Episode 12.
The Barnahus Revolution: How a Small Nation Changed Child Protection Forever

Transcript

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s an honor to welcome Bragi Guðbrandsson to the podcast Beyond A Reasonable Doubt. We are in Reykjavik, Iceland. And the reason we are here today is that Iceland was the first country in the world that came up with a solution for how to take care of kids in difficult situation and in criminal settings that was called the Barnahus Model. And you, Bragi was deeply involved in this development. Could you tell us a little bit about how that came about?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, that’s a pleasure. And thank you for taking the time to speak to me. Well, Barnahus has been, my professional mission for past 25 years or so. And you ask how did it come about? Well, the Barnahus is about sexually abused, victims of, child victims of sexual abuse. And I started my engagement this topic, in the early 1980s, it was in last century. I became a director of local social services and I stayed there for 10 years. I came across a number of cases where children had been sexually molested. I was myself lost in how to best deal with these cases. You know, hands on feel the pain of the children and the horrific situation that this met for these child victims. And from the very start, I started to speculate on how we could do better for these kids. In 1990, I became the counselor to the Minister of Social Affairs and when he asked me to be his councillor, I said I would do so if I would have the opportunity to work on the reform in child protection legislation in Iceland, which he happily accepted. And that led to the set up of the government’s Agency for Child Protection in 1995. I was appointed the director general of that agency. 

This Agency had main function to coordinate all child protection work Iceland, the whole of Iceland. The child protection system was overtly decentralized. We had 180 communes or local authorities in Iceland. And in each local authority, we used to have child protection committee. Over half of these committees had less than 300 people in populations. You just could imagine how really impossible it was to provide professional intervention into complicated issues like child sexual abuse. Besides, the time, Iceland was in denial on the very existence of child sexual abuse. But one of the first decisions I made as the Director General of the Government of Asian Child Protection was to do a research on the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the country. And the outcome of that research came as a surprise to all of us here in Iceland. There were a lot more cases that nobody had sort of envisaged. We had over 100 cases per year being dealt with in the different sectors, society, by the child protection, by the police, by the medical profession, and so on. But this outcome of this research demonstrated the complete failure of the system to deal with these cases as it sort of revealed the lack of collaboration between the different agencies that were responsible for dealing with this. It demonstrated the lack of professionalism, lack of or absence of guidelines for working these cases. And it really demonstrated that children were subjected to repetitive interviews with the consequent, you know, re-victimization that this involves. But you also could find cases where, you know, children were not even talked to because they’re in some parts of the country they didn’t really believe that the children were good witnesses or they didn’t have the capacity to speak to  children. So this was more or less in total chaos. There was no therapeutic support available in the country. There was no expertise in terms of medical in examination of child victims. So there was a huge work to do. 

One of the things that I felt in particular was bad was that children were dragged to the courts if an indictment was made. Children would need to give their court testimony in the courthouse and being subjected to cross-examination where the child had to face the accused person. This was of course very intimidating for the child witnesses. Now, this was the sort of scenario at hand in Iceland in 1995, 1996. I came to the conclusion that if we were going to do something about this, we need to do it centrally. Iceland is a small country with only at the time just over 300,000 people, just over 70,000 children. So we couldn’t build up these competence centers all around the place. I decided that we would set up a of a competence center that will serve children the whole of the country, whole witnesses, child victims and witnesses in the whole country. And we would need firstly to have expertise in terms of forensic interviewing. That was number one, because without the child’s disclosure, we can’t do really very much. So that was one. And number two, we needed to have a facility for medical evaluation, although child victims oftentimes do not have any physical evidence due to the fact that most of the cases we deal with are historic sexual abuse happened in the very past and the body has this great capacity for healing, so you wouldn’t have any evidence. It was necessary and also for, you know, give the child the whole sort of physical checkup not only look for the evidence, but also support the child and the child’s concern over own physical health, because often time child witnesses, they are concerned about being in any way harmed due to the abuse, even though they are perfectly healthy. So this is one part. And the third part was, of course, the therapeutic part. Now, the idea was really to have all the different professions work together within the one roof. Of course, this idea did not fall from the sky. It sort of developed discussions, developed from what was happening in the world at the time. That was very remarkable, particularly with regard to forensic interviews as a response to the sort of historical, or I should rather say, hysterical child abuse cases in the nurseries in America, Canada, even in Europe. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

