The 15-year-old looks shyly into the audience. He’s going to sing a song. “An emotional song,” he says softly into the microphone. „I’m so alone, I can’t find my home, I have no place to go”he sings. In the audience, 28-year-old Jamir Wever hugs his mother Erica Wever (53) tightly to him. She hides her face in his sweater.
The actions of Violence (his real first name) hit Wever “terribly”, because of course as a child you have no idea what is going on when your parents are victims of the Benefits Affair. Her own children did not have that either when the family packed its bags and left for Curaçao “to flee from the Dutch state.” “I felt like a target, hunted, chased away.” It didn’t make the debts disappear, so when her son Jamir went to study in the Netherlands, he took out student loans to help his mother financially. “I wanted to give her some breathing room.”
This Saturday, children and other people affected by the Benefits Affair will gather in the Koekamp park in The Hague, next to the Malieveld. They demand “recognition and a clean slate,” according to it manifesto that they prepared in advance, and “an equal recovery process,” just like their parents. Because: their parents are recognized as victims, receive legal assistance and have their debts forgiven. But not them, while many of them, like Jamir, incurred student loans because they had to contribute to the family.
Participants in a demonstration in The Hague to ask for recognition of their situation as victims of the Benefits Affair.
Photos Laurens van Putten/ANP
Great responsibility
“As the eldest daughter of a victimized mother, I also bear the scars and the debts of the Benefits Affair,” says 26-year-old Loïs Houwen on stage. Children of victims want the government to send them a letter officially recognizing that they themselves are “full victims”.
A 35-year-old woman who, because she does not want to be labeled “benefit child forever” (her name is known to the editors), explains that she and her older sister took out student loans to pay for groceries and bills. “We wanted to prevent our brothers from being removed from home, so we felt a great responsibility.” In addition to her studies, she worked in healthcare. “Every weekend, and every day after internship.” She is now in the final year of her studies, but it has already taken her six years to complete that final year. “I keep dropping out because of the PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and because of the hassle with the settlement of the Benefits Affair.”
We are not asking for a favor, but for equal treatment
The Benefits Affair may be over, but it still dominates her life every day, she says. There is a scheme for children for Benefit Parents under the heading ‘broad support’, via the municipality. But that support is not that broad, according to her. “Applications for support are rejected and we don’t get lawyers like our parents, so we can’t challenge those rejections.” The government has torn her family apart, she says: she no longer has contact with her mother, and she missed the first years of her older sister’s now four-year-old child. “The tension in the house also caused tension between us. We are trying to restore that.”
False start
29-year-old Celine Santos Pires tells a similar story on stage. “We got a false start and that will not be repaired. Because how can you receive an education if the electricity is turned off at home and if you have to ensure that food is on the table? Our student loans went to rent or clothing for our brothers and sisters. We are not asking for a favor, but for equal treatment.” She is now a mother herself, she says. “I want this to stop with me.”
Participants in a demonstration in The Hague to ask for recognition of their situation as victims of the Benefits Affair.
Photos Laurens van Putten/ANP
As a child, Jamir Wever knew very well that something was going on, but not what. “My mother has always stood strong for us. But from a certain age you start to notice that something is going on.” Especially when they suddenly moved to Curaçao, when he was eleven and his brother was five years old. “We liked it at first, but we soon started missing home. It took me a long time to realize that we were no longer going home.”
Her father lived in Curaçao, says mother Erica Wever, and said: come here, at least then I can look after the children. She was 36 at the time. “I left everything behind, my seat as a councilor of the SP, my work as the owner of a foundation. But it was no longer possible in the Netherlands.” She was duped in 2005, she says. “The first two years you still think: everything will be fine. You do all kinds of tricks to be able to pay those bills.” Antics? “Yes, like for two years at night in a gambling house on the [Amsterdamse] Work on the sea dike, so that extra money comes in.”
Two teenage sisters take the stage. They say that youth care removed them from their home, that they found it difficult to talk about their feelings to a different stranger and that they saw how difficult it was for their parents. Many children were removed from their homes during the years of the Allowance Affair (approximately 2004 to 2019). Also very young children; the government must make more efforts to let them live at home again, according to the manifesto.
15-year-old Violence is doing quite well now, he says after his performance. He now has a supervisor from the foundation Colorful Dreamswho he can talk to. But when he was “still in the thick of it,” he felt very alone. “I had much less than the other children.” His parents separated and he no longer speaks to his father. What do they need as children of Benefit Parents? “I just want people to hear us.” His music will soon be available on Spotify. “This is how I tell my story.”
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