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Adam och övergreppen

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Adam och övergreppen is a three-part Uppdrag granskning series by Katia Wagner, Karin Mattisson, and Ali Fegan, broadcast in February 2025 and nominated for the 2025 Guldspaden.

Social services in Helsingborg falsely accused seven-year-old “Adam” of raping his three-year-old brother and of being a danger to other children, while simultaneously accusing his father of abusing him. Adam was taken into compulsory care under LVU, placed for years in a family home 300 kilometres away, kept from school, closely monitored, placed at an HVB home, and put through a year of perpetrator-framed therapy at the care company Off Clinic using methods that have been strongly criticized.

The investigation showed that the accusations were constructed rather than reported. The mother was the therapist’s main source, but the record attributed the claims to the boy himself, and Adam’s statements emerged in the therapy room. School, police, prosecutors, and courts dismissed the accusations against both Adam and the father, yet social services held to its hypothesis, concealed the information that contradicted it, including Adam’s own words, and thereby misled the courts deciding the LVU cases.

The external investigation ordered after the broadcast concluded in June 2025 that no evidence or grounds had ever existed for the agency’s actions, describing the handling as deficient in rättssäkerhet and objectivity. Two employees were suspended and four investigated, the agency reported itself, Off Clinic, and the HVB home to IVO, police opened a misconduct investigation, and the reporting found that both the courts and the social board’s politicians had been misled. Adam, by then thirteen, was allowed to move home. The case prompted political demands for a “Lex Adam.”

The case matters in Rättssäkerhet in Swedish criminal cases because the coercion ran through administrative child-welfare powers. The criminal-law institutions all declined the accusations; the years of separation, isolation, and forced treatment happened anyway, because the deciding courts saw only the dossier the accusing agency assembled.

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