If I’m not wrong, this is your area, Bragi but, I’ve read that in the 80s, it came up a lot of stories. Maybe it can be social development in many of the Northern Western democracies, this came up in a large scale. And some of them were proven to be true, some of them were actually proven to be false. So I guess that was kind of the environment of the time that this is coming up. It’s surfacing. We don’t know the scale of it. And it’s also, as you said, there is stigma here. And we have a problem to establish the fact. And in the chaos, I think, if I can summarize your observation, the ones who are truly suffering in that chaos is actually the kids. And they probably were, either if they were a true victim or not.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah. And even if the abuse didn’t happen, they became victimized to this constant interrogation that they were subjected to.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

By the process itself.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, by the very system was trying to protect them. But I think you are right. Obviously, there were real cases of child sexual abuse within the framework of play schools, nurseries and so on. We know that, of course, that pedophilias, they go where the children are, nursery schools and are of course places that they go to look for prey. But on the other hand, what we do know now is that during this period in the 80s and 90s, there were a of false accusations or mis-interpretations and people were scared, parents were scared, well maybe naturally, know, they had heard about these cases, they’ve heard about pedophilia and sexual crimes and they were, they wanted of course to protect their children, that’s quite natural, they listened to their children but perhaps, you know, during a certain stage in the child’s rebirth, the child becomes sort of, I wouldn’t say obsessed, but interested in its gender identity and that includes genitals and breasts and things like that. They talk about it and it’s very easy for parents to misunderstand or to interpret children in the wrong way and not understand correctly what the message they’re trying to convey. These issues are so complicated to sort of detect. But of course, trained forensic interviewers that we know today who know how to elicit the child’s nanoteeth in a correct manner by applying evidence-based forensic protocol, avoiding the suggestibility that a normal being would probably be guilty of when talking with a child. We can now establish whether there is a real cause there for concern or not. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

You did something that I wasn’t aware of. You said you did some research on it here in Iceland. Can you tell a little bit more about why you did it and what you found?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well yes, the research was basically on the structural aspect of it, how the different agencies in society that were responsible for dealing with child sexual abuse, how they handle themselves in these cases. So I looked at the child protection, looked at the police and I looked at the prosecution and the court system and of course the medical system. Now out of the 100 cases, well the child protection should have been dealing with all of them because the law stipulated mandatory reporting to the child protection. However, the child protection system only knew about 60 % of these cases. And the police only knew about the 40 % of the cases. The prosecution only received less than 30 % of the cases. And the courts they only got, well, less than 10%. That was really roughly the proportion of the cases how it was divided. Now, why didn’t the child protection get all of these cases like they should have?  Well, I think it was because we had 180 child protection committees all around the country. The police was a bit skeptical of referring cases to these child protection committees because they knew they did not have any professional capacities to deal with it. So they thought it would probably be better if they did it on their own. The child protection didn’t contact the police either in their cases that they were dealing with. Why was that? Well, I suppose that they simply didn’t know how to deal with it. They may have done so informally. At least it was not registered in any case. Possibly they were, because of the state of denial that the whole society was in, they were probably not sure if this was really a case or not. Or if it was a case, they didn’t really know how to handle it, how to speak to children, how to talk to children. They didn’t really know how to work it through. And this is really what I was basically concerned with. To refer the kids to medical evaluations. Well, there was no specific, there was no specialization there. You could go to your family doctor or to the hospital, but then you would need to have at the time, we found out that you really would need to have some visible injury, so it was really a chaos. We were trying to work out, trying to map the actual procedure, but there wasn’t any. There was no procedure in the whole country. So that was really our main sort of findings that we needed to do, a professional guidelines on how to respond when you had this suspicion. That was number one. And number two, would have to have highly qualified forensic interviewers. And then, of course, the medical setting and so on. But at this was before the Google. So you didn’t really know if this structure of sort inter or multi-agency collaboration did exist somewhere in the world at the time. I did write and phone to my colleagues in the other Scandinavian countries and I did try to read as much as I could, but I didn’t find any place where this collaboration was taking place. Until a bit later on when by pure accident I saw an advert on the internet, in fact, on the conference in Huntsville, Alabama, of all places in the US. What caught my eyes was that there was the concept inter-agency collaboration in child sexual abuse. 

