Child sex abuse in the care sector is investigated and tour operators raided. There are to be more Muslim prison chaplains, public transport swipe cards are fiddled, while lawyers’ bras cause problems. It’s all in the Dutch dailies.

A look at today’s front pages shows that there’s not one big story on which the Netherlands is focused today.

On its front page, AD covers the harrowing interim report of an official committee investigating child sex abuse in foster homes and care institutions. “Abusers stay working in care” is the headline. Group leaders, foster parents, doctors and psychiatrists are all alleged to have sexually abused children in their care. And they are still working in the sector.

Of the 350 cases of sex abuse reported to the committee, justice authorities are investigating just 36, because they were committed recently enough for the perpetrators to be prosecuted. Eight cases have been urgently passed on to police because of fears that the abuse is “serious or ongoing”.

The committee chairman Rieke Samson-Geerlings tells the tabloid: “This is about children who have been damaged twice.” They have often been the victims of violence or abuse in their own families and have been placed with a foster family or in a care institution. “That should have been a safe place but, for these children, it wasn’t.”

It’s not only victims who have been telling the committee their stories: a few abusers have also come forward. Ms Samson-Geerlings is calling on more abusers to own up. She also wants to hear the stories of abuse victims from the immigrant community. “We haven’t had any reports from that quarter. It looks as though abuse is still a taboo subject for this group.”

Raids on tour operators
Only today’s de Volkskrant devotes its front page to Thursday’s vote in parliament on the proposed Dutch police training mission in Afghanistan. It says support for the government-backed mission among MPs “is falling still further away”.

On an inside page, the left-of-centre daily covers yesterday’s raid by the Netherlands Competition Authority (NMa) on offices of the three biggest holiday companies and the sector’s ANVR umbrella organisation. The NMa raids kicked off a major investigation into price fixing between tour operators TUI, OAD, Thomas Cook and the ANVR. The holiday sector is worth 10 billion euros a year, of which the raided companies take the lion’s share.

An NMa spokesperson would not say whether the raids had been prompted by a complaint from rival operators, but did say there were solid grounds for suspicion. “A raid is a relatively serious move. We don’t do that for nothing. There were indications that something was going on.” Meanwhile, a spokesman for TUI has rejected any accusation of price fixing.

More Muslim prison chaplains
Christian-based Trouw leads, as might be expected, with Roman Catholic Cardinal Simonis’ court testimony that he, as might be expected, knew nothing of a child abuse case in the early 1990s. But further inside the paper, there’s something of a scoop.

It says that more imams and fewer Christian chaplains and humanist advisers are set to be hired to work in prisons. The Protestant daily has got its hands on an internal justice ministry document which shows that 12 of the current 32 posts reserved for non-religious advisers to prison inmates are going to be scrapped.

However, the number of Islamic clerics employed to minister to the prison population is going up from 35 to 43. The present 177 places for other religious advisers will be reduced to 160. This will mean fewer Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist prison chaplains.

The shake-up is based on research into what kind of spiritual support prisoners want. The Humanist Union is angry and has rejected the research results, saying the survey of inmates’ wishes was misleading. It tells Trouw there’s “a lot of suspicion and dislike of religion” amongst the prison population, and that the survey questions made humanism sound like a religious movement.

Public transport card ‘easy to fiddle’
Nrc.next leads on the tortuous question of how its highly educated young readership should “deal with your cleaning lady” but, moving swiftly on inside the paper, there’s a report on how easily the new public transport swipe card can be fiddled.

A journalist and various Socialist Party MPs have been using trains, buses and trams courtesy of fraudulently topped-up cards for the last fortnight. A card reader and software – “which will shortly be freely available on the internet” – are said to be all you need to put up to 150 euros on one of the swipe cards without the bother of having to debit your bank account.

Trans Link Systems which operates the card scheme, apparently reported the fraud last Friday. A spokesman claimed they purposefully didn’t block the “corrupted” cards “in the interests of the criminal investigation”. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party is calling for an urgent parliamentary debate on the whole swipe card system.

Bras in prisons
There’s a head-and-shoulders (and more) picture of well-built young woman wearing only a bra right bang in the middle of the front page of De Telegraaf today. The Netherlands’ most popular daily says female lawyers visiting their clients in prison are having to think twice before wearing bras with metal supports.

They are apparently setting off the metal detectors at jail entrances. The bras have to be taken off - in a private room De Telegraaf reassures its mass readership – and handed to security guards. After going through the metal detector they can be put on again –in private once more. Women lawyers have understandably been complaining. “It’s just security regulations,” explains a justice ministry spokesperson.