On January 29, 2024, a news item appears in the press that shocks the entire Moldovan society: an 11-year-old girl, a pupil in the fifth grade, gave birth to a child. Practically immediately, the shock gave way to the perplexities that people began to address:
„I ask myself: this child is a pupil, how did no teacher have noticed physical, emotional, behavioral changes in this little girl?”
„They didn’t notice, or didn’t they want to notice? How is it possible that no one notices that a girl is pregnant? The teachers, the social workers, the neighbors, the mayor, the acquaintances, even no one?”
„In few months and you can already see it, especially since the little girl was small. All the culprits put to respect, you have ruined the little girl for life.”
„Why is everything written beautifully on the paper? And only when catastrophes happen, measures are taken, news are produced.”
Trying to find answers to these perplexities, 4 months ago we started interviewing dozens of people who had a touch with the case – from ministers and prosecutors, to ordinary employees in the educational, medical or social system.
Although some officials claim that the authorities acted practically „exemplary”, the step-by-step reconstruction of the case suggests otherwise: appearances and insecurity prevailed over what the law calls „the best interests of the child”, and poor coordination between representatives of different institutions led to the fact that, even after it was found out that she was pregnant, the little girl lived for a whole month under the same roof with the one who is now accused of rape.
„After finding out [about the pregnancy], colleagues did not know what the procedures and protocol were: they should not re-victimize, but have an approach based on children’s rights, services, friendly justice. All specialists had separate discussions with the minor. This means that, each time, the given child was traumatized and re-victimized,” remarks Alexei Buzu, Minister of Labor and Social Protection.
***
On November 30, 2023, the Freshmen’s Ball was organized inside a gymnasium in Moldova. The event is also attended by pupils from the fifth grade. The girls wear yellow skirts matched with a white t-shirt or shirt. Among them is Iulia*, an 11-year-old girl.
Both teachers and parents of the students involved in the event are present at the ceremony. Iulia’s mother was abroad, the child being left in the care of her mother’s 46-year-old cohabitant, who is not present at the ball.
Although she is visibly more corpulent compared to her classmates, the yellow skirt still sits on Iulia suspiciously bulging in the abdominal region, according to a photo from the event that we managed to see.
„It was not a big question mark for us, the teachers, nor for the headmistress. The girl is a bit overweight and I thought she was sick. No one approached her that night,” the director of the gymnasium says in an interview.
Even so, in the coming days, both in the teaching staff and among the parents, discussions and debates arise that try to find an answer to the question: What happens to that little girl?
According to the nurse, who works until noon inside the gymnasium, the class leader and a teacher would have asked her if she was feeling well. The child would have replied that she had hormonal disorders. And they believed it.
„I couldn’t admit that she was pregnant, because she is only a fifth-grade child. Maybe he gained weight! Don’t you see now how many chemicals they put in food? Although her face was very changed and I can’t lie that something like that didn’t cross our minds. But she always wore sweatshirts and loose clothes and didn’t get along,” the mother of a colleague tells us.
One of these days, the nurse receives a phone call from a woman in the village who hints that Iulia could still be pregnant. The woman bases her assumption on the fact that, at the end of the fourth grade, that is, half a year ago, the child was not so „developed”.
The woman’s assumption is not at all without a substrate. Even at the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year, Iulia still looked like an ordinary schoolgirl, according to a photo taken on September 1. And this means that the radical physiological changes occurred in just a few months.
***
On December 11, that is, only 11 days after the Freshmen’s Ball, the nurse decides to check on the child. „I went to that class and told the girls that they would have a routine medical check-up and asked them to come to my office after lessons. The little girl was the last one. First I weighed it. She had gained 7 kilos since the last check I had done at the beginning of the school year. She also told me that it was because of hormones and that she did not have regular menstruation,” the nurse points out.
After asking her to pick up her hoodie, the nurse understood that she was pregnant. „A lot of people didn’t think about pregnancy. I, after seeing that belly, didn’t want to believe that it was pregnancy in the fifth grade,” she explains excitedly.
She didn’t raise a big fuss, the nurse emphasizes, because she needed concrete evidence so that she could notify the guardianship authority, i.e. the mayor, that the child was pregnant. „You come like this and ask her: Are you pregnant? What if she wasn’t pregnant? You have to be careful to act in such cases,” the medical worker seems to apologize now.
She sends Iulia to the toilet to bring her a urine sample, claiming that it is needed for some tests. „I insisted at school that they give me urine, because we needed a pregnancy test, because it was the safest argument,” says the nurse. But the little girl would have told her that she didn’t want to go to the toilet and that she had no idea when that would happen. Then the nurse proposed that she collect the urine at home and, the next morning, bring it to the medical center, which is located right next to the school.