When I saw it, I decided I should go there. Then I learned about the children’s advocacy centers in the USA. And they were actually based on the same concept. And it started in the Southern States of the USA and it was in its infancy. This was a great inspiration for me. I could see there how these different agencies collaborated and worked under one roof. 

They had medical people coming over to do the medical evaluation, and they had therapists on a permanent basis there. Well, this would be exactly what we would need here in Iceland. It would fit nicely to serve the whole country, but I wanted to take it further. 

I felt what’s lacking in the USA model was number one, was an NGO. It’s a private…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like a lot of things in the States.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

So there was no obligation part of the police or the child protection, so I had to refer cases to it. And secondly, and that was very important, that you didn’t take the child’s for court purposes in these children’s advocacy centers. This was basically done for the police for investigative interviews and for the criminal investigation. And then the child needed to wait maybe a year or two until the actual court procedure.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Then appearing courts.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

And then appearing court, yes and being cross-examined and subjected to cross-examination of the task. So, this was something which I did not like very much, but I wondered if we could sort of do it differently to take the good elements and to strengthen the model by number one, to have it operated by the public authorities to integrate into the welfare system. So it would be with the corresponding sort of mandate of the different agencies to refer cases to the partners. Secondly, if we could have the court judges come along and join us in this project. 

It was at this time that invented the term Barnaheussora. This was something which being used a bit before. When this slowly developed, we got some support from them, particularly from the prosecution. The prosecution particularly saw the potential in this. We then tried to have the set up as being the default procedure here in Iceland. At the time we had the legislation that court judges could not touch the case or come near the case during the investigative phase. It was only after the indictment had been made that they could come into the case. But at the time, Norway had a system which was called Dommeravhør, which was kind of an exception from the general rule that court judges should not be involved in the investigative phase, where they were supposed to take the child’s during the pre-trial states. Now, this is an arrangement that Norway has no longer. However, it was the solution that we found that was to have the court judges to take the child’s statement during the pre-trial state.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like a subpoena, in a way.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah. It was only limited, the role of the court judge was only limited to that particular part. The idea really was to fulfill the basic principle of the due process.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Exactly.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

You know, the due process consists of two, more or two dimensions. Number one is the evidentiary immediacy, so that the court judge would be able to see or sense the evidence directly without any interference. So by meeting the child and listening to the child, that requirement was fulfilled. And secondly, the requirement of the due process, which meant that means that the accused person must have the opportunity or his defense contradict, yes, to ask the child witness. So what the arrangement sort of came out of this was that we would have the child in Barnahus in one room with a forensic interviewer. And then in a different room, you would have all the representatives of the different agencies, the child protection, the police, the prosecution, and the defense. And this would be done under the auspices of court judge. So they would be able to observe the interviewer live. 

