What effect does a year in an enclosed Youth Care (Jeugdzorg) institution have on someone? Ex-UvA student Jason Bhugwandass (24) had to endure thirteen months of isolation and loneliness in some of the nation’s strictest Youth Care institutions. Once outside, he had lost everything from his old life. Now, the student uses his worst traumas as motivation to change the system: ‘What I’ve experienced was shocking. I won’t accept that some children are still closed off from society, while I do nothing to help them.’
Closed-off Youth Care institutions, or Youth Care Plus as they are also being called, are places where children with serious behavioural problems end up. According to the official website of the Dutch government, children in Youth Care Plus facilities are getting ‘appropriate care in a safe environment.’ Jason wholeheartedly disagrees with this statement:‘ Exactly which part of my procedure would you consider as care? On my first night in the compound, I got jumped by fifteen Youth Care attendants because I didn’t want to work along with them and had to spend the night in isolation. I had conflicts with the attendants almost every day. The rest of the time I had absolutely nothing to do. I entered the Youth Care system with depression and left with an anxiety disorder.’ Jason is committed to abolishing Youth Care Plus facilities: ‘With Youth Care Plus, Youth Care always has an easy way out. When they are clueless about what to do with a child- they get placed in a Plus facility. How that affects the child, doesn’t seem to matter.
He got out of the system on his eighteenth birthday, but he didn’t feel free yet. ‘It was the most pathetic birthday imaginable. I was sitting alone in my room all day long. Once I was out of Youth Care, I felt the consequences of a year cut off from the outside world. I built up an enormous learning disability, my high school in Amsterdam didn’t want me back, and I lost all sense of confidence. In the beginning, I was even jealous of my friends who were still in the Plus facilities. They had each other and I was all alone’, Jason tells us. He didn’t feel like he was part of society anymore: ‘One moment you’re a 5 VWO student and the other moment you’ve lost all hope that you’d get your education back on track. My connection with society is lost. They locked me outside and I never got back in.’
Against all odds, Jason eventually picked up his studies. He is now a psychology student. ‘My first grades were great! An average of an eight. I put them on LinkedIn, just so my old teachers could see that I didn’t need them to succeed. Later my teachers reached out to me and told me they didn’t know of my troubled youth, I remain in touch with some of them. Those connections are very precious to me.’ Jason prefers to follow his studies online. ‘I started studying at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam during the lockdown. Everything was online and I really liked that. When society opened back up, I had to change universities. I only chose the UvA because it was near my house. However, the UvA and I turned out to be a poor match. I can’t bear crowded lecture halls and don’t like to have lectures too often, just give me some literature to read and I’m fine! This year I’m going back to Erasmus.’ No matter where Jason studies, he will always have ‘an intense hatred for APA referencing’, Jason shares laughingly.
Besides his study, Jason is often seen in the media and tweets fanatically. Last year, he also developed a documentary about his experiences with Youth Care called ‘Jason’. That movie was the reason for organisation Het Vergeten Kind (HVK) to focus their yearly week of HVK on closing off the Youth Care Plus facilities. ‘Together with HVK we fired up a petition about getting rid of the Plus compounds. The count is now already at 90.000 signatures.’ It seems that the Youth Care system is finally changing: ‘My first Plus facility De Koppeling voluntarily closed its doors. An increasing amount of facilities are removing isolation rooms. Politics is also finally paying more attention to Youth Care related issues, but they still need to apply national policy for abolishing all Plus facilities. That has to happen. Children are not being helped by putting them into isolation – they just get more traumatised.
Jason has a clear end goal in mind: ‘When at a certain point Youth Care has changed for the better, I’ll become an ice cream man.’ With all that he has already accomplished, we have no doubt that is going to happen!
You can sign the petition of Het Vergeten Kind here