Rotterdam has announced the introduction of a new policy to protect children who are being abused by their parents: remove the parent from the home, instead of the child.

Up until now, the authorities have only occasionally imposed a restraining order barring parents from entering their own homes. Compared to the traditional approach in which the child is placed in foster care, removing the parent instead has the advantage of causing minimal disruption to the child. The Rotterdam council says it will actively seek to use this type of restraining order as a complement to existing policies whenever possible.

In every classroom
Rotterdam Alderman Hugo de Jonge said on Friday that the new restraining order will be imposed more quickly when professionals, such as teachers or kindergarten staff, have serious suspicions that the safety of a child is at stake. Mr De Jonge has reached an agreement with the police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office on the implementation of the new policy, which will take effect after the summer.

“Figures show that one in 30 children is the victim of child abuse. That means each and every classroom has at least one child in it that is facing a precarious situation at home.”

Alderman De Jonge says temporarily banishing a parent from their home if they are suspected of child abuse can provide a vital time-out for the family.

Trusted environment
About 5,000 of these restraining orders have been imposed in the Netherlands in the past two years, one fifth of them in Rotterdam. Many of these cases involved violence between parents. Quite often in these situations, the child is temporarily removed from its home.

The Rotterdam alderman says the old approach is is the opposite of what should happen:

“The child is forced to leave his/her trusted environment, school and friends. That’s an incredibly invasive measure which should only be imposed in extremely threatening situations. The main thing is that we do not remove the child from a potentially violent situation, but rather the person who created it in the first place.”

(gsh/rk)

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