A few days ago, Polish media reported that a 6-year-old child had been left in the window of life. The media began hunting for the man and the circumstances of the incident.
Let’s establish one thing at the outset and get it over with. It’s impossible to imagine what a 6-year-old child feels and how much it will ruin their life to be suddenly removed from the window of life. It’s absolutely awful and there are no words to express all my feelings about this situation. I don’t even want to dwell on this any longer, because every moment I think about this situation only makes me angry and unyieldingly sad.
But it’s still better to end up in the window of life than in a barrel
Windows of life are specially organized places where mothers in difficult life situations can anonymously leave a newborn child. They are usually run by church organizations, religious orders, or other charitable institutions. They work with the aim of saving the lives of children who could be abandoned in dangerous conditions.
Polish law does not provide for any criminal sanctions for parents who decide to leave a child in the window of life. Contrary to what we have been reading online for a few days, this is because such an act is not treated as abandoning a child within the meaning of the provisions of the Penal Code (the constantly cited Article 210), as long as the child is left safely and without endangering its life or health. Even the Ministry of Justice during Zbigniew Ziobro’s time issued special recommendations not to initiate criminal proceedings, except in situations where it is clear that the child was a victim of violence. The girl in question was placed there in good condition.
I don’t know why the police immediately went after the parents of this child. I want to believe that there were some rational reasons for it. One of the basic assumptions of the windows of life is to provide anonymity to people leaving children. In most cases, windows of life are organized in such a way that it is impossible to establish the identity of the mother or the person leaving the child. For this reason, law enforcement agencies have no basis for taking action to identify these people.
But the real crime here was made by the media.
For example, we read the headlines “6-year-old in the window of life. Father of the child pursued by the police”. In other words, the narrative that is generating millions of views across the country, from many different services, is shouting – to often poorly educated and not necessarily bright people – not to put children in the windows of life, because the police will pursue us. Of course, for completely different acts and from some time ago, but that didn’t fit in the headlines anymore. Besides, searching for parents in the case of windows of life is not a rule at all, but rather a rarity, so – as I mentioned – I don’t fully understand the actions of the services themselves.
This is sabotage. The windows of life, however sad they may be, were created to prevent unwanted children from ending up in cabbage barrels, from falling out of slippery blankets, from being abandoned in the forest and… many other such situations. Over the last dozen or so years, about 150 children have been saved in this way. And their fates could have turned out differently if their “parents” had read clickbait earlier that the police would chase them because of it.
