A 37-year-old mother of eight children receives an allowance for her six minor children and survives on it. Until last year, she supplemented her income with another severe disability benefit due to mental illness. Her husband and father of some minor children has addiction problems and is in and out of prison. The mother comes and goes to the social structures of the municipality of Athens for food, clothes and everything else she needs but cannot buy. She often drags one of the children with her, and sometimes sends her 12-year-old daughter for packages.

Social services, people who specialize in uncovering the hidden, “reading” beyond the obvious, because that’s their job. And yet no one understood that “something was happening”, did not even assume that “the conditions are such that it is very likely that something very bad will happen.” Nobody bothered to look further.

“Because there are many incidents and the services are understaffed. Why didn’t they file a complaint? These are common excuses. Social workers simply fill out paperwork for benefits and don’t “see” anything else.

If things were different, if the system worked effectively, if social workers were doing the job they were hired to do, couldn’t the fate of a 12-year-old girl be different?

The Municipality of Athens has 27 social workers in the social security services. 8 of them work in the municipality’s child protection team, 8 in the relevant adult service. According to the responsible vice-mayor Katerina Gagakis, the remaining 11 are distributed among the offices of 8 communities of the municipality. These offices welcome people who need help and inform them of the benefits they are entitled to. However, their main duty is to provide “psychosocial counseling support to children, adults and families” as expressly stated in their employment newsletter. Judging by the data presented, some services are clearly understaffed. According to Vice Mayor Panda, 32,000 people are registered in the register of social services and 8 public offices.

“We are constantly tasked with informing people about new benefits, but people do not have time,” said Katerina Gagaki, the responsible deputy mayor of Athens.

To a related question “K”, the vice-mayor replied that the 37-year-old mother, who was arrested for high-profile pimping, was not listed in the documents of the Kolonos NGO. However, he adds that this particular woman, because of her low income, was a beneficiary of social services and had access to the Social Grocery Store and the Mutual Help Center, where clothes and things can be purchased. The two services of the municipality, however, do not share a common file and therefore there is no common picture for each beneficiary.

The Vice Mayor, however, clarifies that even if the mother had come to the cultural center, it is very likely that the problem would not have been identified. “Problems are not always visible, obvious. Thousands of people apply for benefits. They are all “vulnerable” in the sense that they need support, but as long as they are functioning, we cannot know if there is a problem.”

For any further investigation to proceed, a complaint must either be filed or the beneficiary himself must request one. “The social worker cannot know unless someone informs him,” says a municipal official. In the case of a 12 year old, who could tell? Therapist? Mother; Clients; Or maybe the child himself?

“Obviously there are holes and cracks in the system. But we constantly face the task of informing people about new benefits, and people do not have time. In addition, we do not have the opportunity to hire staff,” says Ms. Gagaki.

According to the Ministry of Labour, 556 people work in the social services of municipalities across the country. Not far from the city center, in another large municipality, the municipality of Ilio, which of course cannot be compared with the size of the municipality of Athens, the social service consists of 70 people, most of them social workers and psychologists. . These people were hired on fixed-term contracts through the NSRA. The decision to expand the social service of the municipality, which in 2010 had three employees, was a conscious choice due to the identified social problems. Social workers collect detailed medical records from claimants so they can determine if there is a problem of abuse or domestic violence, for example.

Characteristically, the mayor of the city, Nikos Zenetos, signs 4-5 protocols every month, in which he asks the prosecutor to give permission to perform autopsies on the applicants’ premises. The same is happening in other municipalities of the country, since if a problem is found, the municipality can turn to the prosecutor for further investigation without the need for police intervention.

In the case of a 12-year-old child, the municipality of Athens was summoned by order of the prosecutor – after a telephone call from a person from the family environment – to visit the family’s home in order to find out the living conditions of the children. It took three days to find an available social worker. When he finally visited the house on September 21 at 11 am, the child had already been transferred to his grandmother. Mother in the following days proved to be “extremely accommodating.” Until last Wednesday, when her arrest was announced, as well as the arrest of her father, literally the next day. Thus, the children were left alone and therefore had to either be transferred to an institution or stay with a relative. But even after what happened, it was not possible to find a psychologist who would assess the situation in the family in order to give an opinion on whether the children could be safely relocated there. The Mental Health Center at Attica Square, which was notified, said there was a waiting list and no staff.

Ultimately, it took high-level political intervention to mobilize the highest echelons of the prosecutor’s office and move the children from the Children’s Hospital to Child’s Smile.