TORTURE AND ILL-TREATMENT OF CHILDREN IN UKRAINE

Torture and ill-treatment of children in Ukraine— the staff schedule of the departments of criminal militia for minorsand job descriptions (functional responsibilities) of their employeesare documents for official use only and are not available for publicinspection;— staff suffers from high levels of professional deformation.Despite the availability of large number of theoretical disciplines of psychology,sociology, and pedagogy, as well as courses in the study of nationaland international human rights law, including, separately, children’s rights inthe course of academic studies and training of students supposed to workwith children in the framework of MIA the implementation of these provisionsin practice leaves much to be desired, because the graduates of the institutionsof higher education of MIA, with no practical skills and knowledge thatthey could get during internship, indicating inefficiency and isolation of learningfrom the practical needs of juvenile justice.Specifically, the law does not establish any requirements for qualificationand special training of the personnel of the unit for crime prevention amongchildren. Based on international experience and logic of reform of the institutionsconcerned, it would be quite appropriate to formulate the requirementsfor the presence of higher education or special training in the field of psychology,pedagogy or social activities of employees of the authorized unit forcrime prevention among children, and the presence of positive experience ofwork with children.The information provided by the Ministry of Internal Affairs includes “aggregate”information about courses attended by students majoring in all fieldsof training (“Sociology”, “Psychology”, “Law”, “Law enforcement”), that is thesedata do not contain information about majoring in a particular field.Based on the names of disciplines in the curriculum of institutions of highereducation of the MIA of Ukraine, only three of them, to varying degrees, arerelated to specialized work with children. It should also be noted that the timeallotted for self-guided work with the courses, which is almost equal to thetime of academic classes, in general, is not included in the curriculum. Accordingly,this impressive total hours of training in disciplines of social directioncan be reduced by half. Also it should be noted that in the system of institutionsof higher education of MIA of Ukraine there are no classes in the field of“Social assistance”, while exactly the specialists in social work are needed towork with children.186