A rescued migrant child is carried to safety by an officer last year. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

A young child was told he was going to the beach before a social worker took him to the police station where officers were questioning his mother.

“They didn’t tell me I was coming to the institution. They told me I was going to the beach with mummy. We were going to the beach when they took me.”

The child was one of several placed under a care order who were interviewed by the National Commission for Child Policy and Strategy along with stakeholders, birth parents, social workers, lawyers representing parents, carers of residential homes and foster carers.

The commission strove to understand the children’s experience of being taken away from their birth families and placed under care – there are some 600 children in care. The interviews culminated in a report published yesterday, titled The Voice of the Child in Care.

They didn’t tell me I was coming to the institution. They told me I was going to the beach with mummy

The children recounted distressing stories of isolation and helplessness, which also stemmed from a lack of information about their situation and control over their future.

“I have two brothers,” one child said. “And I haven’t seen them for a long time. I even forgot how they look.”

“No one explained anything to me,” another said. “And till now, I don’t know why I am being kept here [institution]. I wish someone can tell me why.”

Commission vice chairman Charles Azzopardi said that lack of communication surfaced as a massive problem in the system.

Some children were not even allowed to bid their parents goodbye, while access to their family was not always adequate.

One birth mother said she was not allowed to visit her daughter who was undergoing an operation, while a lawyer remarked that children spending two hours each month with their biological parents was no rehabilitation.

Police involvement traumatised children while bureaucracy pervaded the system. Children sometimes wished they could speak directly to the Children and Young Persons Advisory Board. Others felt intimidated.

“Why so many people on the board?” one child asked. “I’m embarrassed to talk in front of all of them.”

The birth parents were also in need of support, saying they were not even offered any group or individual therapy sessions they could attend to improve their parenting skills or their lives.

“The social worker kept coming for a whole year,” one biological parent said. “She would sit there on the sofa, legs crossed and stare at the children – that’s it; she wouldn’t say a word.”

More effort was needed to help parents with family or social problems, Dr Azzopardi emphasised.

“We desperately need to move from crisis management to a more prophylactic, ‘early detection and intervention’ approach. We can’t first issue a care order and then not allow them the right of appeal. The current system is dysfunctional for the child on different levels: legally, socially, psychologically, politically and structurally.”

Outgoing Social Solidarity Minister Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca said that for the first time, a law (the Child Protection Act) was being drafted through a bottom-up approach.

“The report confirms the system is defeating the purpose. We cannot afford to fear change. If we have failed even one child, we have failed completely.”

Migrant children ‘treated like criminals’

Unaccompanied migrant children were being treated like criminals or worse, Ms Coleiro Preca said in an impassioned speech.

The commission, she added, spoke to some 80 unaccompanied migrant children and the stories were so harrowing she could not forget them.

“It is an issue which we must make our own – when looking at these children’s faces, we should see the faces of our own children.

“Maltese children under care orders stressed how much they missed their parents and siblings. Now imagine these children, coming from far away, boarding a boat where God knows what abuse they have to face, only to arrive in Malta and we treat them like criminals or worse.”

She emphasised that the government’s commitment to remove children from detention centres was a serious one, adding that the Church also pitched in to offer a space where they could stay.

Integra Foundation’s director Maria Pisani questioned to what degree the commitments would be seen through since Ms Coleiro Preca will no longer be minister.

“As President, I will keep facilitating and pushing for things to be done. Let’s say I’m an experiment, but I rarely fail in experiments when it comes to the vulnerable. Bear with me a few days and we will set things in motion.

“Naturally, I won’t have an executive role. But as the Prime Minister said, I am going to be the social conscience of the country.”