Following the interview, which was carried out by trained interviewer, according to a forensic interview protocol, the defence had the opportunity to ask the child questions, to offer alternative explanations and so on. This would all be video recorded and the video would be then accepted as the chief evidence, main evidence during the court procedure, the court’s proceeding, if an indictment would be made. So this was an arrangement that we sort of set up from the very start.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So then saving the children in general for potential revictimisation, but by having to appear for cross-examination in court. So that was the level that you thought was missing in the US.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, absolutely. In this system, the child is only subjected to one when the child has given his or her statement, then the child does not need to be concerned about the justice system anymore. The child has done with the justice system. Now, I that there are other ways to do this. I know, for example, the other Nordic countries, including, for example, Norway, the court judges, they’re not involved in this procedure. But it is the prosecution who is responsible for the procedure. The defense will have this opportunity. In Norway, you have two systems. First, you have the interview with the child where all the different agencies are involved. But the defense is not there. Once the child has given his or her statement, then the perpetrator is interrogated or interviewed. And then you have the second interview, which is often referred to as a supplementary interview, which focuses basically on the diversion or the different account, the disagreement, the differences in the natterchiefs of the child and the accused. 

You get about 80-90 % agreement, then it’s about 20-10 % disagreement. So the second interview of the child focuses on this diverse narrative. Then the child is over with the judicial part. Both of these interviews are recorded and they can be played in court if an indictment is made. So the difference between the Icelandic system now or Banahus interview and the other Scandinavian is this one versus two. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

If we then go back again to when you started, you were in the Alabama in 1997. And you were in position, as I understand both, because you had historically seen the problem. You had an idea about the And based on that, the Barnahus was established as the multi-agency center for potentially victimized children. How was that received, because I imagine one thing is that you say the chaos and the 180 different agencies and of course varying level I would guess of competency and capacity, but I guess also one of the fundamental problems when it comes is kind of the all the different government agencies have different budgets. So how was this received and dealt with on a government level?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, once we had carried out this research I mentioned, and we had seen that the prevalence of child sexual abuse was as high as the outcome of that research demonstrated. I think the Icelandic society wasn’t a bit of a shock, you know, because they really didn’t believe in Iceland at the time, the population, that child sexual abuse was an issue. Child sexual abuse was something which was, you know, infighting the States or the UK and the larger societies, but not in Iceland. So when this information came out, there was a bit of a shock among the nation. And there was a great debate in the parliament that something needed to be done. And which was to be expected. My agency, the government’s agency for child protection, was entrusted to put forward proposals to reform the system. So I really got the mandate to do whatever I thought was necessary to improve the situation.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Fantastic. 

 Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

And so I looked for support from the prosecution, from the head of the university hospital in Iceland, from the police chief here in Reykjavik, and from the Federation of the Social Directors of Social Services in Iceland and so on. And they were mostly positive. Not all of them, but mostly there were. Particularly, I’m happy to say the prosecution was happy with it because they realized the problem, particularly in terms of the criminal investigation, that the police at the time, they had not the necessary training or the capacity to interview children. So they saw immediately the potentialities there for improving the criminal aspect of it. So they were fine. They were interested from the very start. But it was a different history with medical professions. At the time, they could do the medical exams through, by the application of a state of the art equipment, video colposcope, which we had never heard of here. And most of the kids who were examined in university hospital in Iceland, they had to be, well, they used anesthesia. They put them to sleep before they did the examination, which is not a very child-friendly way to do a medical evaluation and not very effective either. So when I approached him, I sort of asked them if they were willing to join us in Barnahus, if we could set up a medical suite there. They were not extremely keen on that and said, well, we need to have this option to use anesthesia in many cases and we can only do that in hospital. Then we don’t have the video colposcope, we don’t have the money to buy it. So I said, look, if I can finance it and I can buy it and put it in Barnahus, would you come? And they said, yes, then we would come. So I bought it. And when it came to Barnahus, I contacted them again and said, now we had the video colposcope in the medical room. Now I want you to come and start doing the medical evaluation. 