Also on Monday, December 11, after lunch, a commission met at the town hall to discuss some cases of vulnerability of some children from the village, recalls the social worker. She was told that they had a possible pregnancy in the fifth grade.
„We had a commission and it was announced preventively, on December 11 – it is a suspected case of pregnancy. Then let’s see the result! The doctor said it was, but confirmation had to be confirmed. It took two days for the test to come. When it is suspicious and precise, they are two different things,” insists the mayor.
„When you have an 11-year-old child pregnant, this is rape. When you have such cases, it’s not that you leave her next to the possible abuser for another 48 hours, but you don’t leave her for 48 minutes either. What evidence did they need if they understood from the nurse’s control that the girl is pregnant?” puzzles Liliana Rotaru, president of CCF Moldova.
According to the intersectoral cooperation mechanism for identifying, assessing, referring, assisting and monitoring child victims and potential victims of violence, neglect, exploitation and trafficking, if a child is in imminent danger to his or her life and health, and this danger is caused by the parents or persons in whose care the child is located, the local guardianship authority:
- a) orders the removal of the child from the parents/person in whose care he/she is, communicating this fact to the prosecutor within 24 hours;
- b) orders the emergency placement of the child in the family of relatives or other persons with whom he has established close relations (neighbors, family friends) […], as well as family-type placement services or residential placement services. The emergency placement is applied for a period of 72 hours, with the possibility of extending the term up to 45 days, during which the complex evaluation of the case will be carried out.
***
The next day, on December 12, Tuesday, the child comes to the village medical center and brings the urine container. The pregnancy test comes out negative. „I realized on Monday that he would not bring his urine because I saw that she was hiding everything,” says the nurse. „I sent her to the family doctor [in the office next door], so that she could check it too.”
„The doctor palpated her, confirmed that she was pregnant. But we sent her the next day to the district, to have an ultrasound, accompanied by her mother’s partner, to make sure that she was still pregnant. To put it bluntly, you have no legal proof. Based on what do you tell her that she is pregnant?”, the nurse insists.
Why wasn’t she directed for an ultrasound on Monday, when the nurse checked the child, or on Tuesday, when the family doctor also confirmed the pregnancy? The answer, as simple as it is bizarre – the villagers in that locality have only one day of the week – Wednesday – when they can go to the ultrasound machine in the district center and benefit from free services. „The doctor comes from Chisinau,” the nurse explains.
On Wednesday, December 13, the child goes to the ultrasound, accompanied by her mother’s partner. The result shows that the fifth-grade girl is 34 weeks pregnant and that the fetus is healthy.
„Shock! They don’t even think about giving you something like that,” the school principal describes the situation. „No one noticed any change in that pupil. She always participates in all the activities… It’s true that, lately, she didn’t do physical education, she stood in line, because she reasoned that she forgot his sports equipment at home. She wore very loose clothes,” the gymnasium principal apologizes.
Vasile Coroi, the Children’s Ombudsman, believes that those responsible at the local level should have acted as soon as the suspicion arose that Iulia was pregnant and that no evidence was needed, since the family doctor also checked her.
„They don’t have to wait for Wednesday to have an ultrasound. They do not have to work in such cases from 9.00 to 17.00. It’s serious that two weeks have passed,” says Vasile Coroi, referring to the period between the Freshmen’s Ball, when the first indications that the girl was pregnant, and the day when the ultrasound confirmed this.
Liliana Rotaru, president of CCF Moldova, is of the same opinion, arguing that in such cases, as provided by law, children must be immediately removed from the family and placed in an alternative form of protection, while the case is investigated.
„Their role was to urgently remove the girl from the family on that Monday. It is better to be alarmed, to notice and not to be confirmed. We are left with a meeting of the multidisciplinary commission and with the concern for the child, even if there was no abuse, even if the minor was not pregnant, except to postpone and make some assumptions further and leave the child around a possible abuser,” explains Rotaru.
„If it is not proven that the parent is the abuser, the child returns to the family and the investigation continues with another list of suspects. But if it comes true, then we protected the child as soon as we found out. Another problem is that it was found out too late and, probably, the members of the commission did not cooperate with each other,” says the president of CCF Moldova.
On that Wednesday, December 13, 2023, the multidisciplinary commission of the village, which included the mayor, the social worker, the sector policeman, medical and teaching staff, officially met and decided that Iulia should be removed from the family and transported to a placement center.
„On December 13, I personally transported them [Iulia and her two brothers] by car to the placement center. Until they drew up the papers, I brought them to the town hall and served them with biscuits and tea,” says the mayor. In the meantime, they called the girl’s mother. They ordered her to return home urgently, otherwise she would lose her parental rights.
