Mounting child abuse cases in Fiji

Transcript

Fiji is tackling an apparent spike in cases of child sexual and physical abuse as doctors call for more child psychologists to help victims.

Police released figures that show there were over 2,500 reported cases of sexual assaults in 2015.

A doctor and reporter to the Minister of Health, Reati Mataika says the higher number of cases doesn't mean it's a recent phenomenon but that people are more confident in coming forward and reporting cases.

She told Alex Perrottet she is happy people feel safe to come forward.

DR REATI MATAIKA: Just in the last few years we've started to protect them and that's when the numbers have started to come in, giving us a truer reflection of what's actually happening out there. And that's what we're seeing that most of them come from broken families, being looked after by other family members or friends. So the thing that social welfare is doing now is trying to alleviate the factors that we have already identified there such as unemployment for the family. The parents, they're not there most of the time because they're trying to make a living and then someone else comes in to look after them so we've come up with child protection allowances which gives the family some allowances for the child's food, living expenses, you know if they can't earn enough money for the child and they're usually away looking for a job.

ALEX PERROTTET: We've got cases where parents have been found to be guilty in the sexual abuse of their children, so surely there has to be some more basic level of education and awareness here and I think we've got the minister herself, Rosy Akbar, warning parents and guardians that the government won't hesitate to take negligent parents to task. Do you know any more about what the ministry's trying to do there?

RM: In regards prevention, trying to prevent it, I am aware that they are actually trying to introduce sort of good parenting classes for young parents and also trying to introduce this also into high school, towards the higher levels of high school. That's the two programmes that I am aware that are coming out soon. But to the acute problem, I just know of the child helpline that they are doing. And they are also trying to involve the iTaukei affairs to try and get the message out to the communities. It's a bit difficult trying to tackle the squatter areas because there is no structure to the community. In a typical Fijian village you would have the turaga ni koro where you would go and ask them permission to talk to the community and then the hall and everywhere you go and the information gets through to everybody. But in the squatters it's sort of different because there's no clear structure of who's the leader and everything else so I think that's a big barrier to trying to get the information through to those sort of settlements but I know that they are trying to work through there by getting, from the outside, community health workers to come in.

AP: You're a doctor, you see cases day to day, what sort of reaction do you get from the children when something as devastating as this happens? Is there a complete loss of trust in the family? Are they afraid to go back? How do you deal with those more problematic cases?

RM: There is a big gap here in Fiji and I am hoping that this is something where we can direct our efforts this year and in the coming years, and that's having some sort of counselling for the children that are involved. We have a lot of counsellors in Fiji but unfortunately there's no child psychologist or even a psychiatrist that's employed by the ministry - both in the ministry of health and the ministry of women. These children, they get counselled by counsellors but in regards to how they cope and how they live, but having worked in Australia and having looked at the resources that they put into counselling I recognise that it's a really big area and a lot of our children that have been abused are traumatised for life. The most severe case that I've had, I've seen her again and unfortunately she was also physically abused in addition to being sexually abused so she had mentally regressed. So she was a class five student and by the time I saw her, a year later, she had a developmental age of a class one student because she was physically abused also. But in regards to all the other children I think there is a general distrust but I think the main thing that plays very big role is the family where that child is from. If the parents are quite solid and have a very close relationship, those are the ones that I see do quite well when I see the follow up. But all of them would actually benefit from a child psychologist being in the picture and from child counsellors being part of the whole rehabilitative part of the abuse.

AP: And that's a message that you are sending to the ministry of health that that would be a good move for the future - to bring in child psychologists to participate in this effort?

RM: Yes and I've been saying that and I'm actually trying to have a collaboration between the ministry of social welfare and the ministry of health to try and get a child psychologist as part of our child protection training this year. We usually hold a three-day training for all our doctors and so I'm trying to get a child psychologist that I worked with in Sydney to come over also as part of this training. Just to include the social welfare people into it also to see the huge role that a psychologist can play in parts of management of these cases.