The first thing they said was, please bring the video colposcope to our new children’s hospital. We want to do it rather there… So they tried to resist. But in the end, they became so fascinated by the way in which children could be then examined and the possibility they had to communicate with the child in this child-friendly environment. They could perform their obligation in a much more effective way than before. Soon they became the strongest advocate for Barnahus. They pointed out that in Barnahus, children are so relaxed, they were not stressed in the muscles they needed to examine. They were so relaxed and it was so easy to examine the children compared to what was before that they became the strongest advocates for Barnahus very soon afterwards.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I guess if you reflect upon it, you have probably two of the most powerful historical professions.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

You have the lawyers.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

The lawyers.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And the medical doctors.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

So making them be able to invest and communicate. I guess you must have taken some diplomatic skills.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, it took a while. It helped me that Iceland is a small society and I had been a councillor to the Ministry of Social Affairs. So I knew these people personally. And that was something which was helped me a great deal. So they were ready to do it as a favor to, you know, as a pilot for maybe one or two years or so and see how it would evolve. So I think that was a part of the explanation as well. But they were not all in the legal professions who were happy about this. The defense wasn’t happy. Because they said, Barnahus, it’s not like a courthouse. The courthouse is a neutral ground, but Barnahus is biased. It’s publicly advocating children’s rights for children. So it’s not an objective place to do this part of the court procedures. But on the other hand, we argued, well, you know, the child is not a partner in court case. The court case is between the prosecution on the one hand and the accused person on the other. So the child is only a witness and it should be to the benefit of the innocent accused person to provide environment for the child so that enhance the possibility that the child will tell the truth. And in the end, they bought that, that as a child was not part of actual court proceedings, other than having a status as a witness. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I can see the argument, of again, as you have to, some eggs if you want to make an omelette.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And it depends on you see it. Either you acknowledge the fact that sexual abuse towards children actually do occur.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

But you don’t know in advance against who? And then you advocated a safer neutral space for where we investigate and take care of this. well, I know I can hear myself, I’m advocating for it, but I it’s interesting to hear that there were sceptical voices.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, it is. And it’s quite natural. It was something new and they had been doing it, you know, from the very beginning, the old way. And they knew that procedure. But this was something which was very revolutionary in a sense to have the child in a house, you know, outside the courthouse somewhere in a in a house in a residential area, to have a social worker or a psychologist who was trained to do the forensic interview and so on. And they had to be prepared to let go of some of the power they had in terms of controlling the situation in which the child gave his or her testimony. That was quite natural. But they did try to appeal those decisions or to take the statements in the Barnahus to the courts and all the way to the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court said, our law of the procedural says that court procedures should take place in the courthouse. As a general rule, it’s up to the individual judge to decide where to take the statements of the witness. And there were, you know, presidents, for example, taking statements of prisoners in prisons or taking statements of people who were hospitalised, mental hospitals and so on. So there were presidents and if the court judge accepted and wanted to take the child statement in the courthouse, he had the power to do so. During the first years from 98 to 2002 or so, there was a lot of uncertainty concerning this while the system was trying to adapt to the new idea of Barnahus. But the worst scenario was however, the number of court judges, particularly Reykjavik, that refused to go to Barnahus and would rather take the child’s statement in the courthouse. So when this law was sort of changed, court judges got this responsibility to take the child’s statement during the pretrial state. Most of them in Reykjavík, they simply wanted to do it in the Reykjavík quarters. I recall inviting them up to the Barnahus to show it to them and said, look how wonderful this is. And they said, well, they responded, yes, this is wonderful. We may possibly use this for the next two or three months while we set up a child-friendly room in the courthouse, because we do prefer to take the child’s testimony in the  courtroom. So it didn’t really look very good in very beginning. But what happened was that the court judges outside of Reykjavik, you know, they did not have this facility in their courthouses and there were no plans of setting up in the child-friendly rooms at their courts. So they thought, well, why don’t we try it? And they decided to come one after another. And soon there were more and more court judges that choose to go with these cases to Barnahus. And in the end, you know, today everyone does. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

So the longer they were traveling distance from Reykjavik, the more interested they were in a way. In a way, bizarrely.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

That’s a paradoxical fact.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s really interesting.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

And it moves like this for maybe a decade or so. And that’s another story because then the Council of Europe started to submit their guidelines on child-friendly justice and then they Lanzarote Convention. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

