Myths and facts about the 'state kidnappings' after the allowance affair: this is what it really is - Follow the Money - Platfor

Myths and facts about the 'state kidnappings' after the allowance affair: this is what it really is - Follow the Money - Platform for investigative journalism

Myths and facts about the 'state kidnappings' after the allowance affair: that's how it really is

MARGOT SMOLENAARS

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Discussions about custodial placements are highly polarised, with camp #state kidnapping on the one hand, and camp 'it also goes very well' on the other. When emotions run so high, the facts are easily overlooked. Follow the Money separates the fables from the bare facts: what do we know for sure about custodial placements?

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THIS PIECE IN 1 MINUTE

The term 'state kidnappings' surfaced after the benefits scandal. A total of 1,675 children have been removed from the parents' homes and they have still not returned. But now 1120 of these children are 'out' of youth care again. At the end of 2021, 555 of them had still been removed from their homes.

Another misconception is that the number of evictions is steadily increasing. In reality, that number is fairly stable between 2019 and 2021.

The Health and Youth Care Inspectorate investigated 45 of the 3301 new out-of-home placements that took place in 2021. Most young people who were placed out of their homes in 2021 are 16 or 17 years old. In more than half of the 45 cases (51.1 percent) these children ended up with family or friends of the family. In more than twenty of the out-of-home placements studied, both parents and young people supported the decision. All cases involved complex problems on several fronts.

According to extensive European data research, the Netherlands ranks thirteenth among the 28 countries surveyed in terms of the number of children who have been removed from home on a court order.

WAS THIS FRAMEWORK USEFUL?

March 24, 2022, This was the News . Presenter Harm Edens gives the floor to comedian Peter Pannekoek. He starts talking about the fuss du jour – there was something about Sywert again, and also something about Pixar cutting a lesbian kiss from a movie. Pannekoek says that such problems are dwarfed by 1115 children placed out of home.

Six months earlier, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) had published a table to Ministry of Justice and Security of Information to provide. It found that as of 2015, at least 1115 children of families affected by the benefits affair had been removed from their homes. Volkskrant columnist Harriët Duurvoort said it was a disgrace .

The public outcry did not last long. That is why Pannekoek gave a monologue about these custodial placements on primetime TV. 'So we just have 1115 children in the Netherlands, at least, who have been placed out of their homes as a result of the allowance affair. [.. ] Those children have not seen their parents for years. I find it mind blowing . If one child is kidnapped tomorrow, the whole country will be ablaze, we'll have amber alerts, searches. And now 1115 children are gone, and not one child has returned. What madness is this?'

'That's very sad, yes,' Edens confirms.

“Actually, I'd like to coin the word… these are state kidnappings. Literally kidnappings by the state.'

The YouTube video has now been viewed more than 121,000 times. Below the fragment are 192 reactions. Most of them go with their legs stretched out in.

On Twitter, the hashtag #state kidnappings is trending the following weekend. Emotions run high. 'Can someone just hack the amber alert program and send a text message to the whole of the Netherlands with the request to watch out for the 2000 children stolen by our government?' tweet someone.

'Are we going to talk about state kidnappings?', the AD asked Minister for Legal Protection Franc Weerwind a few days later. He replied dismissively, 'I have spoken to mothers and seen the grief. I am shocked by their stories. People who have not been able to put their children to bed, who have had to miss them for years. But this is not a term they use. And me neither.'

mood-making

The criticism of that vehement word received less attention. The image of far too many out-of-home placements, due to government action or on the basis of a single event, would be unjustified.

This sound also reached Peter Pannekoek. His statement was 'populist mood-raising,' he now sums up the criticism. “'State kidnapping' is a huge word, which is literally wrong. That's true: no ransom was demanded, no. At the same time: there was no discussion then. The attention was gone.'

On the broadcast a week later the comedian adds some nuance. He says to Follow the Money: 'A custodial placement may also be justified. And the people who do this work also have an impossible task. Since that broadcast, I have started to delve even more into it. When you read that an alarmingly high number of children are removed from their homes every year, I think: what a perverse system this is.'

Is that number really shockingly high? What remains of the Netherlands as 'champion of out-of-home placements' if we analyze the figures?

1675 'child allowances'

The first figures published by Statistics Netherlands on 'allowance parents', in October 2021, reported 1115 children placed out of home. After six months later, all data for 2021 had also been received and more victims had come forward, Statistics Netherlands adjusted their number in April 2022. The known benefit parents have a total of 59,805 minor children. Between January 2015 and December 2021, 1,675 of them were removed from their father and/or mother through the courts.

Of these 1675 children, 1120 were now 'out' of youth care on 30 December 2021. There are various reasons for this: 430 have now reached the age of majority, the protective measure has been terminated for 335 children, and the protective measure has been lifted in the interim for 20 children. For 40 children, the guardianship went to the foster parent. Parental authority has been restored in 30 cases. 260 children are still under the supervision of the juvenile court.

