Transcript by Cora Westerink
Introduction Every year, 19,000 Dutch children are placed in out-of-home care and a lot goes wrong. Jojanneke van den Berge made a series about it.
Khalid: “Last week there was much commotion about 1500 children who had been placed in foster homes because of the benefits affair. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Every year, 19,000 Dutch children are placed in out-of-home care because it is not safe for them at home. Jojanneke van den Berge made a series about it. Welcom to you, my three guests. First I will address you Jojanneke. Why did you choose to make this series?”
Jojanneke van den Berge, Documentary maker: “I came up with the idea when I was working on a previous series where I talked to children who had been in child prostitution. All those girls, boys and also the pimps had a history of youth care. […] And all their stories were terrible. Belly-ache stories that blew me away, about what they had been through. Until then, I had the naive idea that the Netherlands, a prosperous country, was well taken care of. But what I heard from them, well, I never thought that possible. And at the same time, a major study was published by the De Winter Committee, an investigation into youth care in the Netherlands from the Second World War until now, on behalf of the government, which showed that 75% of the children in youth care were exposed to psychological or physical violence. That’s three out of four children. That is unimaginable. Moreover, being placed in a home is a very intense procedure. It is a fundamental right of a child to live with its parents. Yet we do that a lot in the Netherlands, placing children out of their homes. And a lot of children end up in a place where they are just as unsafe or even more unsafe than they were before.”
Khalid: “That is what the figures show. But then you’ve heard the stories, and then you see the figures, and then you’re out in the field experiencing what that looks like. Are you shocked by what you found?”
Jojanneke van den Berge: “I am terribly shocked. Because what you say, those figures are already shocking, even the Samson Commission has been appointed for that purpose. Children in youth care are twice as likely to suffer abuse. We know the figures. But when you hear the stories, see the children. Well, Nando (Jojanneke speaks to the boy who sits at the table and shares his life in the documentary). I have visited you in a closed institution in a former juvenile prison.”
Jojanneke to Khalid: “Nando was in a cell of 2 by 4 metres with a very thick cell door. He looked out on a prison yard. The first thing he saw in the morning when the door was opened, as he could not open the door himself, was the isolation cell. After a day of shooting, I was crying on the sofa at home in the evening. How is it possible that in the Netherlands we lock up children who have done nothing criminal?
Khalid: “Nando, Welcome, I understand that you were four years old when you were evicted from your home. Why was that necessary?”
Nando: “I had to deal with a lot of domestic violence, addiction in the family. When a child is placed out of home, and that was also the case with me, a child automatically thinks: “Hey, it’s my fault”. But a child of three or four can never be guilty of an out-of-home placement. But with the thought, that’s often where it starts. And what you also often see is that when children like me are placed out of home at a young age (I’ll be 18 in a week), they go into shock. What you often see is that the behavioural problems increase over the years.”
Khalid: “So you have been in youth institutions since you were four years old, how many different institutions are we talking about over the past fourteen years?”
Nando: “We are talking about 24 different locations. I think I have met about 400 to 500 social workers. The constant transfer of children causes hospitalisation, as we call it. You get used to living in an institution and it becomes your norm, you experience it as normal, when it is not so normal. Yesterday I moved. I am living on my own for the first time. The aftercare is nihil.”
Khalid: “So you spent your first night on yourself, how did you manage?”
Nando: “It is strange. In the closed youth care there were at least ten or eleven doors between me and the wolrd outside. Now I live in an appartment with two doors that can be opened by one kick. It makes me feel unsafe. That is why I slept with a knife under my bed. I was afraid that someone would come into my new house. I no longer had 12 thick doors.”
Khalid to Nando: “What a horrible thought that you are so used to those thick doors in youth care that make you afraid now that you live on your own.”
Jojanneke to Nando: “What you describe, you were already afraid of in the run-up to your new phase of life. Children in youth care are totally excluded from society. They grow up isolated. You’ve experienced that too, Nando. They’re not prepared for what it means to be in that society. You have a house now, Nando, but many children become homeless. Maybe Rosanna will tell you something about that later.” Jojanneke points to a girl at the table, Rosanna. She also has experiences with youth care. “Her sister Elie has been through that. She was on the street.
Khalid to Rosanne: “Your sister Elie, has died, you told us. You are here to tell her story. What was that like for her, living on the streets?”
Rosanne: “Elie explicitly asked me to tell her story on the night before she died. She chose euthanasia because her life had become too unbearable after seeing 28 different places in eight years in institutions, foster homes, but also juvenile prisons in which she was placed as an innocent nevertheless. She did indeed need care. But she was treated as a delinquent. So time and again she became part of the prison regime. A lot of bad things happened there. When we came to visit her, someone always had to be there. The visit was always at restricted times. She was in the cell a lot. She was among delinquents. That made her feel very threatened.”
Khalid: “Let us have a look at a fragment of the documentary, and Elie.”
