He killed her, and then himself. On December 28, 2020, a father shot his 14-year-old daughter in his apartment. It happened after a year and a half of alarming signals. After intervention by the school, the attendance officer, the Parent and Child Team, Safe at Home, Youth Protection, the Child Protection Council, doctors, the juvenile court judge. Everyone knew that things were not going well for Famke. But no one seemed able to protect her.
After her death, Amsterdam, the municipality where the girl lived, had an extensive investigation conducted under the leadership of lawyer Corinne Dettmeijer, who was National Rapporteur on Human Trafficking and Sexual Violence against Children from 2006 to 2017. She concluded that “the system” had “failed” for Famke. The agencies did not work well together, lacked expertise and waited too long to scale up. According to Dettmeijer, the court also acted incorrectly in an important procedure surrounding a letter from Famke in which she made it clear that she no longer wanted to live with her mother – a request that the judge agreed to after discussions with Famke and her parents. After publication of powerlessness, the report with these findings in October 2021, the healthcare authorities involved made concrete agreements about improving assistance. Famke’s mother and her partner were involved in that process, they held discussions with the municipality. “We have always been informed about the progress of improvements by the healthcare authorities, and we felt recognized.”
Disagreement
The Amsterdam court saw reason for “national reflection” in the 2021 report, but at the same time contradicted Dettmeijer’s criticism: no violation of the law had occurred. This disagreement has not yet been resolved, more than two years after publication.
“The healthcare authorities have taken the criticism to heart – it has been recognized that things were not going well. But the judiciary still does not do that, says mother Ineke at the kitchen table of her home in Amsterdam. She does not want her last name in the newspaper for privacy reasons. Ineke and her partner Richard believe that the judge who handled Famke’s request to change her main address made serious mistakes.
The procedure in question is that of the child letter. Every child in the Netherlands who wants to change his or her situation through the juvenile court can send a letter, email or app there. This is intended to give children a voice, for example in the event of a divorce.
Famke wrote such a letter to the judge in July 2019. She announced that she officially no longer wanted to live with her mother. The judge agreed to this request after speaking to the girl and her parents separately. No hearing took place.
According to researcher Corinne Dettmeijer, the approach of the Amsterdam court was wrong. The decision had consequences for parental authority and contact between a parent and child and therefore the judge should have formally heard that parent. According to the report, the law was applied incorrectly by not following the legal procedural rules. In addition, “the mother’s legal interests” and “the right to be heard both ways” were also violated. According to the report, the fact that the mother was not heard about the contact arrangements is evident from, among other things, three – unanswered – letters that she wrote to the judge about this. “It is clear from my letters that I was only heard about changing Famke’s main address, and not about the contact arrangements,” says the mother.
She considers the decision regarding Fam-ke’s child letter to be a defining moment in the run-up to her daughter’s death. The girl became even further isolated with her father.
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Everyone knew that Famke was not doing well
Parental alienation
Famke grew up with divorced parents, and around the age of 12 the problems started to pile up. She started to turn away from her mother, got into trouble with the police and barely went to school. In her research, Corinne Dettmeijer pays attention to the phenomenon of parental alienation, in which children of divorced parents lose contact with one of them due to the negative influence of the other. According to Dettmeijer, the lack of expertise in this area was one of the reasons why Fam-ke’s care was inadequate. When the judge allowed Famke to change her main address and officially live with her father, this meant that his influence increased and she was hidden from her mother’s view.
The Amsterdam court is of the opinion that a hearing with both parents at the same time as part of the child letter procedure was not necessary, and that there was indeed a hearing and that the law was followed. The judge in question heard all parties and “carefully weighed the interests,” says juvenile judge Peter Björn Martens, who is speaking on this case on behalf of the Amsterdam District Court. Together with Susanne Tempel, national spokesperson for family and youth law on behalf of the Council for the Judiciary and juvenile judge at the Zeeland-West-Brabant court, he explains the aftermath of this case in a meeting room of the court. “Mother and judge differ in opinion about what exactly was discussed,” says Martens, who is not substantively involved in the case. Ineke says that she has never spoken to a judge about the visitation arrangement, but the judge involved believes she remembers that. The board of the Amsterdam court later admitted that there should have been a timely response to written questions from the mother.
