Child protection professionals in the North department are mobilizing to denounce the catastrophic situation of the child welfare sector (ASE). Boycotts of placement hearings, press forums, letters to the President of the Departmental Council, they are sounding the alarm about the lack of resources.
Children tossed from one place to another are the first victims. Children who have become adults, with a chaotic journey like that of Dounia, a frail young woman, placed from a very young age like her six brothers and sisters. Mother prostitute and drug addict, from fathers to absent subscribers, she has an appointment that day with her lawyer in Lille to take stock. At the end of the month, she will no longer officially be an ASE child. “I made three host families and seven homes, that’s a lot”laments Dounia.
“You don’t know where you’re going. So you’re waiting to see where you’ll end up. With whom? Which people? Which educators? You’re starting to get used to being carried around like a pawn.”
The last place she was placed is an emergency shelter. Dounia the brawler, the runaway, finally stayed there for nearly a year. It is still marked by this stay: “It’s not a home, it’s the jungle. There are fights that break out like that overnight and crazy stuff. If there’s no more room in a home, you say That you can’t. It’s not you take people and make them sleep on a cot like dogs…until there’s no more cots” she denounces. Before accusing:“You are being raped by the watchmen. All the girls to whom it happened, we had gone to the police station with the home. We had filed a complaint. I was 14 years old.” The instruction is in progress. Dounia, fatalistic, trivializes her aggression although she still regrets having had to stay in this home after that.
There are 11,000 children in the care of ASE in the North. The French department where there are the most. A figure that has increased with the health crisis. Among these placed children, a thousand of them according to the South union have no lasting solution. An unbearable situation denounced by the teams of educators in the Roubaix-Tourcoing sector. Since June 2022, they have been exercising their right of withdrawal, no longer going to placement hearings before the juvenile judge.
Marie and François point to the example of a child forced to stay in the family home where he was in danger for lack of space. “For a year, the situation was very difficult at homesays Mary. It exploded many times and the parents would call us and say, ‘You have to come get it now, because something bad is going to happen.’ We were asked to reply that nothing could be done. It’s actually the unknown. Already, the children are living through an abnormal, very stressful situation, and they are being told: ‘You’ve already been there for two days, and afterwards, maybe we’ll find something for a week, long enough to find something long term.'”
“We sometimes have the impression of being mistreated. We know that it is not necessarily our fault, but just because there is a lack of means, because we are in a somewhat thankless place. For others, it also feels like abandoning them.”
François, educatorat franceinfo
These cornered social workers no longer submit their report on a child they follow to the magistrates. The latter, who also denounce the lack of means, find themselves in difficulty to make their decisions, and must face the distress of the families. “Children break down crying in court because they need to see their situation evolve and as it stands, the decision will not be able to be pronounced when they expect it.explains Gisèle Delcambre, children’s judge in Lille and member of the magistrates’ union. Parents too, who come to make requests that we cannot respond to because we do not have the deadline report. We don’t have an assessment from child welfare, which is not present. We are truly in an unprecedented situation which is not legally understandable.
The majority union Sud Solidaire denounces the elimination of more than 300 jobs between 2015 and 2018, and accuses the department of making savings on the back of child protection. In June 2022, the department announced the creation of 150 places in establishments, when the union is asking for 1,000 to respond to the emergency. Asked several times, the president of the Nord department refused to answer questions from franceinfo.
Beyond the question of structures, there is the lack of personnel. The child protection sector is being hit by an unprecedented recruitment crisis. Some departments now call on temporary work agencies to manage children’s homes. This has been the case with Calvados and Mayenne since 2022. A solution for lack of anything better, even if it means recruiting unqualified people as educators and changing teams often. This is what denounces Paul, a borrowed first name, recruited in 2021 for just under three months: “I started by doing night watchman and educator at the same time. The arguments are that we need people. All that without real maintenance, without knowing what this job was.”
“We always saw a new colleague almost every two or three days, we do not understand. I worked three months there and I had three different department heads.”
Paul, educatorat franceinfo
This turnover no longer exists assures the department of Calvados, which also recalls that it had to find a solution in an emergency for about fifteen children. We are also told that the home is regularly inspected in response to the malfunctions listed by the unions. In Mayenne, Olivier Richefou, the president of the departmental council also defends himself: “These are the solutions where there is less permanence in the staff. These are not cheap solutions. Between no one and someone in the interim, for the child it is better someone in the interim. These are extremely difficult children to take care of. It has to be 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In these structures, the cost price, sorry to use this horrible term, but the price for a child over a year , it’s 100,000 euros. So it is important that we also ensure, and we are very keen on it, that this public money does not enrich private companies but is a quality service provided to children. He adds that the partner associations of the department also call on temporary workers, a new but inevitable phenomenon.