This is really interesting to hear and thank you for taking me down the history lane. If we didn’t think about it, now we leave Iceland behind for now. Because if I’m not wrong, this idea hadn’t been established as far as I know in any other country. So it was quite revolutionary.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Absolutely. Well, those who came next to it was the USA with the children’s advocacy centers. They did have, in fact, forensic interviews, had the medical evaluation and they had the therapy under one roof. But Icelandic Barnahus is the first one that incorporated the judicial part of it.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

And as a government service.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

As a government service, an integral part of the welfare system. That was for sure the first, and still it is like that, you know. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Bragi, this is the reason why I’m so honored to talk to you today because I am also like yourself, fortunate enough to travel a lot in my work around in the world and in Europe. This is now an established model very much around Europe. So how did it spread?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, that’s something with this very, very fascinating story in a sense, you know. I was quite convinced after Barnahus had been in operation for two years here in Iceland. How effective this was and how good this was for child victims. We did a comparative research here on how children experienced on the one hand going to the courthouse to give their statement and the other giving the statement in Barnahus. And there was a huge difference in terms of the child’s experience in going through this. So I had lot of data that I could share with others. And I gave the first presentation on Barnabas abroad in the Nordic Barnavarns Congress, the Nordic Child Protection Conference that was in Finland in Helsinki in 2000. And I could sense, you know, when I was presenting, the interest in that lecture hall. And soon I got messages from others wanting to know more about this. And then in 2002, I was contacted by Save the Children. And they told me they had been doing a research in Europe, comparative analysis of nine European countries on how they dealt with child sexual abuse cases. And they were just publishing a report called Child Abuse and Adopt Justice. And in that report, they had chosen Iceland as the best practice in Europe. And I was invited to come to Copenhagen to do a presentation on a conference where they were going to precept the findings of this research. And that, I think, was a turning point. I went to Copenhagen and I did two presentations And then the ball started to roll. 

The save the children’s organization, in Denmark, in Sweden and Norway, they all started to campaign for it. And we started to get requests from both professionals and from politicians, particularly local politicians and also members of parliaments from the other Nordic countries, if they could visit Barnahus. And as there is a lot of Nordic collaboration on the political level, oftentimes they were coming here for meetings and they would, come to Barnahus as well. I kept on receiving at the time many invitation to give a presentation in Scandinavia. So I could feel that there was this great interest. But still, it took some time, a couple of years. The Nordic country also had a collaboration within the Baltic Sea Council, the Baltic Sea States. There was a collaboration called Children at Risk that was set up in 2002. I was elected the chair of that collaboration. And the Baltic collaboration started also to promote this in the Nordic countries and in the Baltic Sea states as well. So at that time there was a lot of talk, a lot of conferences, a lot of discussions, but it was not really until in 2004 I was giving a lecture in Solna in the Police Högskolan in Stockholm. 

And in the break, I was, came these two big gentlemen to me who were the bodyguards of the Queen. And they said to me, the Queen wants to talk to you in the garden.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

The Queen of Sweden.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

The Queen of Sweden. And it turned out she was the Creator of the conference. And in the garden, she told me that she would be coming to Iceland the following year for an official visit and she asked if she could visit the Barnhus. I said, of course, you’re certainly welcome. And that happened. She came a year later and I can always recall that visit. It was amazing. She was supposed to be there for half an hour. She was there for more than one hour. She was so fascinated by this. And I was told that when she came back to the hotel, she called the director of the World Childhood Foundation, and asked, why don’t we have Barnahus. And a year following this, I received an invitation to deliver a speech in the inauguration of first Barnahus in Sweden. This was in Linköping in 2005. By that time, there was so much interest, both political interest and professional interest in Sweden that within very few years, you would have Barnahus in about 30 cities in Sweden. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

There’s a reason that we Norwegians call the Swedes the Germans of the North.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yes.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

If they decide to do something, they do it quite efficiently.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Sometimes. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

