Contributed by: Bulgarian Gender Research Foundation, Bulgarian National VAW Monitor

On June 25th in the city of Pazardzhik, and in the future in the cities of Shoumen and Sofia, "blue rooms" for questioning of child victims of violence will be established. This includes the project "Children's Participation in Legal Procedures" - a continuation of the project "Hear the child" - which is realized in the three cities.

"The main problem on which we are working in both projects is that the children who have become victims of violence and have witnessed violence have been questioned frequently and often by people who don't have the proper training," said assoc. prof. Nelly Petrova, a chairperson of the boarding committee of the Social Activities and Practices Institute (SAPI), in a press conference today in Shoumen.

The establishment of specialized rooms for listening to children aims to create a friendly and welcoming atmosphere for the child and to guarantee the implementation of legal actions. The rooms are provided with so-called "Venetian glass," through which the experts can watch what happens while the child is being questioned by a specialist. The rooms will be equipped with video and audio recording systems.

During the final session of the training course on the project in Shoumen today, magistrates, policemen, and investigators discussed proposals for amendments to the legal procedures.

Part of the proposals is the following: "when a child is a victim of violence and is under 16 years, he or she should be questioned only once in a pre-trial procedure. The procedure must happen in the presence of a judge and an expert in psychiatry. This method also has to be applied in the questioning of child witnesses of crimes in order for them not to be traumatized". "The proposals will be presented for discussions in front of specialists in both Sofia and Pazardzhik, and the National Institute of Justice will take part in ordering the proposals to be accepted by professionals before making the normative changes," said assoc. prof. Petrova.

According to Nadya Stoykova, an executive manager of SAPI, a parallel study concerning the children victims of violence will be conducted on a national level, in accordance with the realization of the project. "We will do this research together with the Bulgarian Judges Association so that we can gather data for the continuation of the lawsuits, their duration and as a whole, and the way their are conducted. The gathered data will be presented on the final international conference in September in Sofia," said Stoykova. 

The five-day training on the project "Children's Participation in Legal Procedures" ended today in Shoumen. In it, magistrates, policemen, investigators, and social workers, as well as psychiatrist experts in the field and representatives of NGOs from Razgrad, Pazardzhik, and Rousse, took part.

The project is funded by the European Union and the budget of the Republic of Bulgaria and is being realized by the Social Activities and Practices Institute in partnership with the National Judges Association in Bulgaria, "Nobody's Children" Foundation (Poland), and the municipality of Shoumen.

Compiled from: News.vestnik24.com, 13 June 2008.