By the end of the year, such a room will be operational in the premises of the Chervonohrad district police department.
A child-friendly crisis room is a facility designed to work with children who have been victims of crime or who have witnessed sexual abuse or exploitation, other crimes, or those who are suspected of having committed crimes.
The premises will consist of two adjacent rooms: a therapeutic room in which a psychologist will work directly with the child, involved specialists in pediatrics, children’s gynecology, psychiatry, pedagogy, etc., and a working room, the so-called observation room, for police officers and involved specialists. Children’s behavior will be observed from here. It will be equipped with appropriate cameras.
The crisis room will be designed for children of all ages. Therefore, if the child does not know how to speak, or due to circumstances cannot do it, depict the events that bother him, he can, for example, by drawing. There will also be anatomical dolls in the room, which will allow the child to role-play the events that happened to her.
Interrogating a child in such a room will prevent re-traumatization of his psyche, both thanks to special methods and a psychologically comfortable atmosphere, and thanks to technical equipment that allows you to correctly record a video of communication with a child and use it in the future for conducting an investigation without conducting repeated interrogations.
“It is very important to create such a center that allows you to significantly improve the opportunities and conditions of communication with a child who has experienced violence or witnessed a crime. It will also help to get a better result for conducting an objective investigation. Thank you to the partners – the public organization “Women’s Perspectives Center” for supporting such an initiative. Now the repair work and arrangement of the crisis room are starting, we plan to open it within the framework of the international campaign “16 days against violence”, – said the head of the family policy sector of the department of social protection of the population Ulyana Dorosh.