RIYADH, 23 September 2007 — The National Family Safety Program (NFSP) was launched on Thursday at the Intercontinental Hotel under the sponsorship of Princess Sita bint Abdul Aziz. According to Dr. Maha Al-Monief, executive director of the program, the income generated from that evening was raised to support the program.
The NSFP initiated the first of its kind national campaign against domestic violence. The program is disseminating recently established guidelines created by the Ministry of Health regarding how domestic violence will be diagnosed and reported by doctors to authorities.
The Kingdom is a signatory to the United Nations Child Rights Agreement and the Declaration of Child Rights in Islam.
Al-Monief said that child abuse was first recognized in the Kingdom through the medical field in 1990 and some articles in some hospitals indicated that there are sexual and physical abuses on children. But those articles were simple and presented one or two cases of weird or disturbing cases where the indication were strong enough not to go unnoticed, and did not require searching or investigating.
“From 1990 until 2000 there were around 15 articles in the medical journals talking about child abuse,” said Al-Monief. “Not until the year 2000 were people started to recognize it as a phenomena.”
In a study carried out by Dr. Ali Al-Zahrani, consultant psychologist for children and adolescents, on 3,000 students of primary, elementary and high school levels, it was discovered that 25 percent of them were physically abused and 15 percent sexually abused.
Between reluctant families and doctors who receive cases of children showing signs of physical and sexual abuse are the authorities whose job it is to force the public interest enforcing the law in the homes of families that try to mask the crime.
Dr. Hussein Al-Sharif, a medical doctor and member of the Jeddah chapter of the National Society for Human Rights, says more needs to be done to establish a system that reconciles public interest in combating child abuse and the social values of privacy and reputation.
“In my opinion, 90 percent of the cases are still confined to the home due to the social taboo and the scandal that might accompany it,” he said. “The legal system is not doing its job regarding this issue.”
He points out that one of the biggest problems facing the prosecution of child sex crimes and abuse is a legal system that he says doesn’t allow reports from doctors who diagnose abuse cases in the injuries of their child patients. Only evidence provided by forensic experts is admissible, but few hospitals have forensics teams on staff that can be called in quickly to examine child patients as they appear in emergency rooms.
The doctor recounts a story of a young girl who had clear signs of sexual abuse that had resulted in deep lacerations in the genital area. Partly because the attending physician initially diagnosed the cause as “an injury with a sharp object,” no forensics evidence of a sex crime was collected, such as checking for DNA samples or evaluating the patient’s body in the context of injuries sustained by rape.
“When she came to our ER, we detected the injury that caused a cut as deep as the rectum,” said Al-Sharif. “After undergoing many repair operations, we wrote a report relying on the little girl’s description of what happened — in detail — explaining that this is a clear case of sexual abuse.”
The report eventually made its way to a court, said the doctor, but it was rejected because the evidence didn’t come from a forensics examiner. Instead, the first doctor’s report about injury with a sharp object stood and no sexual abuse charges were ever filed.
“Many cases go undetected because they aren’t immediately investigated,” he said. “Then the physical damage heals, especially in the cases of young children, and the proof of the abuse dissolves.”
It seems that some momentum has being made in recent years, and awareness is growing that not all that happens behind closed doors is sole the province of family privacy. More and more cases have come to light, and Saudi officials are working to develop a national database to track child sexual and physical abuse.
The National Family Safety Program, along with the new protocol from the Health Ministry regarding doctors who receive possible victims of domestic abuse, is aimed at helping expose a crime that has all-to-often gone unreported.
