Hi! (I do speak and understand Swedish, but English comes easier to me. I'm a Dutchie and have lived in Sweden since 2015)
Our daughter, who will turn 18 next month, has a severe form of autism, a moderate learning disability and extreme stimuli sensitivity. She lives in a care home.
We moved to our current municipality in 2021, because the one where we lived first had terrible LSS. So far we've been happy about the care here.
Today we received a phone call from a staff member; they were under the impression that we had received an email about 'the incident' last Saturday, and would we be willing to meet with the group home manager tomorrow?
We had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
Turns out, our daughter, together with staff (no idea how many) was in this shop buying sweets, as they tend to do on Saturday. There was also a boy there, and our daughter pulled him by the hair. We don't know any details. The boy's parents decided to file a police report.
We have so many questions! Unfortunately, the staff on the phone wasn't there when it happened and couldn't tell us more. She was under the impression that we had been contacted by email, but we hadn't. We got a short SMS as usual, which is basically a little chat about our daughter's day. Last Saturday it said that they had gone to the shop and bought sweets, that she had had a good day and that she went to bed feeling happy. Absolutely nothing about any incident whatsoever.
Our daughter is known to become aggressive when she gets overstimulated. The staff is supposed to know that, to keep an eye out for it and to avoid any stress once they notice things are getting too much for her. Anything could have triggered our daughter. Her start of the day, the presence of staff she doesn't care too much about, music in the store, a long waiting line, people being loud, the boy behaving unpredictable... like I said, I have so many questions... I hope the staff was able to adequately deal with our daughter afterwards.
Intellectually, our daughter is like a 4-5 year old, and emotionally a toddler. Even worse when she gets overstimulated. She is absolutely incapable of managing her emotions and her reactions to them. But physically she is almost an adult, and she probably really hurt the poor boy. Unfortunately, it's not the first time that this has happened.
It is, however, the first time that the police were involved. And I have absolutely no idea what to expect.
Long story short (sorry, I never seem to be able to keep things concise): what are the possibilities? This would be assault, right? Can our daughter be held accountable for what she did, even though she has the cognitive and emotional capabilities of a young child? Can we as parents be expected to pay damages? Or have I been watching too much TV?
It's so frustrating that the care home has so little information. Apparently, the manager is just new; we didn't even know there was a new one, let alone the person's name or contact info. My husband has an important thing at work tomorrow that he can't reschedule, so we're going to hear back from the staff member about hopefully meeting the new manager this coming Thursday.
But if possible, I'd like to hear before then what could happen, just to ease the pit in my stomach a bit...