NORWAY: High-Ranking Child Psychiatrist with "Pedophile Leanings" Removed Children From Families

In 2018, a top Norwegian child protection expert and child psychiatrist was sentenced to less than two years in prison for possession of 200,000 pictures and 4,000 hours of video depicting children subjected to brutal sexual abuse. The indictment against Jo Erik Brøyn read: “Pictures and videos show sexual abuse committed by adults against children, sexual acts between children, and children performing sexual acts on themselves.”

Brøyn was a high-ranking official and a working member of the national Expert Commission on Children (ECC) from 2012 to 2017. The ECC works to “quality assure all reports submitted by experts in child welfare cases,” and works with the government’s Ministry of Children and Families. Brøyn had been employed as a child psychiatrist for 20 years and was one of 14 professional members of Norway’s ECC.

Due to his influential position within the ECC, Brøyn was involved in evaluating reports that resulted in the removal of children from their families. The children were then placed into “emergency” care for what critics emphasize were spurious reasons. The children were subsequently relocated to foster homes, the locations of which were kept secret from their parents.

Figures reported by national media indicate that after Brøyn began working for the ECC, child removals escalated significantly; in 2014, a total of 1,664 children were taken into foster care, and about a fourth of them were from mothers who were born overseas.

According to an op-ed in the Sunday Guardian Live ⁠— co-authored by former Parliament member Jan Simonsen and Marianne Haslev Skånland, a Professor Emeritus from the University of Bergen ⁠— Norwegian police were notified of Brøyn’s possession of child sexual abuse material as far back as 2014. However, Brøyn continued to practice as a child psychiatrist in the child protection services (CPS) system for several years afterwards.

Former Parliament member Jan Simonsen and Marianne Haslev Skånland, Professor Emeritus, University of Bergen

“This case is symptomatic of the Norwegian child protection services system (known as Barnevernet) and our authorities’ attitude to it. It demonstrates the double standards of what people in authority do and say in relation to the strict legislation regarding children that they themselves promote and through which they exercise power,” Simonsen and Skånland state.

Prior to landing his role on the Expert Commission for Children, Brøyn consulted vulnerable children with “serious mental illnesses” as a senior physician at the University of Oslo, where he worked from 2005 to 2012. He was reportedly involved in collecting child sexual abuse materials since as early as 1997.

Distrubingly, Brøyn had been able to purchase two babies through a surrogacy clinic in India in 2010. He even used his surrogate children as justification when requesting a sentence of community service in order to avoid jail for the child pornography charges, on the basis that a jail sentence would separate him from the children.

“The children are closely related to each other, and they are the ones who are harmed by living separately if their father has to go to prison. I can document that through cases from my own work,” Brøyn argued in the Borgarting Court of Appeal.

After Brøyn was arrested for possession of brutal child sexual abuse materials, his children purchased through surrogacy were returned to him while he awaited trial. Whereas he had been instrumental in removing children from their families for distorted and exaggerated infractions, Brøyn’s children purchased through surrogacy were returned to him, despite his admission in court that he had “pedophile leanings.”

According to Simonsen and Skånland:

“When Brøyn was arrested more than a year ago, his children were at first allowed to be placed with his sister. This is considerably more lenient than is usual in CPS, where there is great resistance to kinship placement. Before Brøyn was released from custody, his children were moved by the CPS to non-relatives. However, the County Board (an administrative committee which functions as the first instance decision-maker in care proceedings), decided that they should be returned to Brøyn, so they have been back with him since the summer of 2017. Again, the liberal attitude of a section of the authorities, here regarding a confessed pedophile father living alone with his children, is somewhat unusual. In open court Brøyn stated that he has pedophile leanings, being stimulated by sexual pictures and films of boys.”

Although his conviction at the Oslo City Court was within the domain of public information, Brøyn’s name was suppressed by both national and international press. His identity was released by the Kristen Koalisjon Norge (Christian Coalition Norway), and representatives from the organization report that they were contacted by his legal counsel, Svein Holden, threatening litigation for revealing his name to the public.

In 2018 the BBC interviewed parents whose children were taken from them by child protection services under the supervision of Brøyn — who would later admit to using child sexual abuse materials for 20 years, including content depicting infants being tormented.

Rune Fardal, a “veteran campaigner for the rights of families,” testified at Brøyn’s trial. Fardal told the BBC, “He admitted downloading pornographic pictures of young boys. The majority were 10 until 14 [years old], but there were also very small babies. There were young boys having oral sex [with] each other and grown-up men… There was rape, there were disabled children… every fantasy you can think of.”

“He did not see that as being pedophiliac at all, looking at pictures of young children being misused by adults,” Fardal explained.

When passing the sentence, the judge commented, “The accused confessed his own guilt. The court finds that the accused, to a certain extent, trivializes his own actions. The court furthermore sees it as serious that a professional who is supposed to be the protector of children and young people has placed his own satisfaction and desires first in this matter.”

One mother interviewed by the BBC, Inez Isabel Arnesen, became emotional as she recounted her terrifying ordeal. In 2013, four of her children were taken from her home by Child Protection Services and her husband was placed under arrest. When she arrived at her home, Inez was also arrested.

“When the door to the cell was closed, that’s when I realized what it meant. It was so strange to find myself in a cell, and I just remember being so scared… because… this was madness,” she said, fighting back tears.

While her husband was soon released, Inez was held on accusations of smacking her children, which is a punishable offense in Norway. She had been intervening in a quarrel between her children, in which one of the children was harming the other, and gave him a slap in order to “get him to let go of his sibling.”

However, her explanations of the incident were rejected, and her four youngest children were placed into foster care. After a court battle where she was represented by lawyer Victoria Holmen, Inez was acquitted and two of her children were returned to her. Yet her two youngest children remained separated from their family. Ultimately, Inez had to fight the legal system for five years before all of her children were returned to her.

Additionally, there have been numerous similar cases where the Norwegian Expert Commission for Children was accused of false or hyperbolized allegations used to remove children from their homes. In 2017, 170 leading Norwegian professionals complained to the country's Children’s Minister that the Barnevernet was a “dysfunctional organisation which makes far-reaching errors of judgment with serious consequences.”

A film was made based on the experiences of Sagarika Chakraborty, an Indian woman whose children were taken away by Norway’s Expert Commission on Children