FRAGMENT FROM THE DOCUMENTARY: Elie’s voice: ” Sunday, 2 October 2007. Dear diary, today was also a crazy day. There is a girl here, I am very afraid of her. She is here under criminal law and threatens people quickly. I don’t know exactly, but when I look at her, I get a choked feeling. The place where I am sitting is the most torturous place for a girl of 14 who has never broken the law. Luckily, I still have my goals. Without them, I am nothing.”
Khalid: “This is intense. Jojanneke, you talked with Elie. You knew that she planned euthanasia. Did you have any hope that things would turn around?
Jojanneke to Khalid: “I met Elie a year before we started working on this series. By then, she was already in the end-of-life stage. That takes two years. It is done very carefully. Still, I had a naive hope. As you can see, Elie was an incredibly sweet, sparkling, intelligent, beautiful, special woman. She talked about her goals in her diary. She was very much attached to the moment she turned 18 in youth care. She thought, then my life begins. I don’t have a life in youth welfare, but when I turn 18, that’s when my life begins, and then I want to help children, children like me, who have been oppressed. That is why Elie wanted to participate in this series. In this way, she could still help children. I myself still had the hope that, who knows, a new ray of hope might dawn on Elie. But I remember her calling me on the day that she was euthanised. She was so happy, as if she had won the lottery. Then I understood. But the wish that really existed for her, that Elie also shares with Nando and all the other young people who are participating in this series, is that they want so much to change the system, so that the future children will have a better life. Nando and Elie might also think, I don’t feel like getting into this at all. I think they are brave and resilient to do so.”
Nando: “Let me catch up. Between 2002 and 2008, around that time, the young people placed under criminal law were with the young people placed under civil law who actually need care, children without criminal records. Before 2002, there was no such thing as closed youth care. The Minsiter responsible at the time in 2002 (the Kok government, if I’m not mistaken) made the decision to place young people for whom there was temporarily no room in a normal residential setting. Because even then, there was a huge shortage of those. Which, by the way, is still the case today. Temporary placement in a judicial juvenile correctional facility. In 2008, politicians had decided that this was not right. This is how closed youth care came into being, with the same regime and the same controversial working methods.”
Khalid to Nando: “In fact, you say. Children were placed in juvenile detention centres. that is all wrong, because those children had no criminal record at all. In 2008 that changed, but actually nothing has changed.”
Nando:“Juvenile delinquents and young people in need of care are no longer placed together. But juvenile prisons are being cut back and replaced by ankle bracelets and community service. In terms of prevention, they put juvenile delinquents in closed units of youth care, with the assumption that there is something wrong in the heads of these juvenile delinquents. Effect: the pre-2008 situation, which we no longer wanted, is back because the government is cutting back on justice.”
Jojanneke: “Youth care is continued in old juvenile prisons, with the old prison staff not at all equipped to deal with young people in need of care. Nando, you’ve been in solitary confinement more than 100 times, to name but one example. There’s a girl in our series who spent 9 months in solitary confinement. 80% of the young people who spend time in closed youth care come out of it worse than they went in.”
Khalid to Rosanne: “This is exactly what Elie suffered greatly from, right Rosanne? Do you blame anyone?”
Rosanne: “I don’t deny that care was needed. But I do blame the government, which directs the care through organisations that work for the government. Placing a child in 28 different places and locking him up in isolation cells damages children. Elie kept a diary. In it, she wrote that in certain trajectories in which she was placed, she had to start in solitary confinement for weeks or months. Before she had to go into the isolation cell, she was inspected. She had to undress completely and bend down three times to show herself, even though she had never done anything wrong. This happened so many times. She had to do this so many times. Each time in front of new people she didn’t know at all, because she was transferred all the time and also there she had to be strip searched before being taken to the isolation cell. She was a child. I cannot understand this.”
Khalid to Sjuul Paradijs, a political journalist, also at the table: “I have an enormous sense of shame that this can happen in the Netherlands. These are indeed young people who have a whole life ahead of them. They are mistreated by the government in this way. The other side is, and of course you also hear this from responsible politicians. How should we do it then? But what you see here is innocent children being put under lock and key who have got into trouble because of family situations. Having them transferred dozens of times. Jojanneke, do you have an alternative? As far as I am concerned, there should be a humane alternative.”
Jojanneke: “Pedagogues, psychiatrists and scientists say that there should be much more help at the beginning. Let’s concentrate on helping families as a whole, being there early. Also make sure that the parents dare to raise the alarm when things go wrong. Now there is a culture of fear, for example: “oh I hit my child once, now it’s taken away from me, so I’ll just wait”. As a result, problems pile up, such as sudden eviction. But we should give the attention to the families. That is what all children say: “I would have preferred to stay with my parents. Give us help as a whole.” In the long run, this also costs a lot less money. A child in closed youth care costs EUR 150000 per year. What you can do for that money to support families at the start. Besides, these dramas often take place in the lowest layers of society. The gap between rich and poor is widening. Families in the lowest strata are under enormous pressure, due to worries about debts and so on.”
Khalid: “So you are saying that the support should go directly to the families. thanks Jojanneke. It’s an impressive series. I would recommend everyone to watch it. Thank you for being here.”
