DOVVSU worried over increasing cases of ‘child stealing’
The Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service in the Northern Region has expressed concern over what it describes as the increase in the cases of ‘child stealing’ in the region.
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According to the Regional Director of DOVVSU, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Mr Emmanuel Holortu, a number of aggrieved couples, after breaking up their marriages and cohabitations, try to steal children born in the relationship in order to avoid sending remittances to their divorced partners.
This act, he explained, often affected the development of the children in the relationship; they were usually subjected to abuse and not properly catered for.
He said the unit recorded 17 cases of ‘child stealing’ in 2015 and had in the first half of this year recorded 12 cases.
Explanations
ASP Holortu made this known in an interview with the Daily Graphic when he spoke on the statistics the unit had recorded in the first half of the year in Tamale in the Northern Region.
According to him, ‘child stealing’ usually occurred after marriage breakups due to the rancour in the hearts of the jilted persons.
“Sometimes children as young as two weeks old are stolen from the mothers,” ASP Holortu said, and noted that “the couple steal the children in the marriage from each other”.
“The father tries to win the custody of the child from the mother while the mother also tries to win it from the father,” he stated.
“Because they (couples) are aggrieved and do not want to send money to their partners, they both want to keep the children away from each other,” he said.
Cases of domestic violence
Touching on the statistics on gender-based violence for the first half of the year, he said the unit had so far recorded 330 cases of domestic violence as compared to 273 cases the same period in 2015.
He said the unit had recorded 10 rape cases as against 17 cases in the same period last year, indicating that defilement cases declined from 54 in 2015 to 12 this year for the same period.
Concerning non-maintenance issues, ASP Holortu explained that 89 cases were recorded for the whole of 2015 while the unit had in the first half of this year recorded 66 cases.
He added that the unit recorded 193 assault cases by the close of 2015 while it had for the first half of this year recorded 124.
Interference
He expressed worry about interference from opinion leaders and people in authority in cases of domestic violence, and explained that sometimes police officers handling cases of domestic crime were threatened by some of the opinion leaders and people in authority if they refused to heed to their request to strike out the cases.
According to ASP Holortu, such interference from opinion leaders and people in authority greatly affected the work of police officers in their effort to clamp down on people who perpetrate domestic crimes.
He, therefore, pleaded with opinion leaders and people in authority to stop interfering with domestic violence cases and rather assist the police officers to bring offenders of domestic crimes to book.