Interesting. And at least from the Norwegian perspective, when Sweden has it, Norway wants it too.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, Norway came very soon. They asked to come for a study visit here in Iceland. And they came here in 2005. And 2007, only two years later, they start to roll this out in Norway. Now it’s in 11 or 12 Barnahus in Norway. Denmark came a little later started in 2013 and they did that very grandiose. They did that, the first of the Nordic countries to pass legislation to facilitate and to ensure that the Danish Barnahus would be a part of the official structure by mandating the local child protection, the police and the medical sector to refer cases to Barnahus and by then the ball started to roll. Soon Baltic Sea state, Lithuania was the first one, then Estonia and Latvia, down to Hungary and all the way down south to Cyprus, UK, Ireland. So it’s really still spreading. You could say that during the years from 2005 to 2015, it was basically the Nordic countries from 2015 and onwards, it’s been really the rest of Europe. And now we have, well, there was a report given out last year with the Council of Europe. 

It says 28 states in Europe had then started operating Barnahus. Of course, was different sort of co-operates. In some instances, it was Barnahus by default, like in the Nordic countries, or only in pockets, like in Hungary or Cyprus. And there were the 10 states in the pipeline to set up. I have been very much part of this progress I’ve enjoyed that. What has particularly played a very important role in this is the Council of Europe.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Really?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah. It started off by, I was encased in the work of Council of Europe from 2005. In fact, in a different topic, it was in the rights of children living in residential care and on these guidelines, they incorporated the Barnahus principles limiting the number of interviews that children need to be subjected to to ensure that only trained interviewers were used, you forensic protocols, a child-friendly environment, all that. And explicit recommendations set upon us. And this was the guideline on child-friendly justice. And the following year, we started to draft the Lanzarote Convention. 

The Lancerote Convention was a breakthrough because it’s a binding convention to all member states of the Council of Europe. It has a very comprehensive content with regard to how states should fulfil their obligation for investigating child sexual abuse, and so it’s really, you know, intersectoral. It emphasizes collaboration and coordination and all the rest of it, which is basically the ideology of Barnahus. This was in 2012. I was elected chair of the Lanzarote Committee in 2016. In that capacity, I travelled all around Europe advocating and promoting Barnahus as well as the Lanzarote Convention. And so that was a huge effort. Now today, all states in Council of Europe have ratified the Lanzarote Convention. So they have now taken on these obligations. So that’s not really surprising that they are all implementing Barnahus, because Barnahus really is the only arrangement that can ensure that you meet the requirement of the Lanzarote Convention. And on top of this…  

Ivar Fahsing: 

It’s a solution in a way.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

It’s a solution, yes. And on top of this, the European Union, like they often nowadays do, they take the Council of Europe documents or guidelines or human rights instruments and they translated into directives. And 2012, they submitted the Directive on the Rights of Victims of Crime. And the same year, the Directive on Sexual Abuse and Sexual Exploitation. So it became, in a way, a law of the member states. 

Now, this all had its say, its great impact on this. But what I felt was particularly so wonderful was that the European Court of Human Rights, they came in with a new jurisprudence in these cases, in child sexual abuse cases, where they emphasized that the Council of Europe instruments, should be applied when states are dealing with these cases. The principles of these instruments should be adhered to in respect for the child’s dignity and psychological integrity and to avoid re-victimization of the child was an absolute requirement that the states needed to fulfill. And that had a great impact because the court has so much influence over the national jurisprudence. The committee has consistently recommended states to set up Barnahus if Barnahus is not existent or if Barnahus is existent, then the committee has recommended it to be strengthened to make sure that all children have access to Barnahus and that the Barnahus is strengthened by passing law to support Barnahus. 

