In Portugal, the indignation grows with the emergence of new details related to the case of some 10-year-old twins who were rescued from their parents' garage, where they had apparently lived in unsanitary conditions for years. The small ones were found by agents of the Public Security Police (PSP) last week in the Lisbon suburb of Amadora. The authorities found the sisters thanks to an anonymous complaint made through a child support line.
According to the PSP, the little ones lived "in deplorable conditions" among garbage bags and surrounded by cockroaches. They had never attended school, so neither knows how to read or write, and both showed psychological consequences related to the years they have spent locked up and witnessing the violent relationship of the parents, a marriage of 51 and 34 years of age. They shared an adjacent bedroom, in which they lived with two dogs and four cats.
At first the parents were arrested, accused of several crimes of domestic violence, but finally they have been granted probation, and the couple currently requires the return of the daughters, who are in a temporary foster home waiting that the Portuguese Prosecutor decides what to do with them.
In declarations to the Portuguese press, the mother of the small ones has assured that "they did not live so badly" and that the twins "have never complained". The parent affirms that the girls were not in school because there was a lack of a key document to register them - a detail that belies the Town Hall of Amadora, which says it has no administrative record of the twins, or proof of a registration request made by the mother-, but in any case detracts from the illiteracy of the girls, stating that "nobody has never died for not knowing how to read or write."
The case has generated great commotion in the neighboring country when it was revealed that the Portuguese State had evidence of the terrible conditions in which the girls had lived for at least six years. In 2013, the Commission for the Protection of Children and Young People (CPCJ, according to its acronym in Portuguese) was alerted to a possible situation of violence in the house where the family lived, and at that point a preventive removal order was imposed on the father . However, shortly after the order was filed at the request of the mother, and the CPCJ chose to stop monitoring the girls.
In 2016, there was a new complaint of domestic violence before the CPCJ, which referred the case to the Portuguese Prosecutor's Office, but the Public Ministry did nothing about it. Last July, the Commission was alerted to the "negligence" of the parents, but was unable to locate the family, so it eventually referred the case to the PSP, which took several weeks to find the girls.
The fact that the twins have spent so much time in miserable conditions and that the State has taken six years to mobilize to rescue the little ones has opened a debate on the effectiveness of the child protection system in Portugal. Meanwhile, the Prosecutor's Office notes that it has opened a criminal investigation of the parents and a process for the protection of minors "of an urgent nature" in order to establish what to do with the family. The small ones are also being accompanied by a team of psychologists from the region, who will determine what social support they should receive from now on.
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