Dovilė Šakalienė: I became the target of terrible aggression, and the real culprits hid behind my back

According to D. Šakalienė, the whole situation directly affected his life and he became depressed after the threats. The parliamentarian also criticized the former head of the country, who declared that he was fighting for a safe childhood, but did not say a word when it was necessary to defend the law that established it and the member of Seimas who started it.

According to D. Šakalienė, the current actions of the ruling “peasants”, with whom he joined the Seimas, are reminiscent of the communist regime and try not to think that it may be necessary to work with this political force after the elections.

– Mrs Šakaliene, let’s start with the current issues. Do you like the beach at Lukiškės Square?

– In Seimas he blinked in the blink of an eye, I will not call him another, when people made a very strong declaration of patriotism, respect for resistance and spoke about the War of Independence, which is just a perfect illustration of the communist regime . I don’t even know if this law would be suitable for Belarus, it takes me more to North Korea. There was a specific article in the law that ensured the seriousness of using the square. Does that mean we will forbid people to laugh or even smile by law? How do we measure if there are serious enough to enjoy that place? It is a problem that in fact is so reminiscent of a totalitarian regime that it is very scary.

– Would Vytis like it?

– My family is a family of political prisoners and deportees. My grandfather was imprisoned several times, arrested by the Soviets, he deliberately injured his right hand so as not to take him to that army, and for that he was also imprisoned. He managed to escape custody on the last day when his wife and son were loaded onto the train and found on the train to be taken to Siberia with him. It is very important to me, but at the same time, I do not think that Vytis or the hill are in that square will change in any way my relationship with history, the relationship of my children or the rooms with history. Yes, I personally like Vytis and I like the guerilla hill.

– The opponents of the Lukiškės beach say that such an installation damages the memory of the tortured and murdered people here and their relatives. Does the current image hurt?

– No, it doesn’t hurt. Probably because my grandparents, my aunts of eternal rest and my mother wanted a free Lithuania so that their children and grandchildren could live happily and safely in that country.

Whether there is sand or not, the children ran, shook, and played in those fountains. Now mothers may not be babysitting on the bench, but on the sand. What has changed? If someone is lying on a bed wearing a swimsuit, it is also a good day, let’s wake up, people dress very differently these days.

– You mentioned children playing. Another hot topic today is the proposed new parental leave regime. Would you agree with the model that you propose to shorten the period paid?

– This is a very difficult dilemma. On the one hand, he was very pleased that Lithuania is one of the top countries in the world offering the longest paid vacation opportunity for parents to care for their children at home. I would like to point out that statistically most children still have a mother, although, as the gender equality situation shows, Lithuania is the only country in the European Union that has not progressed since the Equality Index was calculated of genre.

In fact, a child’s parents are mother and father. Both can successfully care for a child. Is the father less loving the child, is he or she not fit, or is he or she a responsible adult who can care for the baby, change diapers, and take the mother to work to feed her if she is breastfeeding? Likewise, it is very important that the child has a connection with the parents.

The other thing, of course, is the capacity of the state. I have also heard many times from economists, from financial experts, that in the context of the Lithuanian budget, such a long holiday is a luxury. But perhaps you would be more in favor of tax reforms instead of depriving what is very important for families.

– But will this kind of obligation really succeed in involving parents in the upbringing of children?

– Communication is the weak point of our state. For example, I am a person at risk. The fact that during quarantine you see those notes that you are not allowed to enter here or that is unwanted, it really doesn’t feel like you have been cared for. Feel with such a mark on the forehead.

Now the same. This is the fact that we understand that women in Lithuania are in a much worse position in the labor market than men, from the wage gap to uncontaminated length of service and resulting in a lower fifth pension, double the risk of poverty in old age, etc. Rather than explaining that the mother will still have to live 30,40,50 years after that, it might be important to give her the opportunity not to lose a lot of work, return to the job market, earn a salary, pursue a career, obtain a bigger pension, we didn’t go through motivation, but we were able to formulate a binding message. I think it was very poorly written and people didn’t get that message at all.

– For some families, that ideal communication you mentioned may not work. They say that this is the model of our family, the mother herself wants to raise children and does not want to work during that period, and the father feels good working. They don’t understand why the state interferes with their family life.

– Well, you know, until very recently, less than 10 years ago, at the Seimas we discussed that there are family models in which a man has the right to slap a woman with his fist for not producing food. Some lawmakers have argued that the Domestic Violence Protection Act is not necessary because it is supposed to be an internal family matter when a husband raises his wife.

There are certain things where it is really your choice that determines how you behave and feel, whether you are raising children under one system or another. But when it comes to violence, discrimination, direct harm to another person, I think the state has to say: look, certain things cannot be done. We have an outcome in which, in real, factual and tangible terms, women suffer financially as a result, are at a much higher risk of poverty, and receive a much lower pension.

– But there is a similar situation with vaccines. Part of the public is against vaccines and does not vaccinate himself or his children. It can be said that they harm their offspring. Does that mean you need mandatory vaccinations?

