The Lost Boy

The Brazilian story

If you follow me on Twitter you would have once again seen me going on about a story that was about to come out. Well, now it’s out and I feel it deserves some analysis.

Here’s a link to the story.

All right, in terms of its actual size it’s not especially big, but it’s the subject matter that has really gripped me and the few people I’ve been speaking to about this.

To sum up, a Brazilian man has been arrested in Dili on charges of sexually assaulting three underage girls. Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m making such a big deal about this. Firstly, it happened a week ago and has taken this long to come out.

The hoops we had to try and jump through to get information from the police were ridiculous. Furthermore, the UN hasn’t said a word about this. Part of this is the bureaucracy of getting information in this country, but this is a foreign national being arrested in a developing country for having sex with children. Is that not worth bringing to the public’s attention?

I can tell you now that very few, if any, of the local reporters know about this and yet each Timorese person I’ve told this information to has been outraged, shocked and concerned. This is something people should know about.

Could someone not have held a short press conference of issued a press release on the day the Brazilian man was arrested? It wouldn’t have needed to contain too much detail, but a short summary of events would have been welcomed.

Who was arrested, when, by whom, who did the investigation, what are the charges, was he granted bail, when will the trial be? These and many other questions are what I’ve been having extreme difficulty confirming.

There is more to this story. Police, the prosecutor general’s office and the Brazilian embassy would neither confirm nor deny that the man is 51 years old, that the girls are from the same family and so on.

Now that the local reporters are aware of this story they will be encouraged to cover this as it develops.

There may even be more cases like this that come out in the near future.

This whole debacle raises the question of access to information in this country. Could this have been handled this better? I mean, a press release goes out every time someone plants a tree or fills in a pothole, so what about something directly related to the safety of children in this country?

It’s part of my job to get information from people. The problem with matters such as these is that everybody wants to pass the buck. The UN will tell me to contact the PNTL. The PNTL will tell me to contact the court. The court will then tell me to contact the PNTL.

We spend so much time running around in circles unless the story is about a celebratory ceremony where all the important people show up in their suits and ties and congratulate each other on how shiny there shoes were.

Maybe I’m wrong and this is something the public neither cares about nor should know about, but judging from people’s reactions, I think this is a matter of public interest.