After a severely injured two-and-a-half-year-old girl, beaten up by her mother, died on Sunday, Slavonski Brod County prosecutor Mirela Smital said the indictment against the mother would be changed and she would be charged with the crime of causing grievous bodily harm resulting in the child's death.
The crime carries a prison sentence of 3 to 15 years. The severely injured child, who was brought to Zagreb’s children’s hospital from Nova Gradiska on Wednesday, died on Sunday, the Zagreb hospital’s director, Goran Roic, said earlier in the day.
Despite all the treatments undertaken and doctors’ exceptional efforts, her condition critically deteriorated and brain death was confirmed, he said.
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The child was brought to the Nova Gradiska general hospital on Wednesday morning by her mother, who said the child had fallen. The doctors tried to revive her but due to the severity of the injuries, she was transferred to Zagreb in the afternoon. The head of the Nova Gradiska hospital, Josip Kolodziej, said the injuries were severe, notably to the head, but that they were all over the girl’s body.
On Saturday, a Slavonski Brod County Court judge remanded the parents in custody for one month. They admitted in part to the crime of violating the child’s rights.
The mother is charged with hitting the child with inappropriate force.
Investigators suspect that the girl was abused between November 2020 and 31 March 2021, while the couple’s other three children, who have been separated from their parents, are believed to have been abused for a longer time.
The Nova Gradiska Social Welfare Centre has been aware of this family because the father was reported for domestic violence before. The girl was in a foster family for over a year, but the centre returned her to her parents at their request.
The director of the centre, Branko Medunic, was relieved of duty after an administrative inspection found irregularities at the center.
Jelena Veljaca, founder of the “Save me” civic group, launched in 2019 after a 54-year-old man from the island of Pag threw his four small children from the first-storey balcony of his house, said the group’s representatives would demand at a meeting with Labour and Social Policy Minister Josip Aladrovic on Tuesday that parents convicted of domestic violence not be allowed to live with their underage children and that social workers in charge of the case of the child from Nova Gradiska be fired.
More than 20 percent of children physically abused
The head of the Zagreb Child and Youth Protection Centre, Gordana Buljan-Flander, said on Sunday that more than 20 percent of children in Croatia experience physical abuse and that one could not say that biological families are better for those children than foster families.
There are criteria used in determining the risks for a child who lives in such a family, she said for N1 television, adding that she does not know why parents found to pose a risk, who have been reported for violence and who have abandoned their children, are given back their children so easily.
“It seems that very often – and this is not a matter of law but of worldview – we think that any family is better than no family. I have worked with families for 40 years and I know how dangerous families can be for children. In Croatia, 20 percent of children are physically abused, more than 20 percent are emotionally abused and 20 percent are sexually abused,” she said.
As for the case of the child who died of injuries inflicted on her by her mother, Buljan-Flander said that state institutions had failed and that the tragedy could have been prevented.
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