So the Committee on the Rights of the Child has also impacted this very much so and it goes beyond Europe because of all nations in the world come to Geneva. So the basic ideology behind Barnahus this multi-agency child-friendly approach, is now the mainstream jurisprudence of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. So this has had enormous impact. So that’s why I believe we are seeing this growth, proliferation of Barnahus all around. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I would like to ask you about, because there’s one specific thing that I think you are bringing, if we can bring the concept of Barnahus Bragi into in a general investigative setting. You said something that when you were doing this in Iceland in the first years, you did a survey on satisfaction. And I think that is a very interesting concept. Could you reflect a little bit about that dimension?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. We did submit this survey to the parents and the kids. So it was quite comprehensive. Quite number of questions on all the different steps of the process. the difference that was scored, it varied a great deal. In some of the elements, perhaps there were not much difference, but others there was huge difference. And what really mattered so much was the child friendliness of the environment. The parents and the children, there was not a huge difference in the way which people interacted with them. They were all kind and friendly and so on. But somehow the child environment, child friendliness of the Barnahus made the whole difference. There were problems in the court, like for example, there were examples where children met their offender in the lift in the elevator going up, know, or they met the accused person in the waiting room. Also, they met people that were not particularly friendly in the corridors that were being taken to one of the courtrooms or something.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Like scary situations.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

So it was absolutely clear that the courthouse was intimidating for some children, and in fact, many children, I should say. It was intimidating for the children. While the Barnahus was always, there were always positive associations in terms of their feelings and experiences, the way they came. It was really something which was a discovery. And when you come to think of it, you know, it has such a great impact also on the capacity of the child to disclose the abuse. The capability of the child to share the narrative, to disclose, is very much dependent on the level of anxiety. The more anxious the child is, the less likely it is that the child can give you the full narrative of his or her experience. And conversely, the more relaxed the child is, the more likely it is that you will receive the full and rich detailed narrative from the child. And this is something which very soon came out that played a major role in the Barnahus success.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

But don’t you think that would apply also to grown-ups?  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

I think so, yes. And therefore I have always believed this should not be exclusive for children. This should be also applied for all interviews and interrogations in the justice system, for example.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I think you definitely have paved the way, at least pointed in a direction which I think should be… To the extent I know, there are very few satisfaction surveys when it comes to how people in general are interviewed and going through the process of a criminal justice process. So I think that in itself, that is a very inspirational idea that I definitely hope will spread beyond the child victims.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Well, I think in fact, although it’s not my area, police interrogations, but as I understand it, there has been this huge development into in this area and the Mendez principles is more or less based on the same principles of respecting the person.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

I still think we have a long way to go before we have integrated some of pioneering work on how we dealt with our children until we are able to see the same structures and cultures when it comes to how we deal with our interviewees and potential victims, witnesses and also suspects, I guess, in not only these kind of cases, but in all kind of cases, guess, the state or the authority or the different authorities as you have underlined here can sometimes be quite intimidating in general.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

But there was one element you mentioned, the cultural element in it, which I think is so important in this, because in the proliferation of Barnahus, when Barnahus has spread all over Europe, that is absolutely wonderful. And that is that you can see that there is not just one Barnahus, there are multiple Barnahus. I sometimes say that Barnahus is not a recipe for the cookshop of the future. It is rather, you know, you have in Barnahus the ingredients to make Barnahus, but you have to make it in line with when the your culture and your legal framework, your professional traditions and so on. So that’s why Barnahus well really should be called Barnahus concept rather than Barnahus model because it’s not a strict fixed idea. It’s more like a guideline to make a child-friendly, evidence-based structure to address these issues. So that’s why we see all these different types of Barnahus and different ways in which Barnahus have been implemented. There are differences in terms of who is operating it, how it’s structured and organized and so on. There are ways in which the justice system comes into it. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I think we will wrap up this conversation by saying that also the, what you said, the general change in from interrogation where it’s more coercive and goal-directed exercise towards what the Mendes Principles are around, which is more process-oriented and value-oriented that requires a shift in mindset. And I think I want to thank you for enlightening me around this tremendous change of mindset that you helped firstly Iceland, but later as more than half of the countries in Europe and it’s still spreading. So by that, will say thanks a lot for a really interesting conversation.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Blessings all mine, I enjoyed it tremendously. 

Ivar Fahsing: 

I’ve learned a lot and I’m really impressed by the work you’ve done.  

Bragi Guðbrandsson: 

Thank you. Thank you so much.  

Ivar Fahsing: 

Thank you.