The Inspectorate will examine about fifty files of out-of-home placements from last year. In doing so, the inspectors check, for example, whether youth protection clearly separates facts and opinions in the reports. And also whether they give parents and minors sufficient voice in the research. The inspection report should be ready before the summer.
The quality of the advisory reports of youth protection organizations has been criticized for years. Parents complain, among other things, about factual inaccuracies that are constantly copied into new documents. The juvenile court judge bases its far-reaching decision on these reports as to whether or not the child can continue to live with its parents.
“The fact-finding investigation is not always carried out properly and it could be better,” Minister Dekker for Legal Protection wrote to the House of Representatives in June 2018. An ‘Action plan for improving fact-finding in the youth protection chain’ followed, set up with the youth protection organizations and Youth Care Netherlands.
Now that the sector has completed this ‘action plan’, the Inspectorate thinks it is time to investigate ‘the considerations and decisions before and during a forced out-of-home placement’. Also because the juvenile court judges stated at the end of last year that they sometimes have to make far-reaching decisions based on incomplete or incorrect reports.
Benefits Parents
According to the inspectorate spokesperson, the ‘social unrest’ surrounding the subject certainly played a role in the decision to conduct this investigation. This arose after Statistics Netherlands (CBS) announced in October that more than 1,100 children of so-called benefit parents have been placed out of their homes in the past six years. How the consequences of the allowance affair are related to these out-of-home placements is not yet clear, according to Statistics Netherlands.
In the discussion about out-of-home placements that flared up at the time, the juvenile judges identified more bottlenecks in the youth protection chain: in addition to the sometimes deficient reports, there was also a shortage of qualified youth protection staff, waiting lists in youth care and mental health care, and the lack of available help and diagnostics. Many families have to deal with changes of family guardians.
“We know that youth protection is under heavy pressure due to, among other things, labor problems and waiting lists,” says the inspectorate spokesperson. ‘However, careful fact-finding and the involvement of young people and parents are still necessary when making a drastic decision, such as a forced out-of-home placement.’ This research is separate from that of the Justice and Security Inspectorate into the role of youth protection in children of benefit parents.
Enhanced surveillance
On Monday, the IGJ also announced that of the four youth protection regions that were under increased supervision, two are again performing satisfactorily. According to the Inspectorate, the youth protection regions of Rijnmond and South-West have succeeded in providing children who need it in time. The Noord-Holland/Amsterdam region will continue to be under stricter supervision. The inspectors will pass judgment on the Brabant region at a later date.
In Noord-Holland, the youth protection system does not succeed in linking every young person who needs it in time to a permanent youth protector, in order to draw up a plan to improve his situation with appropriate help. This is partly due to high absenteeism and turnover in youth protection and to a lack of (municipal) supply of specialist youth care, among other things.