Gardaí refused to give recordings to Tusla of interviews with two children who were allegedly raped and forced to perform oral sex on up to 11 adults, a child protection report has revealed.
Carol Coulter, director of the Child Care Law Reporting Project (CCLRP), said the that case was indicative of the lack of co-operation between criminal proceedings and childcare. The project is independent and monitors cases heard under the Child Care Act.
Dr Coulter said that reforms were needed to stop children being re-traumatised by being forced to undergo multiple interviews on alleged abuse they have suffered.
Professionals working with Tusla, the child and family agency, sought the interviews so that they could be shared with an independent expert as part of the childcare proceedings. Gardaí were reluctant to share the recordings as they contained crucial evidence for the prosecution in the case, which is continuing.
Dr Coulter said that while she understood the concerns of gardaí, protocols were not being followed when children were interviewed, as the judge noted in this case. “There is a problem that when child protection proceedings and criminal proceeding are taking place at the same time, there is no clarity on how they are co-ordinated,” she said.
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Gardaí and Tusla are expected to arrange joint interviews with children after allegations of sexual abuse are made but the judge said that because the gardaí did not take this on board the children were subjected to a second interview. Dr Coulter said that a childcare worker was needed to work alongside the garda interviewer to assess the clinical or care needs of the child, but that in practice this was not done.
The details of the case are included in the CCLRP’s 2017 report. It outlines how the children’s alcoholic parents agreed for them to be placed in care in June 2014 while they underwent addiction treatment.
The parents failed to engage fully with the addiction services and Tusla obtained interim care orders for the children.
After the children, both of whom were of primary school age, had been told of the interim orders in December 2015, they made allegations of sexual abuse involving 11 named individuals. They named their parents, two male relatives, a female relative, three teenage girls and two other men and alleged that another female relative was present when they were abused.
Six months later, as a result of these allegations, the couple’s new-born baby was also taken away from them under an emergency care order.
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Gardaí began an investigation and a specialist investigator interviewed the children for the purposes of a criminal case.
Tusla sought the DVDs of the interviews to secure further care orders, but this was resisted by the gardaí on the basis it could prejudice the criminal case. A court later ordered that the DVDs be released. In the DVDs the two children described in detail being forced to perform oral sex on the adults and being raped. They also gave physical descriptions of all the adults allegedly involved.
The parents acknowledged that their alcohol abuse had resulted in the children’s poor attendance at school and neglect but denied there had been any physical or sexual abuse. Five of the adults named by the children also denied that there had been any sexual abuse in the house while they visited. The case will resume later this year.
Dr Coulter said re-interviewing children can cause trauma and lead to false retractions as the children want to avoid more the questioning. In other countries a single interviewer is assigned to a child or children for the purposes of both gathering criminal evidence and assessing the care that the child will need.
The CCLRP made a number of reports on cases last year which involved child sex abuse. It found that difficulties in accessing garda interviews often arise and that there are also problems in getting specialist assessments of the children involved. This can delay or impede the securing of care order.