Youth protection acted less biased than thought, a CBS report concluded this week. But that same report does not end the matter. ‘Such numbers do give rise to self-reflection.’
State kidnappings, as comedian Peter Pannekoek called the forced out-of-home placement of children of parents who had run into financial difficulties as a result of the allowance affair. According to initial calculations by Statistics Netherlands (CBS), there were at least 1,115 a year ago, and later even at least 1,675.
The parents seemed doubly punished by the government. MPs called out loudly for those children to return to their parents as soon as possible. Under that pressure, Minister Weerwind of Legal Protection set up a special support team for the parents to get the children back home as soon as possible.
Surprisingly, CBS concluded this week that youth protection did not treat benefit parents any differently than parents from a similar background who had not been affected by the benefits affair. Was all the outrage unjustified?
Between fact and fiction
The youth protection organizations think so. ‘Now it is clearer what is fact and what is fiction,’ says a spokesperson for Youth Care Netherlands. The sector hopes that an accusing finger will no longer be pointed at youth protection. But this CBS report does not claim to provide a definitive answer to the question of why children of benefit parents have been removed from home: an investigation by the Justice and Security Inspectorate will have to do this early next year.
What also made the discussion about benefit parents and out-of-home placements painfully clear is how little proper research had previously been done into far-reaching child protection measures. For example, youth protection does not know how many children return to their parents after a custodial placement. The youth protection was also not known exactly what their client file looked like, until the CBS investigation this week.
Perhaps the most important insight is that children from single-parent families are four times more likely to end up in child protection than children whose parents are together. It also appears that parents with a low income come into contact with youth protection much more often.
‘These are very large effects’, says professor of applied statistics Casper Albers, member of the supervisory committee for the CBS study. He believes that such data is indispensable for youth protection in order to be able to evaluate its own working method. ‘If a lack of money plays such a big role in a family, you would be better off tackling that problem, for example.’
Debt Stress
‘We indeed did not have those figures,’ says the spokesperson for Youth Care Netherlands. ‘Although they are not very surprising to us either. In single-parent families, the after-effects of a divorce can still play, which can not turn out well for a child. And we know that debt can cause stress.’
The spokesperson does not think it probable that the youth protection would consciously make a distinction based on such characteristics. ‘We mainly look at the safety of the child’, he says. ‘But such numbers do give rise to self-reflection.’
Since the outcry about the children of benefit parents, the entire practice of custodial placements has come under the magnifying glass. In the Netherlands, approximately 40 thousand children live in foster families or institutions, half of whom through the intervention of the juvenile court. According to the sector itself, that is too much, but it is still barely possible to reduce this number – for example by taking less action.
The files are not in order and parents often have no idea why their children have to leave home, the Health and Youth Care Inspectorate said earlier this year. Parents and children involved in youth protection enjoy insufficient legal protection, concluded professor of juvenile law Mariëlle Brüning. She also says that children often do not benefit from being taken away from their parents.
Notorious term
The Netherlands Youth Institute noted that children can also return home after a longer period of time. The guideline of the ‘acceptable term’ is notorious among parents: often before they had a chance to improve their home situation and, for example, they were still on a waiting list for youth care, the judge already ruled on the basis of exceeding that limited term that their children could no longer go home.
The discussion started in September last year with a column in de Volkskrant van Harriët Duurvoort about the many out-of-home placements that benefit parents would have to deal with. In the ensuing commotion, the Ministry of Justice and Security asked Statistics Netherlands for figures. The calculation institute then linked the data of roughly 25,000 recognized victims of the allowance affair with those of children placed out of home. And there was the figure of 1,115 children. With a clear caveat: that the causal relationship between the out-of-home placements and the allowance affair was not yet clear.
Side note or not, there was a concrete number: you could fill a high school with it. It also looked relatively high, given the total number of out-of-home placements.
And that is true, according to the new analysis by Statistics Netherlands. But that was not because they are benefit parents, but because the majority – about 60 percent – form single-parent families, and that group is four times more likely to come into contact with youth protection. Moreover, almost half of the benefit parents surveyed already had a very low income before the first collection from the Tax Authorities. The fact that they mostly have a migration background did not increase the chance of involvement by the youth protection services.
Many benefit parents with out-of-home children have more problems than just recoveries from the tax authorities, the special support team also sees. But whoever they meet: parents who led a stable life before the problems with the tax authorities, which then collapsed due to the stress of mounting debts, followed by a custodial placement. ‘That group’, says an employee, ‘apparently is smaller than we thought’.