On December 30, 2021, all in all, 555 children had been removed from their homes. The investigation into the background of these out-of-home placements has not yet been completed: it is not yet possible to say whether they are directly related to the benefits scandal. The Inspectorate of Justice and Security is taking the lead in this investigation. She expects deliver results by the end of this year.

How many evictions are there?

CBS is the only body that has national insight into how many children have been removed from home. It should be noted that Statistics Netherlands can only count forced custodial placements, in other words the cases where the juvenile court judge has been involved.

Voluntary out-of-home placements, to which the parents agree or which they initiate themselves, or semi-voluntary, via 'urgency' – i.e. under the threat that the courts will be called in if the parents do not cooperate – are not recorded nationally (see the box ' Interfering care, the great unknown").

What makes counting custodial placements difficult is that a custodial placement is not recorded as such in the books. In order to find out, CBS has to combine two groups: children with a youth protection measure and children who live with a youth care provider, in CBS language: 'youth help with residence'.

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However, the latter group also includes all children who cannot live at home for 'care-related reasons', explains the CBS spokesperson: 'Think of children with serious psychiatric illnesses or disorders, children with more than one disorder, or children with intellectual disabilities. restrictions that prevent them from living at home. These are children for whom it is very clear that they have only been helped with admission, or who cannot live independently after they are eighteen.'

It is difficult to determine exactly how large this group is. In the case of youth care with residence, Statistics Netherlands breaks down how many children live in a foster family, family home or closed institution (see the table below), but the rest falls under 'other'. And that group is large: of the 43,900 children who were not living at home in 2021, 42 percent – ??18,435 children – were in this category. Young adults aged 18 to 23 who learn to stand on their own two feet under the Youth Act through assisted living or room training also belong to this group.

If we subtract the large group 'other' from all children with youth care with residence, then 25,465 children remain. of whom we know for sure that they do not live at home, are minors , are not clinically admitted and are not in room training.

INTERESTED CARE, THE GREAT UNKNOWN

Sometimes parents themselves take the initiative to temporarily house their child elsewhere. Such voluntary evictions are not registered anywhere. The Netherlands Youth Institute (NJi) estimates that approximately half of all out-of-home placements are voluntary.

Semi-voluntary custodial placements are a different story. If voluntary assistance does not have enough effect within the family, the youth protector can impose additional conditions on the parents in order to avoid going to court. This 'urge' (or 'interfering care') is a preliminary stage of forced help: voluntary, but not without obligation.

The problem is: urges have arisen outside the law. A rather undesirable development, according to the Scientific fact sheet on custodial placements that went to the House of Representatives on 4 May . Also because each municipality arranges this 'in its own way' and it is not centrally registered how many families have to deal with this interference. The only thing the fact sheet says about it is that this happens 'often'.

Research shows that parents experience 'nasty' pressure to cooperate. But because coercion is not regulated by law, families have nowhere to appeal or object. The judge must make this decision without unambiguous parental consent. In the context of an unequal power relationship between families and professionals, there is no unambiguous consent. That is why the authors of the fact sheet consider custodial placements through urgency 'not acceptable'.

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Reasonably stable

Is the flow of out-of-home placements steady, decreasing or increasing? In 2021, 460,740 children received some form of youth care: 43,900 of them do not live at home, so less than 10 percent. Of these, 25,465 (almost 60 percent of children not living at home) reside in foster families, family homes or closed youth care.

Their numbers decreased between 2019 and 2020, before rising slightly in 2021.

2019 2020 2021

Total number of children with youth care 450,300 435.760 460.470

Youth assistance with residence 44.205 42.470 43,900

- Foster care 21,780 21.210 21.525

- Family-oriented youth care 5.730 5.310 6.515

- Closed youth care 2,580 2.080 1,815

- Other 21.525 18.135 18,435

The figures for 2021 are not easily comparable with those for 2015 to 2020, CBS warned in April 2022. Every six months, CBS asks all youth care providers for data. When in the spring of 2021 it turned out that this list was not complete was, Statistics Netherlands has expanded its list to include all youth care providers who declare care through municipalities.

For example, a 'substantial number, especially small youth care providers' was added, together accounting for more than 31 thousand young people with extra youth care. Relatively speaking, the growth is mainly in children who come to live in family homes. Not so crazy, Follow the Money showed earlier : family homes are on the rise.

There have been no extreme outliers in the past three years. The 'certain' numbers ('youth assistance with accommodation' minus the 'other' category) fluctuate from 25,040 children in 2019 and 24,335 in 2020 to 25,465 children in 2021.

Out of the house, but within the family

Such nuances fit into the picture that the Health Care and Youth Inspectorate outlines. To analyze the fact-finding that precedes forced custodial placements, investigated the IGJ 45 cases from 2021.

That year, according to the calculation of the Inspectorate 3301 new custodial placements. 'New' means that the judge issued the first authorization for custodial placement. This means that in that year an average of nine children per day were placed out of their homes for the first time.