Initially, „the teacher called me from school,” the girl’s mother recalls. „They asked me to do tests on Iulia, because she is a bit fat. I thought she was eating at school, at home… I don’t even think about what’s going on. Then on Wednesday, after she was at the ultrasonography I called him… He should tell me what [the girl] has. He answered the phone a few hours later. He told me that Iulia was pregnant and not to panic. It’s not the first and it’s not the last. I trembled. On December 14, in the evening, I was home.”
***
Also on December 13, 2023, law enforcement officers order the start of criminal proceedings for rape committed knowingly on a person who has not reached the age of 14, a crime punishable by imprisonment from 10 to 20 years or life imprisonment.
Two investigators from the district would have taken statements from the members of the multidisciplinary commission, but also from the cohabitant of Iulia’s mother. She would have found him at home – calm and cooperative, the social worker tells us. „He denied from the start that he had no idea that the girl was pregnant. What, I’m looking under her skirt? I make sure they have something to eat and go to school. I didn’t notice anything about the girl,'” the man allegedly replied in impeccable Romanian.
Namely, that he is from Romania and that he speaks a perfect Romanian, but also the fact that he was a homely and respectful man who „took care” of the children, would have made the locals exclude any possible connection with Iulia’s pregnancy. „Nobody thought it could have been him, because he was a householder. I didn’t think it could be him either, until the DNA results came,” admits the mayor.
„He had a beautiful Romanian language. He was hardworking. He had all kinds of animals around the house. He had pigs, 100 ducks, a tractor, cows. He sold milk, cheese. He behaved nicely with the villagers. And the family was not aware that they would have any problems: poverty, alcohol, violence,” the mayor continues.
We would like to mention that, de jure, while Iulia’s mother was abroad, the child was officially on her own. Or, when the woman went to work, she did not leave custody of the child to an adult, as required by law. And this means that, de facto, Iulia was left in the care of a person who did not have the legal right to represent her interests, including when she was accompanied to the ultrasound. „I didn’t know you had to do something like this when you go abroad,” the girl’s mother now regrets.
But the local authorities did not complicate it either, although the law is practically unambiguous: „In the case of a child separated from his parents due to the temporary presence of the parents/sole parent for a period of more than two months in another locality in the country or abroad, the local guardianship authority establishes custody over him, as a form of temporary protection of the child”.
The mother of a classmate remembers that, after the case „broke out”, she began to analyze from a different perspective certain observations made throughout that year and, what previously seemed irrelevant, now indicated possible implications of the cohabitant in Iulia’s case.
„The girl was controlled by him permanently. If he stayed from school for 10 minutes, then he called the teacher and asked why he was late. The gate was always locked, when people went to buy dairy. And if their mother from abroad called, he was next to the children, present, and only in his presence did they talk,” the woman tells us.
Practically the same thing is now found by the girl’s mother. „I wanted to come home several times, but he told me: ‘Don’t come anymore, we have loan to pay, and everything is fine here.’ He made me take a loan, to make the fence, because it was dissipating… And I trusted him. I boyed with him. And my father trusted him… I didn’t expect him to do something like this. He walked around with the icon in his pocket, he made a cross because it wasn’t him,” says the woman.
On December 26, after 13 days spent at a placement center, the child returns home, with her mother, siblings and her mother’s partner. „Yes, they spent winter holidays together,” several local officials confirm.
„It was not known that he was the suspect. He taught Iulia to say that he was a boy from his mother-in-law’s village (his former mother-in-law – editor’s note)… And I thought, like any mother: How, me at home and she at the center? I was still saying that, during the holidays, we should all sit at the table… That if we knew he was suspected, it was better to stay at the center,” explains the girl’s mother.
„The mother does not decide whether the child comes home or stays at the center,” warns the Children’s Ombudsman, Vasile Coroi. „She requests to take her child home, but the guardianship authority, together with the multidisciplinary team, consults with each other, including the policeman, to say whether or not the mother influences the child in the process of conducting the investigation. Then, after everyone agrees, the emergency placement is terminated,” he explains the procedure.
„We called the investigators to ask what we are doing next. And if the cohabitant is suspicious, how can we leave the girl next to him?”, recalls the social worker. „To which they told us that their job is to accumulate evidence on this case, evidence that they cannot communicate to us, and that we, the local public authority, decide whether the girl comes to the family or not.”
***
In mid-January 2024, Iulia gives birth to a 3,100-gram baby, a source from the hospital where she gave birth by caesarean section confirms to us. A few days later, she is discharged and returns home, under the same roof as her mother’s partner.
„From my point of view, this is a mistake not to put this cohabitant on the list of suspects, because statistics show that over 80% of abusers are known to the child: relatives, neighbors, friends of parents, coaches, teachers. Why the competent body did not think of including this person on the list of suspects from the beginning remains a question mark for them, first of all. Why this person was left around the children for so long remains a question mark for the authorities as well,” remarks Liliana Rotaru, president of CCF Moldova.
