Secrecy between several authorities is now to be investigated in the fight against crime among young people. The government hopes for new rules within a year and a half.
– The school, social services and the police must be able to work with all the means they have to ensure that there is as good a result for this young person as possible, says Education Minister Lotta Edholm.
The government is giving an investigative task to draw up proposals for changes to the law so that the various authorities can more easily share classified information about young people with each other.
– Today we have confidentiality legislation that makes it difficult for authorities such as schools and social services to exchange information. You often have to have the parents’ permission to do that, and it is often the case that the school does not find out what the police and social services actually know about a student. And it can have major consequences for a school not to know that they have a student with violent capital, for example, says Education Minister Lotta Edholm (L) to TV4 Nyheterna.
“It’s quite a rush”
After the serious violent crime on Morö Backe in Skellefteå last summer, where nine-year-old Luna was seriously injured, voices have been raised to facilitate the exchange of information between authorities.
Lotta Edholm hopes that the confidentiality rules can be changed within a year and a half, but does not know how long the referral processing takes.
– It is quite urgent because we live right now in a reality where very young people are drawn into crime, serious crime, and where the school has a very difficult time dealing with this with the confidentiality legislation we have today, she says.
Already during the election run-up last autumn, the opposition at the time demanded that the rules must be changed. Now in government, it has taken almost a year for the parties to start investigating this.
Why haven’t you ordered these additional directives before?
– We have been working on this since day one of course. But sometimes the process grinds slower than you would like. But I am very happy that we are now getting these additional directives in place because they are very, very important, says Lotta Edholm.