The Disturbance of the Peace Act is tested for
the first time
By Christina Waldén, staff reporter
Translation: Ruby Harrold-Claesson,
attorney-at-law
|
This
article was previously published on October 18, 2002 under the title "Pappor
dömda för aga av barn". |
Two 40-year old fathers in northern Värmland have
been given suspended sentences by Sunne District Court for hitting their
children. This is the first time that the Disturbance of the Peace Act has been
tried in relation to child abuse.
They had repeatedly slapped their children's
faces, smacked their bottoms, punched them, threatened them, shouted at them
and pinched their ears. That happened on a daily basis for three children in
two different families in Värmland.
The common factor for the verdicts that were
delivered on Wednesday was that both fathers deem their behaviour acceptable
because "children shouldn't behave in any which way".
- These cases would never have been classed as
anything other than minor assault and they would only have been fined, if I
hadn't used the Disturbance of the Peace Act. Recurring minor assault and the
terror it means for a child to be attacked by a parent leads to more serious
mental consequences than wife beating, says extra prosecutor Tove Klackenberg
Undin.
She came up with the idea to test the four year
old law on Disturbance of the Peace on recurring child abuse, when she attended
a course.
- It was not my idea, but we discussed it.
Maybe they weren't thinking about child abuse when the law was written, but I
wanted to test if it could be used, says Tove Klackenberg Undin.
In one of the cases, Sunne District court
sentenced a 40-year old father to a suspended sentence, 12 000 SEK in fines and
30 000 SEK in damages to his 16-yr old son who had been slapped about twice
every other week during the past years. The father had among other things hit
his son with his fist and once he lifted him by his ear so that the skin under
his ear was torn.
The parents have now separated because of the assaults. The son has been placed in a foster home.
According to the boy's mother, the father had
had difficulty agreeing with his son since he was a small boy.
In the other case another 40-year old father
was sentenced to a suspended sentence and 4 000 SEK in fines because he had
slapped his two daughters who are in their early teens. For several years
the father had, among other things, smacked his daughters' bottoms twice or
three times per week.
The father, who is unemployed, has said that he
doesn't think that a smack on the bottom is the same as beating a child. He
himself was smacked when he was small and he doesn't think he was damaged by it
in any way. The family has now got help from the social services.
Normally, when it is a question of assault, you
have a prosecution based on specific acts performed at specific times and
dates. The law on Disturbance of the Peace was made to meet the punishment
level for harassment that has taken place over a long period of time and it is
used mainly in wife-beating cases. The legislator left it up to the courts to decide
what could be deemed as "repeated belittlement".
Sunne District court finds that the children's
self esteem has been seriously damaged in both cases and therefore the
pre-requisites for gross disturbance of the peace are fulfilled.
700 small children are ill-treated every year
Smacking children was forbidden in Sweden in
1979. An investigation that the National Council for Crime Prevention made in
2000 showed that police reports about violence towards children under the age
or six years had increased immensely since 1990.
According to the study at least 700 small
children are assaulted in Sweden every year. The law on Disturbance of the
peace was passed in 1998 and made more stringent in 2000.
Destroying the Family, Swedish style
By Erik Brodin
Spectre of children's Gulag haunts Sweden
By Chris Mosey