Kipseli: three children the State had already identified and failed to protect
The three minor victims in the Kipseli case had been removed from their parents by prosecutorial order in the past, but the child protection system lost track of them. In.gr analyses the systemic failings.
Kipseli: how the state lost sight of three children it had already "saved"
Stabbed and malnourished infants are not a common sight. The scene uncovered in Kipseli is extremely extreme — and this explains why it has dominated public discourse for weeks. However, as In.gr points out, the pattern underlying this tragedy is not unprecedented.
Three adult substance users, three minors in advanced neglect and abuse, all together not in some remote location but in the centre of a large city. The question is justified: how had these children — aged 15, 12 and 9 — never come to the attention of any responsible authority?
The answer came quickly, and it was not one anyone would have wanted to hear.
Prosecutorial order that was not followed
According to statements by Michalis Giannakos, president of the Pan-Hellenic Federation of Public Hospital Workers (POEDHN), the children had been removed from their parents in the past by prosecutorial order and had been placed in a Children's Hospital. This is a common practice for so-called "prosecutorial children" — minors whom the state removes from unsuitable families and parks indefinitely in hospitals, lacking any other option. Subsequently, their father collected them from the hospital. No one stopped him.
Children's Hospitals have the mission of caring for sick children — not the custody of healthy but neglected minors. In practical terms, this means that someone who convinces a child to follow him — their father, say — has a very high probability of passing through the door without being stopped by anyone. These units are not designed to keep inside those who want to take children out.
The problem, however, does not end with the procedure of leaving the hospital. The critical question concerns those responsible for perpetuating what is euphemistically called the "child protection system".
What should exist and does not
The solution is not some theoretical puzzle. Emergency foster care should function: from the moment of removal from an unsuitable family, children would be placed with a foster family that is on standby, has been trained and is remunerated. There, placed in a family environment, they would receive psychosocial support from professionals in the organised social welfare system. In parallel, the biological family — except in extreme cases — should itself be supported, with the aim of reunification.
Everyone who works professionally in child protection acknowledges that except in extreme cases of abuse, family reunification should remain the central goal. Neglect and physical abuse are very often linked to poverty, marginalisation, substance use or mental health difficulties — issues that an organised social welfare system can help families to address.
The situation in Greece today
None of this works. Meaningful emergency foster care does not exist. Social services are understaffed and are often called upon to cover specialities for which they have not been trained. Contract workers are not legally protected to undertake prosecutorial orders. Social welfare continues to rely on institutions, for which allegations of renewed child abuse are frequent.
There is chaos with various mental health centres and private experts being called upon to give opinions, in the absence of reliable public services. Older children are locked in psychiatric care units without being ill — as the Ombudsman has found — because there is nowhere else for them to go. There is no unified protocol.
And in the middle, a prosecution of minors that directs this orchestra, repeatedly redistributing secondary abuse by the state to the children it supposedly protects.
Allegations since 2020
Even amid this chaos, some questions remain unanswered: can a prosecution that removed children from an unsuitable family abandon them in a hospital and lose all trace of them? Can these same children reappear only because a landlord was trying to collect rent?
The president of the "Smile of the Child", Kostas Giannópoulos, stated that allegations of sexual abuse, financial exploitation of the daughter and charges of procuring had been submitted as early as 2024 and possibly since 2020.
These children were not invisible. The system saw them, took them in and then lost them.
Source: In.gr