April 1999 Volume 80 Number 4 "serving the protectors"
Witnessing Families' Pain
By Brett Williams

Infant deaths and sexually abused and murdered children are only a few of the matters dealt with by SAPOL’s Child and Family Investigations units.
Two detectives attached to the Holden Hill unit explain their role as investigators, and ponder whether their efforts pay off.

Detective Mark Seja found a dead, three-day-old baby in the upstairs cupboard of a suburban Adelaide home as he investigated a concealed birth last August.

He retrieved its placenta from a nearby garbage bin which, for the purpose of his investigation, he was “very fortunate” to find.

A young mother - whom no one knew was pregnant - had lost consciousness after giving birth at home. When she realized her baby had subsequently died, she tried to conceal all evidence of its existence.

Later, Seja would witness the infant’s cold, tiny body being dissected as a mandatory autopsy was performed.

Despite his 24 years’ police experience, no case had struck Seja like this one. “That,” he says, “was certainly the most bizarre thing that I ever witnessed: going to a cupboard and finding a (dead) baby in there.”

Only months earlier, he’d investigated the equally disturbing death of a seven-month-old. This child had fallen headfirst into a bucket of water which had been left for a pet dog. Amid the devastation of the child’s family, Seja had to examine the possibility that the death wasn’t accidental drowning.

In another investigation last June, he was unable to prove which of four suspects savagely injured a six-month-old baby. Says Seja of the enquiry: “(That) baby was shaken twice in a period of two weeks and ended up with eight broken ribs.

“I know that one of them did it, but the only one who can tell me is the child.”

Detective Peter Biermann suffered similar frustration late last year when a young female victim of a sexual assault killed herself. Her case - which Biermann had investigated exhaustively - was soon to be heard before a court.

Detective Peter Biermann: “...we ask the parents some pretty hard questions.”	Detective Mark Seja: “You could bet your bottom dollar that anyone who gets accused of being a child-abuse offender will deny that allegation vigorously.”

And in two separate investigations since late ’97, Biermann witnessed the shocking dilemmas of two mothers, who between them lost two children and a foetus. One murdered her five-year-old; the other lost a child to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) on the same day that she’d undergone an abortion.

Seja and Biermann are members of a team of specialist investigators with the Holden Hill Child and Family Investigations unit. They face scenes as grotesquely tragic as these every working day. But for them, it’s been routine police work for most of the 1990s.

As their unit’s name implies, the brutality they investigate occurs within the supposed sanctity of Australian families. Even beyond blood relations, these investigators act in all serious cases of violence which involve “a relationship of some type between the offender and the victim”.

And the extensive range of offences into which they enquire includes:

• Serious assaults.
• Stalking.
• Abduction.
• Neglect.
• Unlawful sexual intercourse.
• Rape in marriage.
• Murder.

Seja’s career path turned to family investigations when, in 1994, he joined a team at Holden Hill police station investigating child abuse. In early 1996 he worked with the now defunct Northern Family Violence unit at Elizabeth. Later that year he joined the Holden Hill Family Violence unit.

Biermann joined the now St Agnes-based Holden Hill Child and Family Investigations unit (formerly Holden Hill Family Violence unit) in March 1996.

They fulfill a 24-hour-per-day role in which few other police ever seek any involvement. “It might be that they can’t relate to abuse, because it’s difficult for them to grasp the concept of what’s happening,” Seja suggests. “They relate it very much to their own families.

“I think there’s a certain make-up you’ve got to have to be able to work effectively... It’s important that we get the right people to do (family violence investigations).”

Like most experienced detectives, Seja and Biermann reveal little of their personal feelings about the horror with which they’re constantly confronted. Seja admits only that the job is tough and can be frustrating. Biermann concedes that, for investigators attending infants’ autopsies, the experience “can be - and is - traumatic”.

Child and Family Investigations detectives also enquire into all cases of SIDS. Such deaths are treated as suspicious until they’re formally attributed to SIDS. It’s during these investigations that officers must witness those dreaded autopsies on infants - if doctors can’t certify a cause of death.

“The last two (autopsies) I went to were in a matter of four days,” Seja recalls. “One (child) was three days old and one was a couple of weeks old.”

And as detectives’ infant death investigations unfold, emotions invariably run high. Says Biermann of the procedure: “Photographs are taken, and we ask the parents some pretty hard questions.