„The girl was taking us on a false track. She told us that he was a boy from his grandmother’s village, who lived in another district and that she didn’t remember who he was. Do you think that, if the girl had told us from the beginning that it was him, we would not have detained him?”, explains one of the investigators.
Law enforcement officials claim that they checked this lead the very day after they started the criminal investigation, i.e. on December 14, 2023. But local officials tell us that, in fact, this happened only in January 2024, that is, more than a month after it was found out that Iulia was pregnant.
„Two policemen came to our town hall after the baby gave birth, it was about after the Epiphany (January 19, 2024 – editor’s note), to ask on what date the girl was in the village. I told them that she came on Blajini (April 24, 2023 – editor’s note) to her grandmother and, on the same day, she returned home,” says an employee of the town hall in the village of the child’s grandmother. And the social worker from the girl’s village even says the exact date: „They went [to the grandmother’s village] on January 29, after [the case] came out in the press.”
However, „I suspected him (cohabitant – editor’s note) from the first day,” the investigator confesses, „but there is a procedure related to detention, according to the Code of Criminal Procedure. If you had been with us when we interrogated him, you wouldn’t have realized it was him. He denied it so well.” But, for safety, they took his phone and papers, which was confirmed to us by a few people.
„While I was at the hospital [with Iulia], he sold the tractor and, when I came back, he told me: ‘Keep 1000 euros and go and give it to the investigator to give me the documents’. To go abroad. I told him: ‘I don’t pay anything to the investigator. If they find that you are not guilty, they will give you the documents without money,'” says the girl’s mother.
We tried to find out from the prosecutor in the case, Alexandr Guzic, the reason why the law enforcement officers allegedly seized the documents and the phone from the cohabitant more than a month before arresting him, but we were unable to get in touch with him.
On January 29, 2024, the news that an 11-year-old girl has given birth to a child begins to go around the country. „It was a big fuss. The flood,” the colleague’s mother tells us coldly.
On the evening of January 30, 2024, Iulia’s mother convinces her daughter to reveal the identity of the abuser. „I approached her and said: ‘Iulia, the case is in the press. Who is he? Come on, tell me.’ To which the girl told me: ‘You know who he is, mother’.”
On January 31, 2024, the woman filed a complaint with the police. On the same day, her cohabitant is detained. It happened „as soon as the grounds were identified” for the detention of the person suspected of committing the crime, assures us Alexandr Guzic, the prosecutor of the case, in an official response.
„Hmm… If the journalists didn’t come, would the case freeze? They also had evidence in their phone. How did the law enforcement institutions work [since it was found out that the girl is pregnant] that they didn’t investigate him for 50 days? I don’t know how the police worked…”, the mayor perplexes.
„We had a solid evidence, based on which we were able to detain him on January 31. But… If you, the journalists, want to take the credit… Here you go”, says one of the investigators. „I don’t know what solid evidence they had apart from my statement. They took the DNA analysis after they detained him, in February,” the girl’s mother is also incredulous.
„We can’t tell you what evidence we are talking about,” insists a prosecutor from the district. „Yes, the reluctance coincides with the fact that the case appeared in the press, but it has nothing to do with each other. [Little girl] She was heard under special conditions after she gave birth…”.
Specifically, Iulia was questioned under special conditions on February 1, 2024, the day after her mother’s partner was arrested and 50 days after the authorities found out she was pregnant. And the day after the girl’s hearing, her mother’s cohabitant was accused of rape committed on a person who did not reach the age of 14.
Since January 31, the 46-year-old man has been in pre-trial detention and he „has not admitted guilt in committing the incriminated act,” prosecutors claim in an official response to People and Kilometers.
***
„When one child gives birth to another child, we have all failed. The blunder is ours, first of all, of those in the Government,” says Alexei Buzu, Minister of Labor and Social Protection. „The fact that we approve laws and leave our colleagues on the front line on their own is a cowardly attitude, as long as the social and child protection system is not strengthened. The system in our country is not based on prevention. The system is reactive. A social worker intervenes just like a policeman: the crime happened and then he intervenes.”
„Many teachers don’t understand the signs of abuse and don’t know how to work with sexually abused children… and it’s serious… They don’t know what consequences sexual abuse brings,” says Vasile Coroi, the Children’s Ombudsman.
„I wouldn’t want to say that they were indifferent. However, a child is always in the sights of the school, several teachers and non-teaching staff. Things were left too late. Unfortunately, the system has not mobilized and this is very serious. Here my mother also bears responsibility… And, if the girl did not get pregnant, most likely it would never have been found out that she was sexually abused,” warns Liliana Rotaru, president of CCF Moldova.
AI-created images
* Iulia – name changed, to protect identity