followed, who do not agree that Houses of the Child should come under their purview.

The police seem no more enthusiastic than the Prefects. "This is Greece," Konstantina Kostakou, a police officer and psychologist at the Athens Department for Minors, told us, implying that things are being done differently. She disputed Themeli's research and said that children who make allegations of abuse should be brought to police headquarters, so they know "things are serious".

To date, no autonomous structures have been created to function as Houses of the Child, although a handful of court cases have followed the associated protocol for the examination and testimony of child victims.

At the same time, Theoni Koufonikolakou, who succeeded Giorgos Moschos and became the Children’s Ombudswoman in 2018, along with Xeni Dimitriou, a former State Prosecutor for Minors who had been promoted to Chief Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, pressed the government to legislate protection for school teachers that reported suspected child abuse. This was an attempt to strengthen the provisions of the 2006 law on domestic violence, by countering the problem that school teachers were vulnerable to crushing lawsuits by alleged perpetrators of abuse. Their proposals went unheeded.

An attempt to address another long-suffering issue was made by the Ministry of Labour, under Alternate Minister for Social Solidarity, Theano Fotiou. A 2018 law created a new framework for foster care and adoption. Although not directly addressing the chronic institutionalisation problem, the law was an important step in the right direction, as experts agree that the only way to properly relocate children who live in institutions is through foster care, and not through improvements, however major, in the institutions themselves.  

Until that time, foster care was administered by regional welfare services, as well as four institutions under the Social Welfare Centres. The new law introduced several reforms: firstly, it introduced a central coordinating body, the National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, mandated to design and oversee the relevant protocols and processes; second, it introduced two registers, one for candidate foster and adoptive parents, and one for children resident in institutions; thirdly, it widened the foster-care implementation process by including social workers, a move facilitated by a 2016 law that had made SKLE, the Social Workers Association of Greece, a public entity.

These reforms were positive, but insufficient, as pointed out by several experts both publicly and in consultation with the Ministry. The National Council for Foster Care and Adoption, or ESAnY, which has vast responsibilities on paper, is another ad hoc body, lacking a solid administrative structure. This makes it inherently vulnerable to changes in government and inhibits the continuity of policy, as has been the case with other ad hoc supervisory bodies in the past.

The registers for candidate parents and institutionalised children are essential, but do not in themselves guarantee that institutions will open the foster-care process to their residents. There are no penalties or other provisions to ensure that an institution, once it registers its residents, will place them in foster-care, as soon as the opportunity arises.

The inclusion of social workers in the foster-care process had been advocated for by child protection professionals for a long time. But it is not clear how social services that are at present hard-pressed to meet existing welfare demands, will be able to handle the increased volume of foster-care cases, as required by the new law. Passing the baton to SKLE does not solve the problem of understaffed services, or the lack of funds to pay for social workers, as well as emergency and professional foster-care.

General Secretary of Human Rights, Maria Yiannakaki, presented a brand new Action Plan for Children’s Rights, in November 2018, which included both the foster-care law and the Child Houses in its ten action points. The plan was presented in a briefing to the so-called Government Council for Social Policy, which was convened under Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Economy and Development, Yiannis Dragasakis.  

In February 2019, the emergency intervention by the Institute of Child Health in Lechaina ended. The government had already announced, in December 2017, that it would allocate fifteen million euro from the super-surplus to be shared between the deinstitutionalisation of the Lechaina Centre and the Centre of Social Welfare of Attica, with the promise that a detailed plan would follow in the immediate future. A cooperation agreement between Lumos and SOS Children’s Villages was signed in May 2019, and personnel, selected by competition, which did not require specific experience in deinstitutionalisation, was hired in June 2019, on twelve-month contracts.

By the time of the July 2019 general election, the Lechaina situation had still not been addressed, nor substantial steps for deinstitutionalisation taken. Details of the SYRIZA government Action Plan were never made public, apart from summary points in a press release, and no detailed report of the plan was published for consultation. When New Democracy won the election and came to power, it abolished the General Secretariat of Human Rights.  

Once More, With Feeling

It is hard to gauge the feelings of child professionals, many of whom have been fighting for a coherent child protection system over decades, when they heard Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announce, in December 2019, that his government aims to “implement a broader framework of policies for child care”. 

The Prime Minister vowed to take decisive measures to put forward a concise programme for child adoption and foster care. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said, “to have on the one hand children in institutions seeking a family and on the other families willing to adopt and for some bureaucratic reason to not be able to.”

With the fate of reforms by the previous government still uncertain, it looks like it is time for a new action plan.

Antonis Rellas

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