Campaign launched around documentary JASON

17 January 2022

Today, the Forgotten Children Foundation (Het Vergeten Kind), started a petition to stop the imprisonment of children with severe traumas and complex problems.

The foundation, which since the release of the documentary ‘Alicia’ (2015) has been supporting the impact of the films of Maasja Ooms, has spent the past year doing extensive research into the experiences of a large group of young people like Jason Bhugwandass. Based on these shocking findings published today, they will be drawing attention to this issue in the coming weeks.

During the Week of the Forgotten Child (from 28 January to 4 February), the foundation will spend several days with the experience experts Jason, Sanne, Nienke, Jarno and Carlijn, several ambassadors and ‘most contending’ experts and policymakers in action to get as many Dutch people as possible to sign the petition.

After the release of the documentary ‘Jason’, a lot of commotion arose in the youth field. One organisation has since announced that it will no longer place young people in detention and will offer better, small-scale care. This national campaign will involve the Netherlands and further increase the pressure on policy makers, so that Jeugdzorg Plus will eventually be prohibited by law.

FCF could not have wished for a better introduction to the campaign week than with the documentary Jason, released in November. The documentary makes it painfully clear how much the closed youth care system damages children. With a lot of effort from everyone at HVK, we took over the baton and are now in the starting blocks to get going. Hopefully, we’ll manage to generate a lot of attention for the subject, collect a lot of petitions, but most of all, we’ll succeed in ensuring that children are no longer locked up, but are given a place where they can receive sufficient love, attention and closeness.

Forgotten Children Foundation Campaign Team

The study revealed the following:

• 86% were damaged by closed youth care. For example, 76% left with more psychological complaints.
• 87% experienced unsafe situations.
• 84% received no (appropriate) treatment.
• 89% believe there are better alternatives.

Sign the petition

You can follow the campaign on the website of The Forgotten Children Foundation and/or follow Jason on LinkedIn.

“We want to achieve two things with this: that the law is changed so that this is no longer possible and that alternatives are developed quickly. We need to invest well in this.”

Margot Ende– van den Broek; Chief Executive Forgotten Children Foundation.