Comment by pnutjam
8 years ago
This has more to do with a culture of silence. People avoid the uncomfortable.
This is why children need to be part of the community, that's what oversight looks like. Teaches, parents, and social programs.
8 years ago
This has more to do with a culture of silence. People avoid the uncomfortable.
This is why children need to be part of the community, that's what oversight looks like. Teaches, parents, and social programs.
In many cases, the community was the problem. In many examples given above, teachers and social programs cooperated resulting in child sexual abuse.
In many cases that was "unintentional". All these programs intended to do, in most cases, was to take the children away from the parents. Because they end up in a structure that is like a prison: enforced helplessness in an environment with predators, child abuse was the result.
In a non-negligible amount of cases, however, child abuse was the whole purpose of the social program. The people who carried out the program took the actions with the specific purpose of abusing children.
There is a third case of course, where the social programs merely break the power of parents (and still put the child in that environment), and abuse probably did not result.
Now the huge question is: would the outcome have been better, for the children (not the aid workers !), if no actions were taken at all.
And with the Dutch numbers we can calculate. Odds of abuse in the group of child care children ... something like 10%. Odds of abuse if child care interferes ... 33%. Yep ... the outcome would have been better if no actions had been taken at all (and that's taking the complaint numbers as fact, when in reality, of course, they're a lower bound).
Given what actually happens to these children, those prison-like institutions, I must say I can't call this outcome surprising in the least.
There's a movie, the first half of which is about this problem from an adult perspective: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7153766/
But the point is: the outcome would be better if nothing was done at all. It would be a lot more visible too, which I bet is the real issue the government is reacting to.