“They can see through it (the questioning), and say: ‘Well, are you accusing me of killing my child?’ That’s when we’ve had some feedback that they didn’t like our attitude, or thought that we were accusing them.

“But if we didn’t ask those hard questions, we simply wouldn’t be performing our job. That’s what we’re there for as investigators.”

Seja also stresses the importance of an uncompromising style of investigation, adding: “At the end of the day, someone might have killed their child - and got away with it.”

Child physical and sexual abuse cases generally account for 90 per cent of officers’ investigations. Most of their information on abused children comes from Family and Youth Services. But officers liaise constantly with a range of other agencies, including:

• Child Protection Services.
• The Adelaide Women’s and Children’s Hospital.
• SAPOL’s Sexual Assault Unit.
• The Education Department of SA.

Seja, 42, describes child abuse investigations as “completely different” from regular detective work. He says the simple discovery of a child’s seemingly innocent black eye amid a common family disturbance can, with only preliminary investigation, reveal “something horrific”.

“The point is, you’re dealing with a family,” he explains, “you’re dealing with allegations of child abuse. You could bet your bottom dollar that anyone who gets accused of being a child-abuse offender will deny that allegation vigorously.

“They don’t want to be labelled that, because they know that (if they) get convicted, they go to jail and cop a hard time there, too.”

But the golden rule from which investigators never stray is to “believe the child”. And as each investigator deals with up to 60 family violence cases per year, all are highly practised in placing their belief in child victims.

Regardless of their ceaseless commitment to victims, investigators must sometimes wait years to know if their input has truly served the abused. “It’s difficult to look at an immediate measure of success,” Seja says.

“We have to wait until they’re teenagers to know that they’ve come through life successfully; that they’re well adjusted. We won’t know the impact of our intervention (for years), so it’s very important that we do it (our investigation) right the first time.”

And part of “doing it right” means deciding which cases to take before the courts, and which to handle in alternative ways. “We stand or fall on that decision,” Seja says, “but we haven’t had any failures yet.

“We have a pretty good success rate with alternative methods, given the difficulties that we have when we go to court.”

But Biermann, 43, warns that “sexual abuse is for a lifetime”. “People remember it,” he says. And for that reason, investigators are often approached by victims near middle age, who may have been abused up to 30 years earlier.

“They don’t know quite what they want,” Seja says, “but they want to talk about it; they want to tell someone what’s happened. (If) the offences have happened before 1982, we can’t do anything legally (because of changes to legislation).

“What we still do though is put them through the process and let them tell their story, because that’s as therapeutic as you can get.”

Sadly, however, investigators also have to deal with false child abuse claims and counterclaims between estranged partners. Despicable though these claims may be, investigators have no alternative but to commit valuable time and resources to them.

“It’s a recognized scenario,” Biermann explains, “mum and dad are fighting over the kids; they’re before the Family Court; and they (each) want residency. So, they’ll invent a sex abuse allegation.”

But despite being distracted from their core role by deceitful accusers, and constantly bearing witness to heinous family violence, Seja, Biermann and their colleagues remain intensely dedicated.

“It’s more than just being a policeman in this area,” Seja says. “It’s about getting involved in different levels of work with other agencies. This is what I like to do, and I feel that I make a difference.

“I think everyone in our unit believes in what they’re doing. It’s important, therefore we do our job to the best of our ability. I use the phrase: ‘We don’t deal with the worst people, we deal with people at their worst.’

“And we’re prepared to wear (complaints). If someone complains about Peter or me, we’ll wear that as a team; we’ll ride it through and know that we’ve not done anything wrong.”

Neither Seja nor Biermann believe that working within their area should be limited to only short periods. They’ve not yet seen any cases of burn-out, and insist that investigators must develop appropriate skills on the job over many years.

But do the detestable crimes they investigate impact on their personal views?

“It makes you realize just how vulnerable life is,” Biermann says, “and just how quickly it can end.

“What children miss out on, and what they witness, is frustrating enough to see.

“What I found hard to accept when I first started doing the job was that, when you talk to some of these victims where it (abuse) started early, they themselves believed that it was normal.”

So do Seja and Biermann ever feel grateful that their children aren’t among those suffering the torment endured by others? “Every day,” says Seja, “every day.”

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