– As for compulsory vaccines, as you know, my colleague Julius Sabatauskas had registered a bill to make some vaccines mandatory. This bill was not approved for measles. We have a return of diseases that perhaps we have already forgotten and whose complications injure people and make them die of them. Just because again in this place in terms of public education we have great gaps. We now have a situation where distorted and inaccurate information represents a threat to the health of people, their children and the general public.

If decisions were made to make certain vaccines, such as measles, mandatory, even the original bill had clear wording “in the absence of contraindications.” We all understand very well that some people really cannot be vaccinated because of their individual body characteristics, because the harm that a vaccine can cause would outweigh the risk that this person might have.

– Should vaccination against Covid-19 be mandatory?

-When we talk about Covid-19, it is not even clear if there will be a vaccine. If so, what or what will it be. We don’t really have any research into its possible long-term effects, so I think it’s too early to consider such a problem at the moment.

– Let’s talk about the state of society after quarantine. We heard many terrible stories: both a small child was left unattended at home while his mother was having fun on the farm, and a dead baby was found in an open-air bath. How do you interpret that? Perhaps our system for protecting children’s rights really only works in so-called “peaceful conditions”?

– As we know, it was at that moment that the administration changed. A new person has started work, it still takes time to get in, but there was a perception on his part (the new manager – Delphi) that more proactivity is needed. The police in this place was one of the best examples. He identified several families who could be in a violent situation and contacted them before the long Easter weekend. If I understand the Commissioner correctly, even during the non-quarantine period, there has not been such a safe weekend for several years. I mean, preventively, you can avoid that.

In the state we are very fond of reinventing the wheel. We have a line of children, youth, parents. The main line, which operates on weekdays after a few hours, needed to be financed 24 hours a day. Here I can stop thinking that there would be many parents in this place who would have been very, very helpful with such help. I also received a lot of complaints, letters, and calls where parents said we were feeling emotionally drained, we didn’t know where to get help and yes, I yelled at the children and yes, I slapped the child. What do I do now? If I am going to confess, will they take a child from me? I say, of course not.

– You say that it is possible to prevent certain cases of violence proactively, but we continue to listen: the family was aware of the services. So what did those services do? Why not avoid it?

– That narrative that the family was known for services was one of the most worrying things. Both myself and my colleagues have tried to change the system to protect the rights of the child so that, instead of monitoring, when the family is visible for many years, but all that has been limited is to mark, the solution is a specific solution. . What we were talking about was starting to solve the problem as a mathematical problem. And it is not sent to a person from box to box, but help reaches the family. That was the objective.

But it also requires the competence of the employees themselves to move from the role of observer, punished, to the role of identifier and problem solver. We have had some outrageous stories, most likely related to staff preparation, staff competence to respond appropriately, where the family will obviously not be in a good mood.

– You yourself accept that there are still child protection workers who play the role of criminals. So do you really feel comfortable telling your self-confessed parents who have given birth to their child that their offspring will not be taken away from them if they tell the truth?

– Before the reform we had 60 different municipalities with 60 different orders. Basically, it was not humanly clear to anyone when, why or, as they say, what they could take that child for and when he could return it.

By the way, of those cases, much more terrifying and much sadder, and much more that I heard before the reform. For example, one child was taken from an injury and another died during that time because the specialist was not even interested in the fact that there were still children in that family. Such spaces no longer exist, thank goodness. But how many of those workers were punished? Here is a very interesting thing. There were dozens of such serious cases, with many violations, hundreds and units punished.

Now all the specialists of the Children’s Rights Service belong to a service, which has territorial divisions in each municipality, all work according to the same procedure. The Protection of Children’s Rights Act stipulated for the first time that a child protection specialist who does not adequately fulfill his / her obligations is subject to sanctions and this can be done at a very high level. I will hyperbolically say that, if it is not enough to remove the head of the Head of the Service for the Protection of Children’s Rights, it is possible to announce an appeal to the Minister.

– I have not heard of any headaches, despite the fact that there were really outrageous stories.

– Yes, there were fallen heads. Already after the reform, there were people with whom contracts were terminated. And certainly there are people who have been subject to official sanctions. In two years, 11 VTAĮT employees have been punished for incorrect application of the law, 4 of them no longer work in the service.

But in some of the cases that rang in the media, we only saw one side of a dissatisfied person. The Office did not disclose to those other parties due to the restriction of personal data. In some places, the reality was so clearly different from that media complaint that I had a really big internal dissonance in this place as human rights defenders. Sometimes he wanted to show how arrogantly the plaintiff was lying, because it wasn’t like that at all: he drank, left, and didn’t care, and then his puffy eyes explained that he wasn’t there for 5 minutes, even though he was waiting a day and a half .

– The law on the protection of children’s rights was passed shortly after Matuk’s murder. For a time, everything seemed to work, no major problems arose until the history of Eglė Kručinskienė. Why do you think the abscess exploded in society? After all, this was not a single story, they started pouring nonstop.

