The national forensic institute has not taken on any suspected child abuse cases for over six months because of a manpower shortage, the Volkskrant reports on Tuesday.

This means hundreds of cases of both physical and sexual abuse are being ignored, the paper said.
The Netherlands has just four forensic scientists who are specialised in child abuse. Two work for the insititute and two for a specialist clinic in Utrecht.
Capacity
An estimated 500 cases of suspected child abuse a year need investigating by forensic experts, the paper says. But the NFI has capacity to carry out just 25 complex cases and give telephone advice in a further 75.
The Utrecht clinic deals with several dozen cases a year, but the public prosecution department is reluctant to use it because the service costs money, the paper says.
‘At the moment, there is a lot of focus on identifying child abuse… but only the serious cases are dealt with. The rest are left on the shelf,’ clinic chief Jules Mulder told the paper.