NIEUWSBRIEF

PHOTOS: BELLA LIEBERBERG

t all starts with a request for admission. The youth welfare offices approach us with a teenager, and ask if we can place him. We take him in and perform behavioral and psychiatric diagnoses. The psychological help is a solid component of our work. We offer regular therapy groups in our help network.From the diagnoses, we submit a recommendation: Group housing, the Husky project or places in Romania.

The kind of kids that we deal with are delinquents, un- teachable or have drug problems. What they all share is an upbringing problem: the parents spoil their children to the extent that they have no normal understanding of responsibility.

The families we work with are Romanian, Hungarian or German. We even have a gypsy family and we make sure that German is spoken in every family. It’s important to say that none of these kids leaves the country against his will. We prepare the teenagers, tell them what they can expect. We are not a jail.

Frank Schwarz works for Martinswerk as an administrator for the re-raising programs in Romania

The family dynamic is important. Some intelligent guy [Ancient African proverb. Ed.] once said that you need a whole village to raise a family. That’s what you have in Romania, there’s social control. The teenagers go to the garden, plant a potato and eat that potato half a year later. They learn the mechanics of responsibility. The projects in Romania have advantages that no other projects have here. For example, in Romania no one can run away.

When they come back they are integrated into projects that tie in with what they did in Romania, animals being an example. It’s all about building up trust. “The dog doesn’t ask me stupid questions.” “I can tell the dog everything and he won’t tell on me.” “What I give the dog, he gives back to me.” I can’t deny that these kids have problems going back to German schools. And it’s also true that the kids at schools aren’t huskies, but that’s a problem I can’t solve.

I do not understand the condemnation of the fact that we’re an economic venture. People cannot live from air and love. The people who work for us want to earn money, they have to support their family. I mean, no one complains that people earn money with old peoples’ homes or kindergardens.

I won’t say how much a kid costs the State in a month. Do you know how much a jail space costs? It used to be between 10 000 and 12 000 Deutsche Mark. Cost-wise there’s not a big difference, except that a jail place probably costs more now. The question is, what’s better, jail or youth help? I’d say youth help. God save our youth from jail.

After 25 years as a social worker for children and young people, specialising in various areas including drug addiction, Prof. Manfred Kappeler became an academic and ran the institute for social pedagogy at the Technische Universität Berlin. In the late sixties, he took part in protests against the psychiatric institutes and prisons for young people and is an intellectual adviser for human rights organisations that investigate how young people are treated.

Care-planning has been part of Germany’s child and youth care laws since 1991. Care-planning requires that before any decision is made about what should be done with the child, all concerned parties have to sit together and confer on the case. Paragraph 8 of the law makes clear that the child has to be there. According to the UN, children have the same rights as adults.

If Sebastian was told one day that he had to go to Romania, and was taken there without his consent, then the question has to be asked, how was this decision made? In what way was the youth welfare office involved? Do the parents still have custody, or was this right taken from them? The decision has to have been made according to the care-planning section of the child and youth care laws, or else Sebastian was kidnapped. It’s that clear.

I’m afraid to say that all these procedures often get left aside with young people who have been pegged as difficult. So they get taken away, “off the streets,” to a place where they are supposed to come to their senses. If that happens against the kid’s will, then he smashes windows etc, because he’s been subjected to a measure that denies and undervalues his sense of free will. And when, three years later, he is presented as an exemplary case of the system working, and he says that he fucked up, then I would say to him, “I can understand why you fucked up.”

The youth welfare office has to go a different route. Instead of saying, “You are a problem,” it should ask, “What conditions have made you a problem?” The media and experts talk more and more in terms of “difficult kids” and “ineducable kids.” These are all judgements that often become stigmas. If you call a kid a truant, you make him the problem. The term truant doesn’t reflect that school is a system that drives many children away.

Youth welfare offices in Germany work under enormous pressure to get things done. One of the problems is the constant personnel cuts. Here in Berlin youth welfare personnel has been cut by 15% since 2001. Social workers are being set budget limits internally—only this much money can be spent on this—even though such limits are illegal.

The private agencies are constantly worrying how they can fill their places. They take any kid they can get. Filling places might be good economics, but it has nothing to do with welfare. No-one can speak openly about failure. The system fails again and again, but it’s always the young person that is said to have failed. If the system could speak openly about why it is failing, it would be a huge step forward, but on this market for state money, the competition is too intense.


RE-RAISING KIDS | 1 | 2 |