National strategy on child abuse by end of the year

By Andria Kades

A national strategy reducing sexual abuse of children and supporting victims should be completed by the end of this year, Labour minister Zeta Aimilianidou said on Thursday after the first meeting of the ministerial committee including her counterparts from justice, health and education.

The strategy includes efforts to protect children from sexual abuse, pornography and being taken advantage of, as well as finding ways to help them. It also makes provisions for ‘curing’ perpetrators.

Justice minister Ionas Nicolaou said “we are moving forward to implement an action plan that will facilitate combating the phenomenon through specific strategic aims,” that will be implemented within specific time frames.

The committee asked all relevant services to outline any issues they want to raise so these can be incorporated when drafting the plan.

“Through this strategy we want to give all the services a particular direction they can follow that aims at better cooperation between all services, so we can achieve better results,” special advisor to the ad hoc committee Anastasia Papadopoulou said.

She said that one in five children fall victim to some form of sexual abuse or harassment in Europe while in Cyprus, it is higher and close to one in four children.

“We hope that through implementing the cabinet’s decision there will be more studies that may be more specific in the matter,” she said.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.