Fourty-five children, ranging from a few months old to 15-year-old teenagers, are currently being housed in Athens’ two main paediatric hospitals on the orders of the public prosecutor. Among them are the two boys found in the rented flat on Thassou Street in Kypseli, a residential district of central Athens. Their 15-year-old sister is being treated in a gynaecology ward, as she is pregnant.

The children’s hospitals are proving to be the halfway point between an unsuitable family or wider family environment and the welfare structures that are either insufficient in number or, ultimately, too slow and inadequate as a system.

In the case of the three Kypseli children, who bear the marks of the way of life chosen by the 43-year-old Greek man and his 38-year-old German partner, who describe themselves as their parents, it was not indifference on the part of those who knew about them that kept them trapped in that sick and horrifying environment. As has happened repeatedly in the past, the children had already been taken to a paediatric hospital, and instead of being moved on from there to an appropriate facility, they were simply sent back to the “family”.

For “invisible children” like the three from Kypseli, nobody asked questions, nobody searched for them, nobody stepped in in time. That was before the two youngest children contracted a sexually transmitted infection, before the girl became addicted to drugs and fell pregnant, before all three children grew used to living alongside their dead baby sibling in the freezer, and before that baby died at around eight months old.

Extreme cases

Staff at the paediatric hospitals are the ones who take in, on average, more than 450 children every year. Children abused in every conceivable way, malnourished, neglected, or whose family environment has already set them on a path to delinquency by their early teenage years.

According to senior staff at both hospitals, children removed from their immediate home environment are taken to the paediatric hospitals. Police protection is only ordered alongside this if the prosecutor deems it necessary, meaning that in most cases the children remain in the care of hospital staff alone. Their needs, however, vary enormously depending on their age and on whatever a particular child or teenager is “carrying” with them when they walk through the doors of the Agia Sofia or Aglaia Kyriakou hospitals, two of Athens’ main children’s hospitals.

“At the start of summer, we took in a 15-year-old boy with delinquent behaviour and psychiatric problems, on the prosecutor’s order,” says one member of staff. He was a tall, well-built child, “a head taller than me,” the same employee continues. “Who is supposed to make him better? And what can a paediatric nurse actually do when a teenager like that, in the grip of a fit of rage, starts damaging the hospital, stealing, or hitting anyone who tries to stop him?” they ask. That particular child stayed at the hospital for a month and a half before being moved on to another institution.

Under the rules in place, children removed from their environment by prosecutorial order are sent to hospital for a paediatric and child psychiatric assessment. “That process is supposed to take anywhere from a few hours to three days. How long do they actually stay? Some for months on end, even years,” hospital sources say. One child, now almost nine years old, needs nursing rather than medical care, yet remains in hospital. He goes to school and, with the prosecutor’s permission, has something of a social life, but he still lives at the hospital.

Facilities for minors are simply insufficient, and the more complicated a case is, the longer it takes to transfer the child elsewhere, unless, of course, they simply decide to walk out the door, as happened with the three Kypseli children. “Hospitals cannot properly look after healthy children who each need a different kind of care and support. The state parking them here is bad for the children, and bad for the hospitals too,” staff note.

Children under a prosecutor’s order

The issue of these so-called “prosecutor’s” children, however, is not simple to resolve. Even once a hospital has told the prosecutor that a child is medically fit, an inquiry still has to follow into where that child should be placed. Will they go to an institution, return to their immediate family, or to wider relatives?

“First, we have to establish whether the conditions that led to the child’s removal have actually improved, or whether the relative who might take them in is genuinely capable of doing so. All of that takes time,” a healthcare professional with extensive experience of the issue told Proto Thema.

Those who understand the problem from the inside are calling for an intermediate facility to be set up, where children could stay until social services complete their investigation and decide their fate. Such a facility would guarantee proper supervision and care. “Hospitals aren’t prisons. The doors are open. We notify the police and the prosecutor whenever children leave, whether or not someone from their circle has helped them do so. In many cases they are found and brought straight back. But this problem cannot be solved by a hospital,” staff note.

The tangled Kypseli case, which is emerging as one of the most disturbing of recent years, began to unravel not because some public authority went looking for and found the three children, but because the flat’s landlord had not been paid the rent he was owed. Separate reports have also suggested that the building’s caretaker had grown suspicious after noticing that one of the boys appeared to be of different ethnicity to the couple, and that this observation also fed into the decision to call the police.