At the time, he appealed unsuccessfully against the decision on the visitation arrangement. Martens: “And then the decision that Famke went to live with her father was upheld.” According to the Amsterdam court, this shows, among other things, that there was room for the mother’s position and that the legal route has been followed.
There were six months between the decision in the child letter procedure and the appeal. Ineke hardly saw her daughter during those months. The emergency services also lost their grip on the girl. According to the court, it is not important that the procedure surrounding the child letter procedure was not completed exactly as Corinne Dettmeijer states is necessary. Martens: “Procedural regulations as we normally follow do not apply to child letter procedures, because it is an informal legal procedure.” According to Dettmeijer, the process regulations – rules that determine how requests to the court should be handled – are applied when the judge decides something in response to a child letter: then the procedure does become formal. The researcher and the court therefore have different opinions on this.
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No clear policy
This case has made the Dutch courts realize that there is no clear policy regarding the child letter procedure, that rules are interpreted differently, says Susanne Tempel. And although that is allowed, according to Tempel, it “should make no difference whether a child letter is handled in Assen or in Amsterdam.” This should provide all parties involved with clarity about how to handle such a child letter. “We want it to be as consistent as possible.”
A working group has recently made an inventory of how the eleven Dutch courts deal with child letters. Joint policy is being developed. The lack of agreement had been known for some time. According to the Council for the Judiciary, a memo was drawn up in 2017 in which the need to “achieve more national uniformity” was central. “It is complicated and takes time,” says Susanne Tempel. Martens: “You have to have a consensus between two or three hundred judges who deal with these types of cases.” The courts hope to reach an agreement this spring.
In any case, the Powerlessness report has been a reason for the Amsterdam court to change the course of events there, says Martens. In Amsterdam, between fifteen and twenty child letters are received every year. After the report, the Amsterdam court decided to refer it to two permanent judges, regardless of whether the letter relates to an ongoing case. Martens: “This way there is more insight into how many procedures are underway and they can set a clear line with each other.”
Since the revision, a letter has been followed by a standard invitation for a meeting between the child and the judge. This now happens within a month, says Martens – a lot faster than with Famke at the time. Then we look at: what next? “Sometimes during such a conversation you can say: it’s great that you want more pocket money, but as a judge I can’t decide on that. Sometimes a case is already underway, about custody or contact for example, and you have to take a look: what is useful now? Do we run these things at the same time or not?”
Lack of recognition
Famke’s relatives still experience a lack of recognition. That is why they went through a complaints procedure at the Amsterdam District Court. A specially formed complaints advisory committee, consisting of three experienced judges, ruled that the mother’s right to be heard had been violated. However, the court board later declared that complaint inadmissible. The court’s position is that it is no longer possible to reconstruct what Ineke was or was not heard about in the child letter procedure after such a long time. Moreover, the court cannot rule on the question of whether adversarial hearing has been sufficiently applied, a spokesperson said. This can only be done on appeal.
The outcome of the complaints procedure is the reason why Famke’s relatives filed a complaint with the Attorney General (pg) at the Supreme Court – the highest court in the Netherlands – in June 2023. They received an answer at the end of February of this year: according to the pg, there is insufficient substantiation to submit the complaint to the Supreme Court. Famke’s relatives find this “incomprehensible and painful”. The fact that the Attorney General agrees with the decision of the court board is “very disappointing,” says Ineke.
Ineke and Richard are considering next steps. Of course there is a “personal desire for recognition,” they say. But they also have another purpose. “We get the impression that the court is trying to cover something up. They don’t want to admit that mistakes have been made. While we believe that as a citizen you should be able to have confidence in the judiciary, because it protects you against government arbitrariness.”
This case has also had a major impact on the employees of the Amsterdam court, says Peter Björn Martens. “As a juvenile judge, your job is to protect children. If that fails, you immediately wonder: what happened here? The suggestion, of course, is that a tragedy arises from what came before it, and when a disaster happens you always have to investigate whether something could have been done differently. Sometimes, unfortunately, we will have to accept that tragedies can happen, even when a system works.”