ANA’S LEGACY
Lessons to be learned
TWO teenage boys were sentenced to life and 15 years respectively last week for the brutal and inexplicable murder of
Ana Kriegel. Then aged
13, the boys lured 14-yearold Ana to an abandoned house, where one sexually assaulted and murdered her and the other watched. Passing sentence following a harrowing trial, Mr Justice Paul McDermott said Ana’s short life should not be defined by the crimes committed against her.
In an interview with Maeve Sheehan, Catherine Murphy, a close friend of the Kriegel family and Social Democrats TD for Kildare, remembers Ana as she was, a strong, captivating child certain to leave her mark on the world had she been allowed to live her life.
‘VERY often when somebody adopts a child, their personalities might not be so closely matched with the parents. Ana and Geraldine and Patric were just so right for each other.
They got such fun and joy from each other. Geraldine said in their victim impact statement that Ana was the love of their lives and that’s absolutely what she was. She completed them.
I remember when they adopted Ana. One of our friends was the ‘privileged’ one who was going to go collect them from the airport. We were all very excited for them because
Ana was really going to change their lives. We used to socialise with Geraldine and Patric every week up to that point. But their whole social life changed once she arrived. Everything was focused around Ana, the going out stopped. They were very dedicated to her and so thrilled to get her.
She was an energetic girl. We went on holidays with the family on a number of occasions. Ana was a really strong swimmer, very athletic. When she would dive underwater, you’d wonder if she was ever going to come back up.
She loved dogs. She would constantly ask “what breed is this dog, what breed is that dog?” Even after she died, people would say they knew her because she’d stopped to ask them about their dogs.
Too often, people are concerned about being part of a crowd. Not Ana. Ana was an individual. She was a leader rather than a follower of fashion. She created her own identity and that identity was changing all the time.
You can see in the early photographs that she is blonde, and later she had gone ‘Goth’. During the summer holidays, she was allowed to have that little bit of pink or purple in her hair.
She loved music and dancing.
Her dance class, Dance LA, staged a tribute show for Ana just last week. It was a really good show. But it was also, in many ways, a very sad show because you felt that she should have been on stage instead of having people pay tribute to her. I think people felt that on the night, although everyone was appreciative of the efforts the girls went to. The girls that Ana had so many happy times with are clearly grieving for her. This idea of her not having friends, in that context, is not entirely true.
Bullying is something we have all got to pay much greater attention to. When someone sees bullying happening, they stand away from the person being bullied. This further isolates the bullied person and it makes it more difficult for them to make friends.
Ana did really well in primary school, and she had great support. But she had serious difficulties when she went into first year in secondary school.
Ana had a tumour removed from behind her ear when she was about eight or nine and she was deaf in that ear but her hearing in the other ear was fine. In primary school, she got support at that time to make sure that her needs were met in terms of hearing in the classroom. She took that in her stride.
As a consequence, she liked to play her music loud at home. It was just as well their house was a detached house because there certainly could have been complaints with the neighbours otherwise.
Ana stood out, there is no doubt about it. She was taller than most of her contemporaries and she was strikingly attractive.
You couldn’t not notice her. And eventually that, and her own individuality, would have marked her out as being different from the crowd.
Sometimes being different from the crowd brings consequences and Ana suffered the most appalling consequences.
I will remember Ana as a smiling, happy girl who had been presented with a huge number of challenges in the last year of her life because of bullying.
Can a school do more to help in this situation? In a word, yes. Sometimes in very large schools, you question whether individuals get lost in that environment or if they are well-served by it.
I think there is a piece of work to be done with schools, social media platforms and with parents, around being kind to each other. How we build that culture of kindness is important.
Ana is a great loss, and not only to her family. She certainly would have made her mark on the world. She has younger siblings in Siberia who were looking forward to meeting their big sister but that will never happen now.
Ana’s loss has impacted on the community. People have been incredibly supportive and have shown restraint during the trial.
But there is a deep sadness that manifests in people wanting to do something positive for Ana; to learn from her death in order to create a better environment; and, of course, to remember Ana as the vibrant, loving child that she was.”
‘Ana is a great loss. She certainly would have made her mark on the world’
THE Irish public may have thought that they had become unshockable when it came to sexual violence and murder. Since the early 1990s, a string of cases starting with the X-case, the litany of clerical sexual abuse scandals and, more recently, the ‘Grace’ case, have left an indelible print on the Irish psyche. Gangland feuds have made murder almost commonplace.
