In the United States they have a webpage like "The case for the foster care system is written in Stone"
They then list a number of cases where children have been molested, in some cases even killed while they were inside the foster care system. Having a lower number of citizens and therefore fewer kids in our foster care system, the number of children who have lost their lives is fewer.
Also the number of cases where the children have been exposed of abuse is fewer. Take for instance the number of children who have been raped or exposed of other kind of sexual molestation. Only one case every 14 days according to numbers from 2009!
But our system has of course the same kind of problems as the foster care system in the United States. Here children also are aging out the system to be kicked out on to the streets unless they are so lucky that they can go back to their original family and avoid a life as homeless on the streets.
We do also have our educational consultants but in this case not helping the parents by rather the social services finding placements for children. Often these people paid by the social services are the only one who can explain why they recommend a specific place for a child and they don’t like to be asked. We as ordinary citizens don’t like to ask how the money train functions and perhaps this is an error.
About 14,000 children enter the Danish foster care system every year. As long as the local department of social services could get some kind of refund from the state they didn’t really care. Often they waited until a child took the wrong track for too long, so the police and court came to. From that point on the state took over until recently. Now the bill is sent back to the local departments of social services and this change got the employees into gear, so suddenly they are able to fix the children and more importantly the parents in time. Because we all know that it is rarely the children which are the problem. It rest with their parents.
But how are the group homes? We don’t really know. Our parliament has a team which should be able to visit any kind of residential facility unannounced. They have only tried that once with a juvenile group home. When they did try to visit Solhaven – one of our group homes in a remote part of Jutland where local goon – former fishermen ruined by the European Union – has created their own local boot camp using muscle force to put back on the right track, the counselor came at our politicians and forced them to drive back to Copenhagen or face arrest by the local biased sheriff. Since none have care about how the children did at the groups not at the present or in the past.
Until…
A report about an old group home called Godhavn were published this month. The report covered a period from WWII to 1975 and it did show rape, corporal punishment (outlawed In group homes since 1937 – today it is called restraints or positive peer control), rape and convicted child offenders having free access to the campus.
The children from then are grown men today. Many are suffering from PTSD, others have committed suicide and almost everyone carries some kind of emotional scar as result of their stay in the group home. Also discovered but little mentioned that much were the medical trials conducted without parental or other kind of consent. The cost of these trials which the boys had to endure was dearly paid but they benefit children with mental issues today.
It is been 3 decades since this period stopped when they honored the director of the campus before he left so people would start talking about his dirty work. It would be easy to say as present politician that we are sorry because the people who were elected back then didn’t do their job, but No.
They won’t say that they are sorry!
Why? Properly because we are only talking troubled children from dysfunction families which are a burden on the society.
We are talking about the politician saying: “Sorry. It is your problem that you were born into that family”
Is that fair?
I don’t believe so, but people in general have a lack of empathy when it comes to troubled children – worldwide!!
Denmark had a broken foster care system back then!
We still have a broken foster care system!
Last year the department of social services in Broenderslev did send a blind social worker who had caught a cold out to such a dysfunctional family. She didn’t notice the clothes of the children falling apart. She didn’t notice diapers not changed for 14 days and old stool integrated in the skin on the legs of the children - All things which neighbors, school and everyone else had seen. This social worker was set up. She has become the fall guy for a dysfunction system. This family had been living in 3 different towns. In every town people had reported them to the social services. Everybody just hoped that they would continue to move on, so they didn’t have to pay for housing these kids to foster care system!
When they then entered the foster care system, the authorities spilt them so they couldn’t start talking with each other and approach them media. So now several kids are alone in the foster system - a system where they could be the unlucky child who will be exposed to sexual abuse every 14 day. Now they cannot even cover for each other!
It is not fair, but we are talking about a system we don’t really want to know anything about.
When Denmarks Radio showed how they worked at Schuberts Minde – another group home in Ringkoebing where a quick search on the internet tell a story about suicide attempts and numerous runways every year, one large newspaper wrote that they shouldn’t have broadcasted it at all.
The appeal system has published a report showing there are errors in 64 percent of the cases where children are removed from their families. Perhaps too many are in the system, so there is not enough time to deal with every single case as much as it matters for the child. Perhaps the money flow demands that a certain number of children just have to be in the system so the social workers can continue to justify their paycheck. I don’t know.
But I do know that the boys from Godhavn should receive an apology. They were failed back then, like so many children are failed today by the same system.
We have to start somewhere to clean up this mesh. An apology to the boys from Godhavn is a good place to start.
