Justice-wards-of-state

Currently, there are 46,000 children in the Netherlands who are not living with their parents. They are staying in foster homes or children’s youth care homes. For their own good, or it is said. Where out-of-home placements are concerned, the Netherlands is unquestionably in the lead, within Europe. There is no other European country where this many children are living in foster care or children’s homes. This unfortunate front-runner position is the result of the way we have organised our national youth care system. Children are taken away from their parents, either due to a saviour’s mentality amongst the authorities involved, because they are simply accustomed to doing so, or because of the position of power of youth care professionals. For reasons of suspected child abuse, or because parents are considered unable to take care of their children, or because of the children’s own behavioural problems that make them a danger to themselves and/or their environment. Each year, up to three thousand children end up in the most severe form of youth care: in closed care facilities under what is known as JeugdzorgPlus (i.e. intensive youth care method). The stories of kids who this applies to are staggeringly similar. They are lifted from their beds in the middle of the night or plucked from schoolyards by the police and dragged off in police vans. Their stories all refer to loneliness, lack of trust, aggression and violence, and to the horrors of closed care facilities, where children are physically restrained and frisked. They are also all about prison regimes, anti-tear clothing and solitary confinement; about drugs being abundantly available in these places, about kids running away, and about attempted and actual suicide. The stories are also about the lack of proper treatment or good quality education. About the kids not being heard by the Child Protection Board or the juvenile courts — the ones responsible for out-of-home placement of these children and for sometimes even locking them up — nor by their guardians, therapists, counsellors or mentors. Equally disturbing and similar are the stories about what happens to them after they leave these institutions. Most of them never graduate from school; their lives involve alcohol or drug or they become addicted to gambling. Rarely ever do they have stable relationships or jobs. Large numbers of them have children themselves when they are still very young. They trust no one, are depressed or even suicidal. All are traumatised.