However, the Ana Kriegel case reaches new depths. The details are truly shocking, especially the young age of the boys in question.
It has been known since the early 1990s that about one third of all child sexual abuse in Ireland is perpetrated by teenagers. The current case represents the extreme end of a spectrum of inappropriate sexual behaviour; from the mildly inappropriate to the most serious of crimes. The latter are very rare but do occur.
Last February, a 16-year-old Scottish male was convicted of the abduction, rape and murder of six-year-old Alesha MacPhail. Her naked body was found on the Isle of Bute after she went missing on the morning of July 2, 2018. Alesha suffered 117 injuries and died from significant pressure being applied to her face and neck. The 16-yearold only admitted the offence at the last moment, in spite of overwhelming evidence against him.
This inevitably raises the question “why?”. Why do some young boys act in such a way? A 13-yearold boy doesn’t just wake up some morning deciding he will sexually assault and strangle a peer while wearing a home-made zombie mask. Such behaviour has an explanation. It may be darkly depressing; it will, for sure, be complex but it can be found.
I have only ever been involved in one similar case, that of rape-murder by a boy of 14 (in another jurisdiction). The striking thing was that, at first glance, the boy presented, for all intents and purposes, like a ‘‘normal’’ kid, from an ‘‘ordinary’’ family. He had no known antecedent anti-social behaviour. In time, a fuller picture emerged that filled in the blanks.
Those blanks in his specific case consisted of a concealed history of extreme emotional and physical abuse when he was a child, along with extensive exposure to violent pornography in his very early teens.
Work of this nature takes time and skilled intervention. It also requires developing a trusting relationship, something that isn’t easy for either the young person due to their histories or the professionals when they learn all the details of the case. However, it is work that must be done and done well.
This poses the question: how can risk be assessed? In 2001, a case known in the UK as “DM” involved a 16-year-old boy who raped and murdered an 11-year-old boy shortly after discharge from a residential care facility where staff considered he had done rather well. This case led to the development of more rigorous risk evaluation measures. The best known of these, called AIM3, developed by the AIM Project in Manchester, is currently in use in Ireland.
However, such tools can only be applied to those already known to have a problem. There was no indication during the Ana Kriegel trial that Boys A or B had any known antecedent behaviour. That is not to say that they didn’t, merely that it was under the radar.
So, what else can be learned from the horrendous abuse and murder of Ana Kriegel?
The most obvious thing is that this case can serve as a wake-up call to Irish parents about the dangers of uncontrolled internet access, especially exposure to pornography. While that, on its own, will not cause a young person to commit a terrible sex crime, youth who are vulnerable in other ways can have their behaviour disastrously affected by it.
Modern pornography bears little relation to the ‘‘forbidden fruit’’ of yesteryear. Nudity and simulated sex abound in mainstream media, so young males don’t have to go to porn sites to find them. The content of porn sites is largely extreme in terms of both violence and levels of degradation. The negative effect of such pornography on the developing brains of young males is well established. The arrival of the smartphone has propelled access to such material into the pockets and schoolbags of practically every teenager in Ireland.
In my direct experience, parents are extremely naive about the dangers posed by smartphones. While it is now illegal in Ireland to sell a smartphone to those under 16, this is largely irrelevant because parents do the buying, not teenagers. If those same parents viewed smartphones as potentially dangerous weapons — not just a means of communication — they might adopt a different stance.
Another lesson that can be taken from this case is that such behaviour is not inevitable. A United Nations report in 2014 described sexual violence as being of epidemic proportions, causing immense harm to victims’ mental health, but also pointed out that it is utterly preventable.
Parents can take simple measures to intervene before inappropriate behaviours reach a critical stage. This can be as simple as talking to their youngsters — very explicitly — about sexually abusive behaviour and its consequences, not just for victims, but also for the perpetrators.
Another simple step is calling out sexually inappropriate comments or sexist attitudes. This does, of course, require consistency. In the same way that warning offspring about the ‘‘demon drink’’ will fall on deaf ears if parents themselves drink to excess, warnings about inappropriate sexual attitudes will have little effect if dad has his own porn collection.
Ana Kriegel should be alive and well today. Her family should not be going through the heartache that they are now enduring. Likewise, the parents of Boy A and Boy B are, no doubt, desperately wishing that they could turn back the clock so that their sons could be led away from the terrible path they ended up on.
Irish parents, please take note.
‘Parents can take simple measures to intervene before a critical stage is reached’