From the moment police were called in, the revelations went beyond even the darkest imagination. What had looked like a simple civil dispute turned into a thriller with many layers.

First came the drugs found in the flat and the trafficking charge that followed, which the couple say relates to personal use rather than dealing. The children were visibly malnourished, and at least two of them have since been diagnosed with sexually transmitted infections, while the 15-year-old girl has also been found to use drugs herself. The third adult living in the flat, a 27-year-old Afghan man who had presented himself as the 15-year-old girl’s partner and is possibly the father of the child she is carrying, has since been separately charged with committing sexual acts against a minor, given her age. Then came the discovery of the dead baby, hidden inside a suitcase in a thermal bag.

The timeline of the baby’s life and death has since become clearer, though still not fully resolved. In their own testimony, the 43-year-old man and the 38-year-old German woman have said the baby was born in 2022 and died the same year, at around eight months old, which would mean the body was kept in the family freezer for roughly four years before being discovered this summer. All three children living with the couple are hers: the 15-year-old girl, born in Germany; a 12-year-old boy, born in Greece; and the youngest of the surviving children, a nine-year-old boy. The 15-year-old and 12-year-old are the 43-year-old man’s biological children, but the nine-year-old boy is not, and is instead a maternal half-brother of the dead baby, whose father has not been established. DNA testing is under way to help clarify paternity, and no birth certificate has yet been found for either the nine-year-old boy or the dead baby, despite the parents’ insistence that both were born in Athens.

The couple’s accounts of the baby’s death and of what happened afterwards have repeatedly contradicted each other and, in places, contradicted themselves. The 38-year-old woman has said she was not at home when the baby died and has pointed to her partner as responsible, while he has maintained the baby died with the whole family present. In a media interview given from custody, the woman openly admitted to cutting into the baby’s frozen body afterwards, saying this was done to remove built-up ice, while continuing to insist the baby had died of natural causes and that she had not killed it.

A coroner’s examination, however, found more than 10 stab wounds to the infant’s back, wounds well preserved by the freezing, which investigators say points firmly towards a violent death rather than a natural one; the possibility that the baby had also been suffering from neonatal withdrawal symptoms, given that both parents have admitted to drug use, is also being examined. As a result of these findings, both parents have now been formally charged with intentional homicide, broadly equivalent to murder under Greek law, as joint principals, in addition to the earlier drugs and body-concealment charges. All three surviving children have since given their own statements to investigators, in the presence of a child psychologist; their accounts are reported to broadly match what the parents said in their own earlier questioning, including that the children knew the baby had died and that its body had been placed in the freezer.

Painful memories

The case of the dead Kypseli baby, however, revives memories of the murder of Andreas, the seven-year-old boy who had already been dead for five years, and whom nobody had really looked for, because his mother’s vague explanation that he was supposedly in Poland had been enough to convince people. As emerged in February 2022, the woman’s Polish partner had killed the boy, with the mother failing to intervene, after which they placed his body in a makeshift “grave” on the roof of the block of flats where they lived, sealing his small body inside a concrete structure. Reports had been made at the time concerning the abuse of Andreas’s sister. Andreas himself, however, remained a “ghost” child right up until his murder was uncovered, since the authorities had never managed to locate him or check his mother’s claims.

“Once again, the tragic story of a 15-year-old girl who took her own life shows just how badly the system is failing to protect children. Five reports over five years were not enough to secure this child’s protection. In the end, feeling utterly unprotected, in total despair and with no way out, she ended her own life,” The Smile of the Child, a Greek child protection charity, said in a statement last November, when it emerged that the suicide of a 15-year-old girl in Corfu in 2015 was linked to sexual abuse she had suffered. It was yet another case in which people spoke up, but nobody listened.

Cases like the one in Kypseli, now escalated to murder charges, the discovery of Andreas’s murder, the arrest of the parents of eight abused children in Heraklion last December (after six separate reports about the conditions those children were living in) and many others show that indifference is not (always) the problem. People often do speak up. But Greece’s welfare system keeps proving inadequate, even incapable, of protecting children and keeping them safe.

Photographs: Eurokinissi