The most important conclusion: the fact-finding investigation was not completely in order in any file (see the box 'The professionals provide the facts'). The other conclusions were equally newsworthy. Most young people who were first placed out of their homes in 2021 are 16 or 17 years old. In more than half of the 45 cases (51.1 percent) these children end up with family or friends of the family.

In more than twenty of the out-of-home placements studied, both parents and young people supported the decision . In eleven out-of-home placements, none of those involved agreed with the out-of-home placement. In the remaining cases, one parent agreed and the other did not, or the young person supported it but their parents did not.

In all 45 files examined, there are complex problems on several fronts. 'This research nuances the social picture that mainly young children are placed out of their homes, that they are taken away from their parents for a single reason and placed in an institution,' the Inspectorate writes.

'THE PROFESSIONALS DELIVER THE FACTS'

“A psychiatrist who says a mother is incapable of raising a child is a fact. If grandma says the same, then it's not a fact. What parents say is by definition their view of the truth. The professionals provide the facts.'

This quote from the report of the IGJ on the quality of the fact-finding is exactly the problem, say parents. Facts and opinions are mixed up. That is correct, the Inspectorate writes on the basis of qualitative research into 45 files.

In half of the reports, youth protection does not distinguish between facts and opinions. In 70 percent of the reports, the youth protection services did not mention a source for diagnoses. If parents and young people name their own diagnosis, the youth protector does not verify it with the practitioner.

Old information (more than two years old) regularly appears in reports and plans to demonstrate patterns of, for example, domestic violence or care avoidance in a family. In four cases, the usefulness of that old information was unclear. And where one professional corrects factual inaccuracies, the other adds a response, but nothing else changes in the report itself.

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Complicated Issues

What the Health and Youth Care Inspectorate means by 'complicated problems' is strikingly apparent from this ruling , in which the judge extends the out-of-home placement for a recognized victim in the benefits scandal. A mother was unable to provide her children aged 2 and 4 'with the necessary safety'; therefore, they were urgently removed on November 20, 2020.

That was three months after the police, after reports from local residents, found the children with a full diaper on the balcony, calling for their mother. The police had rang the bell, no one answered, so 'the officers gained access to the house', which turned out to be untidy. Mother and her partner were asleep. The officers struggled to wake them up. Mother was found to be under the influence of alcohol and drugs. The drug use was not an incident, the police concluded from what they found in the house.

The eldest child's teeth had crumbled, the teeth were black. "This gives the impression that they have never been cleaned." In the foster home where the children went, showering was initially so difficult that 'it was unclear to what extent the children were used to showering'.

Who can be blamed for what?

The mother from the above statement argues that she 'cannot be blamed for having had a very hard time at the hands of the state. Because of the chaos that had arisen, mother lost her structure and therefore the children.'

The children would come home in June 2021, she argues, but that could not go on because she was now facing eviction. In the end she was able to stay in her house, also because the government got through with 30,000 euros. Since then, no more work has been done on home placement.

The question is whether the latter can be blamed on youth protection. Often the help is simply not there. This became apparent in November 2019, when the Inspectorate raised the alarm for the first time. That alarm has never been silenced: September 7, the House of Representatives received an evaluation of the law on child protection, which states unequivocally that the situation 'has never been as bad as it is now'.

'Champion out of home places'

Does all this mean that the Netherlands takes more children away from their parents than other European countries, and is therefore the 'champion of out-of-home placements'? This belief is persistent, but cannot be substantiated. Since 2020, EU DataCare, a project of Eurochild and Unicef, has been collecting data on child protection in the 27 countries of the European Union and in the United Kingdom. Or rather: about child protection systems, in order to ultimately be able to compare countries.

That is not possible now. 'How the number of children who do not grow up with their own parents is registered differs per country,' the Netherlands Youth Institute (NJi) writes in its memorandum. Insight into out-of-home placements in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe . Placements in formal institutions, such as foster care and family homes (or in orphanages, as in Eastern European countries), are usually tracked. Placements with relatives are not counted in many countries.

For the Netherlands, the EU DataCare project took the CBS figures on 'youth assistance with residence'. The Netherlands thus ended up in thirteenth place out of 28 countries surveyed . So firmly in the middle bracket, and certainly not a 'champion'. That dubious honor belongs to Latvia. Comparing requires the necessary caution anyway, warns the NJi, which is responsible for the Dutch part of the DataCare project. 'Numbers are a flattened representation of a dynamic and complex practice.'

The NJi does think that the practice in the Netherlands is far too complicated. 'The persistence of the image in the Netherlands [as champion of out-of-home placements, ed. ] has more to do with the youth protection system, which seems so much more complex than that of other countries. The Dutch system is too complicated for parents who have to deal with it and hardly understandable for outsiders.'

This has consequences, says NJi researcher Caroline Vink in an article accompanying the memorandum. In Denmark and Sweden, she says, the care is 'more focused on the whole family and not just on the child. Care providers speak more with rather than about the family. Here in the Netherlands we have a system that is based more on distrust than on trust.'

It's time to have a debate about that mistrust – armed with the facts.

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