Doctor calls for national child abuse prevention body

A leading paediatrician is calling for the creation of a full-time national body dedicated to preventing child abuse in Luxembourg.

Dr Roland Seligmann believes that Luxembourg is 50 years behind in terms of its child protection infrastructure and says it is time to change.

Speaking to the Luxemburger Wort to honour 22 years of the UN's Children's Rights Convention, he said: “We are a small country with huge amounts of aid agencies, which are small and not professional. What we need is a national organisation. We are a rich country but in the field of social care we compare poorly with other countries. A structure like this should have been founded 50 years ago.”

Though there are no official statistics on how many children are affected by child abuse in Luxembourg, it is known that there are some 700 children and young people in care.

In these cases the state has intervened because either the young person's life is at risk or their development is threatened by problems in the family.

Dr Seligmann told the Luxemburger Wort that 3 percent of all pregnancies resulted in the birth of an at-risk child. With 5,000 new pregnancies each year in Luxembourg, this means that 150 new families are affected annually.

The paediatrician points out that identifying abuse by parents towards their children is not always easy. “No-one goes to the doctor to report that they abused their children,” he said. However, he recognises that the solution lies in treating parents as patients rather than criminals.

“Parents who abuse their children are not criminals,” he said, adding: “They are ill. There are always people whose life is characterised by multiple problems and who have their own early history of suffering. They often do not know better. But, we must ensure that the suffering of the parents is not transferred to the children.”

The challenges facing health and social services working with abused children could also be further helped by the creation of specialist facilities. According to the doctor, plans for a highly anticipated Centre Diagnostic en Maltraitance at the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg, in Strassen, are not advancing well.