3-Year-Old's Murder Spurs Drive for Juvenile Justice System

Shocked Moscow region residents pulled the naked body of the 3-year-old boy out of the Pekhorka River on a cold January day last year.

Strips of gray adhesive tape bound an old car battery to his frail frame, an improvised weight that had kept him under the water until he drowned.

Doctors later counted 68 bruises, cigarette burns and other injuries on little Sasha's battered body.

Public horror over the death grew when police arrested Sasha's adoptive parents about a week later on murder charges and announced that another of the couple's adopted children, a 1-year-old boy, had died under suspicious circumstances in December as the family was flying from Moscow to Bangkok for vacation.

Only then did the social services step in, placing the couple's last adopted child, a 3-year-old girl, in an orphanage.

But the state's intervention was too little and too late, said Pavel Astakhov, the new children's ombudsman appointed by President Dmitry Medvedev at the end of last year.

"The question is: Why didn't any social service intervene to protect the children?" Astakhov said.

The case, Astakhov said, presents a compelling argument for why Russia needs a national juvenile justice system — and the empowered social services that would accompany it and allow social workers to remove children from abusive homes.

But critics — including the powerful Russian Orthodox Church — oppose the introduction of a juvenile justice system for the very reason that it would allow social services to intervene in family affairs — a concept that they denounce as Western and a threat to the integrity of Russian families.

The conflicting viewpoints put the federal government in the awkward position of trying to fight juvenile crime rates and prevent child abuse while at the same time soothing critics at home. Russia also has international obligations that it is failing to meet without a juvenile justice system, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the European Social Charter.

A juvenile justice system envisages special juvenile courts and juvenile detention centers where troubled children under the age of 18 are separated from more hardened adult offenders in order to give them a better shot at not returning to crime as adults.

Several juvenile courts are being tested in the regions, and the government is considering expanding the system nationwide. The Criminal Code would need to be amended because current law does not provide for a juvenile justice system.

At the moment, social workers' hands are tied when it comes to intervening in at-risk homes.

The father of 3-year-old Sasha, Vladimir Grechushkin, 32, abused all three of his adopted children from the time he adopted them in Moldova's breakaway region of Transdnestr in 2008, investigators said. He beat them, burned them with cigarettes and kept them chained up like animals, they said.

In December, a court sentenced Grechushkin to life in prison for murder, while his 20-year-old wife, Airin-Sofia Baskaya, got 16 years.

Tragically, the social services tasked with monitoring the treatment of adopted children never reported any problems in the couple's home — possibly in part because of a reluctance to get tangled up in bureaucracy.

"At the moment it takes a lot of red tape to remove a child from a family: a court decision, the custody organization's decision, the police, etcetera," Astakhov said, offering a withering appraisal of the existing system at his first news conference, on Jan. 21.

The problem is that the law works in the interests of the family, not of the child, Astakhov said.

The legal system is not designed to protect the interest of minors, whether they are victims or perpetrators, he said.

Another point of contention with the current system is that children from the age of 16 are punished as adults when it comes to crime.

"The system should try to save the child, not to punish him," Astakhov said.

Children under 14 cannot be held criminally liable in court, but they can be convicted and handed a suspended sentence for a limited range of crimes, including robbery and murder, between the ages of 14 and 16. From 16, a teen is treated like an adult for all crimes.

The number of offenders under the age of 18 has dropped in recent years, accounting for 15,178 criminal cases in 2006 to 13,537 cases last year, Astakhov said, citing Supreme Court statistics. But he said the figure is “still high.”

Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF's representative in Russia, said a justice system that treats children as adults hurts a child's chances for reintegration into society.

"Justice systems are traditionally designed for adults, and as such they often lack the capacity to adequately address children's specific needs and rehabilitation that involves families and communities as a safer, more appropriate and effective approach than punitive measures," Bainvel said.

The Justice Ministry agreed that children needed "a special approach" in the legal system, noting in a statement sent to The Moscow Times that the Supreme Court has recommended that judges who work with minors receive special preparation on legal, psychological, sociological and pedagogical issues.

But the question on many people's minds is: What is the right approach?

The State Duma ratified the European Social Charter on May 20 that requires signatory countries to establish juvenile justice systems aimed at deterring minors from committing crimes. The charter, a requirement for Russia's membership in the Council of Europe human rights watchdog, also guarantees people’s right to housing, health, education and employment, and obliges public schools to offer sex education — a requirement that the Russian Orthodox Church opposes as well.

The provisions on sex education and a juvenile justice system were excluded from the document approved by the Duma.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill voiced his approval of the exclusion in July, telling senior United Russia lawmakers at a meeting that he strongly opposes sex education and a juvenile justice system.

The church maintains that a juvenile justice system would give children the right to act to protect themselves from their parents and thus threaten the integrity of Russian families.

Vladimir Khomyakov, co-chairman of the Narodny Sobor movement, which promotes Orthodox and monarchist values, said vindictive children would turn against their parents and social workers would break up homes in an attempt to show that they are doing their jobs.

“Ombudsmen will collect complaints from children about their parents and will be able to take away children easily. Specialists will be employed just to ruin families — otherwise they would lose their jobs,“ Khomyakov told The Moscow Times.

Narodny Sobor, which united dozens of public organizations and claims thousands of members, believes that a juvenile justice system would result in more crime and drug trafficking among teens.

"There are fears that Russia is trying to copy the system from the U.S. and Europe," Khomyakov said.

Instead, he said, Russia needs a system that appeals to its historical and cultural traditions and allows parents to punish their children.

"Juvenile justice is a part of a bigger juvenile system that offers milder punishment for teens. And our law is too mild already," he said, adding that the Bible allows the spanking of children.

But Astakhov, the children's ombudsman, said in a recent interview with Izvestia that no physical punishment of children should be tolerated.  

Narodny Sobor is preparing an appeal to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev to resist attempts to introduce a juvenile justice system in Russia.

Social workers argued, however, that the system would help families survive difficult situations. “Social workers are supposed to find out the exact circumstances within a family,” said Sergei Polyatykin, of the NAN nongovernmental organization that deals with teen alcoholism and drug abuse.

“Of course, all organizations working with children advocate a juvenile justice system, but no one says it's ideal,” he added.

Several groups involved in children's issues expressed reluctance to comment on juvenile justice, citing the sensitivity of the issue.

Anna Balayeva, who works with teen offenders at Perekryostok, a state-owned center for troubled teens, explained that the issue was not whether or not to introduce juvenile justice.

Children's organizations are not pushing for juvenile justice but standing up for “the realization of certain methods and ideas," she said.

• Russia and the United States will establish a joint center for missing children next week, which will be based in Russia, Astakhov told reporters Tuesday.

A U.S. delegation from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is scheduled to visit from Feb. 16 to 19 for talks with Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev and other government officials to discuss the creation of the center, Interfax reported.

"We have our own experience, which we are ready to share with the Americans. … They help run social projects and charity," Astakhov said. By the end of last year, 27,500 children were reported officially missing in Russia, he said.

The visit was announced in January, when Astakhov visited the United States to discuss the protection of children who are adopted internationally. U.S. citizens are responsible for 40 percent of all international adoptions of Russian children.