Parents are “raging” at the government for keeping them in the dark after a man was arrested in Sweden over suspected “aggravated rape of a child” and potentially several other sex assaults at a pre-school.
An unnamed man is being held in police custody in Flen, Sweden after the rape of a “pre-school aged girl” was reported by her parents to police last week. While the arrest now took place days ago, parents who have children at the impacted pre-school are furious the local authorities have failed to speak to them, saying they are having to find out what’s going on from the newspapers instead.
The attack which prompted the Sunday arrest took place on Tuesday October 1st, says Nyheterna, which reports the suspect denies any wrongdoing, had reported himself to the principal, and has no previous criminal record. Prosecutor Fredrik Beijar is cited as having said: “He is suspected of having subjected a pre-school-aged girl to a serious sexual offence. With regard to the plaintiffs and that the preliminary investigation is in an initial stage, I cannot make any further comments at this time”.
Yet since the initial report, it is stated further complainants have come forward, with several new allegations of suspected sexual abuse at the pre-school having been made, although authorities refuse to make public exactly how many reports they are now investigating.
It has now been days into the revelation that a potential child predator was working at a city pre-school, and parents of children at the facility are coming forward to make serious complaints about the way in which the local government have handled the scandal. Some are “raging” at the authorities, it is alleged. Per a report by Sweden’s Aftonbladet, there was supposed to be a meeting between the municipality and impacted parents to update them this Tuesday evening, but it was cancelled at the last minute.
Ironically, the purpose of the meeting was intended to stem the flow ‘fake news’, so stated, but it was cancelled as the authorities apparently didn’t have enough information of their own to make the meeting worthwhile. Instead parents have been left in the dark, and reduced to trying to find out what may have been done to their own children from the newspapers.
One father of a child at the school said parents were worried if any abuser at the school may have been taking inappropriate photographs, and their fears are left to run unchecked because the municipality has been so uncommunicative. “We have not received any information at all… It feels terrible”, he said, alleging the local authority is in such disarray because while they have crisis planning for fires and floods, they had no plan to respond to incidents of child abuse and have been caught off-guard.
A mother of a child at the school articulated the fear that more children may have been impacted than is presently known. She told the paper: “We don’t know exactly what happened, are more children exposed? We have so many questions that we needed to air with someone knowledgeable in the field… you [the press] have still been informed since Tuesday and we find out about this via the newspapers yesterday, when we should be the first to know.”
The local Flen government’s head of schools Henrik Ljungqvist said the parent’s meeting was cancelled “in cooperation with the municipal management. We did not feel that we could secure the information and expertise that we need so quickly. But we can do that on Thursday”. The administrator insisted how to speak to people and when was a “balancing act” between “being fast and ensuring the quality of the meeting”.
A new meeting has been scheduled for Thursday night.