– Apparently, he couldn’t help but explode. The government did no homework. We as parliament passed the law after very intense debate. That process was certainly very complex to organize things as clearly as possible, which would fundamentally protect the interests of both the child and the family, since this cannot be opposed. When we delivered this law to the government for its implementation and when the state budget was planned, what things had to happen? First, a comprehensive public education and information campaign about what is and what is not a law, why it is necessary, what violence is, where to go when you see a case of violence and if you need help. This was not done.

The second is the selection and training of professionals. Transferring problem workers (from municipalities – Delphi) to the new system on autopilot is a bad solution.

Five years ago, more than half of parents said they viewed violence as an appropriate means of “raising” their children. Those people didn’t go anywhere. If some of them realized that such behavior was inappropriate and tried to change, read literature, went to psychologists, sought services, then some of them basically feared that it would no longer be possible, but how to raise that child is no longer clear. . After all, we’ve seen an explosion of all kinds of social media posts, when people wrote: this is the right thing to do now, now I can’t even touch a child with my finger, how can I raise that boy?

– After the Eglė Kručinskienė scandal and other stories, you yourself have disappeared from the public eye. What was going on in your life at that time?

– It has been extremely difficult for me to understand the absurd conspiracy theory developed by various populists that I try to deprive children of families when the purpose of my life is for children to live and be in families. Those accusations were so contrary to what he was really doing that at first it seemed even absurd to defend him.

The aggression and hatred of Kručinskienė and his supporters was simply pathological. I don’t want to go into that story anymore, but the situation was completely abnormal, conspiracy theories are developing that the Norwegian government was paying me some money. Common sense people had a hard time understanding what we were talking about. All those threats to kill, hurt, kidnap my children for me and my family were really a very difficult test.

Still, it lacked a clearer response from our leaders at this time. In that sense, a former head of state was very active in creating the Safe Lithuania campaign, and it seems that she also cared about safe childhood. When a man who has been a legislator for prohibiting violence against children is being persecuted, threatened, there are all kinds of requests about his impeachment, not a single word from there. From the same our Prime Minister, Minister of Social Security and Labor. I completely agree with my colleague from the Algirdas Sys group that everyone hides behind a woman’s back.

– In other words, you felt lonely.

– Yes, I felt lonely. The people in the government who had to implement that law qualitatively did not do their job, and when I became the target of all this attack, they did not defend me either.

– Are you saying that Linas Kukuraitis and Saulius Skvernelis should have taken full responsibility for the kidnappings of the children that caused the stir?

– Yes, unequivocally. First of all, it’s Skvernell. The prime minister here really had to take responsibility.

– The threats he has received have led to the opening of a pre-trial investigation, which identifies several suspects. As I finish all?

– For my family, this whole story has cost a lot of health. My mother’s health deteriorated very seriously and I myself became depressed and took antidepressants for almost a year. Now, I regret that I did not have enough strength to resist slander and defend myself, and to say very clearly that, here are the people responsible for the implementation.

The pre-trial investigation was limited to the dozens of people who threatened me, who are, in my opinion, essentially the same victims of the circumstances. Basically they were incited, intimidated, caused by that hostility and hatred. If the police investigators were really active, then the prosecution’s actions were extremely passive. My lawyers suggest that I go to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) specifically for violation of the right to a fair trial. Basically, according to the article where I was prevented from holding a position because I was being persecuted precisely for my official activities.

– Are you going to apply to the ECHR?

– I don’t know, I really didn’t have time to dig into that now.

– You joined the Seimas as “peasants”, then you joined the faction of the Liberal Movement and finally you became a member of the Social Democratic Party. Don’t you feel cheated by the voters who supported you as a “peasant” candidate?

– I think the voters supported me as I did. In other words, as an expert in human rights. I was not a member of the Peasant Party and when I was invited to participate in the elections, to help prepare the electoral program, problems related to violence, with the family, etc., I really thought that my experience and skills were necessary. As it turned out, after the elections, the leadership changed a bit. The program was definitely the center to the left, it had a lot of left settings. Probably after a year in the Seimas, many rightly said that they are more conservative than the right.

– Did your departure have any influence only on the separation of political attitudes with others in the group, or specifically with Ramūnas Karbauskis?

– Maybe a change in your attitude. When told that even on the issues of children’s rights, to which I was greatly invited, Ms. Agnė Širinskienė would advise the faction, what remains to be said. If you’re an expert on child rights, violence prevention, that’s what I know.

– If you had to work with “peasants” in a team after the elections, could you? Once upon a time it failed.

– I try not to think about it. It seems to me that we will have very difficult decisions in this situation and we will probably have to make them on the basis of whether the provisions of the program can be agreed. I would like it to be done in light of the credibility of the political force as well, because the political forces that, like the windbreaks, convert it to one side or the other, in my opinion, are really a cause for concern. On the other hand, I understand that the rainbow coalition is also a great challenge. I think the post-election puzzle, whatever it is, will be difficult.

Thanks for the conversation.