Groundbreaking ceremony for a Rumduol Centre on May 17. CPU
The Child Protection Unit (CPU) has begun construction of the Kingdom’s first centre that will offer protection and support services to children who have been sexually or physically abused. The new centre will be equipped with modern facilities to help conduct investigations and gather evidence.
A groundbreaking ceremony was held last week for the “Rumduol Centre”.
“The Rumduol Centre will provide the most up to date victim support and welfare services to children who have suffered from these kinds of offences,” said a CPU statement.
The world class facility will offer an extensive range of welfare, aftercare, forensic, investigative, training and medical support services to child victims. It will collaborate with the National Police to introduce new and modern investigative techniques, methodologies and forensic services to investigate and prevent crimes against children.
CPU executive director James McCabe described the centre as the future of Cambodian child projection.
He added that with the continued support of the Cambodian government, the Ministry of Interior and the Cambodian National Police, the facility will ensure that efforts to combat, detect and prevent crimes committed against children will continue well into the future.
“We are all looking forward to the opening of the first-class facility and the many services and support it will provide to child victims of crime. I want to thank Scott Neeson for his drive and support in making this possible and all the people who have made this dream a reality,” he said.
Chou Bun Eng, interior ministry secretary of state and permanent vice-chair of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking of Cambodia (NCCT), told The Post that the establishment of the centre in Phnom Penh was especially important for the Kingdom, as Cambodia is yet to have the facilities to conduct postmortem examinations or DNA tests.
She added that the centre would assist the police in accumulating evidence against perpetrators who committed crimes against children, in addition to cooperating with the CPU on technical affairs.
“The participation of the CPU has helped our government adopt many modern analytic methods and procedures to crack down on offences involving children. It many cases, it is difficult to bring perpetrators to justice, so we need to assemble as much evidence and witness statements as possible,” she said.
Despite the centre being of great help and contribution to the Cambodian police, Sok Sam Oeun, chief attorney at the AMRIN Law and Consultants Group, noted that procedurally, labs and investigative units need to be independent and separate. In his opinion, if the CPU begins to carry out lab work, it should drop its investigative work.
A CPU report said it assisted the police in over 350 incidents in 2022, which had led to the arrests of 315 offenders, or about 86 per cent of the cases. The courts had returned sentences ranging from four years to life in several of the cases, with the CPU spending $1.2 million on its work.
“Over the course of 2022, the CPU investigated 366 incidents involving Cambodian children. Several of these cases involved murder, rape and other serious offences,” it added.
