The rubbish container in Holendrecht where Naomi was found by a neighbor in February 2021. Image Desiré van den Berg
How do you tell a 2 1/2 year old who has lived with you as foster parents for almost his entire life that he needs to move to another foster family? H. and R., the adoptive parents of little “Naomi”, who was accidentally found in a garbage container in Holendrecht in February 2021, found themselves faced with this dilemma last October. “It was terribly difficult to tell her that she had to leave us. But we felt we had to tell him ourselves,” says H., one of the adoptive parents.
Naomi’s underage mother gave birth in the presence of her underage father on February 21, 2021 in a park in Amsterdam-Zuidoost. They put their newborn baby girl in a Jumbo bag, tied her up and threw her into an underground dumpster. The fact that the girl survived was due to a neighbor who heard her crying from the container in the evening while she was throwing away the rubbish bags. He alerted the emergency services, who removed the child from the container.
The biological parents were arrested shortly thereafter and soon released on parole. After their arrest, they said they thought their daughter was dead.
Another child
Meanwhile, authority over Naomi already rested with the Youth Protection Region Amsterdam (JBRA). She decided that the girl could live with H. and R. together with her biological mother. The child’s grandmother, who has been cleaning H. and R.’s house for years, had asked this family for help. The minor father also moved with them.
Tensions quickly rose between the child’s biological parents. Intense arguments ensued, which at times even became physical. Partly because of this, Naomi’s father left after six weeks. Meanwhile, the police investigation continued.
It became clear that Naomi’s parents had had another child more than a year before her birth. The body of that child, also a girl, was found in the garden of the house in Amsterdam-Zuidoost where Naomi’s mother and grandmother were staying. This led to a new suspicion, this time of murder.
However, according to them, the authorities left the foster parents in the dark. Only after viewing a report, via Naomi’s mother’s civil lawyer, which mentioned her previous daughter’s murder, did H. and R. learn of the new suspect.
This fact not only put a strain on the relationship between the foster parents and Naomi’s mother, but also between the foster parents and Youth Protection. The foster parents quickly realized that for months they had been sheltering someone suspected of child murder and attempted murder. Why did Youth Protection Amsterdam, despite this serious suspicion, allow the situation in their family to persist and not intervene?
Youth detention
Adoptive parents still ask this question today. It is difficult to determine what the decision was. JBRA says that, for Naomi’s privacy reasons, it cannot comment substantively on the matter (see box at the bottom of this article).
“We are still shocked by how JBRA treated Naomi’s interests unfairly,” says H. “We still have the feeling that they wanted Naomi to be with her biological mother at all costs, even though that could have potentially posed a risk for security.”
Naomi’s biological parents were sentenced to 15 months of juvenile detention and mandatory treatment in early October. In addition to the attempted murder of their newborn daughter Naomi, the court found it proven that her parents had killed another child two years earlier.
The Prosecutor’s Office had requested 18 months in prison and juvenile TBS against the two. “You took the life of your son in 2019. And a year after that murder, you attempted to kill your second daughter by throwing her as waste into an underground container,” the court said in the ruling.
Naomi’s father is now appealing the verdict. His lawyer Gerald Roethof said the father believes he was wrongly convicted.
Lack of trust
Shortly after the conviction of both parents, Youth Protection decided that Naomi should be removed from H. and R. and placed with another foster family. One of the most important reasons: the resulting lack of trust between parents and adoptive parents. ‘This makes collaboration and deal-making very difficult and leads to a lot of frustration. (…) The foster parents fail sufficiently to ensure the safety of ‘Naomi’,” according to JBRA, which in the petition to the juvenile court writes that there are concerns about Naomi’s education and care and the cooperation between foster parents and parents on the one hand and foster parents and caregivers on the other.
With a “neutral” foster family, Naomi can grow up safely and in an environment where she has the opportunity to form an opinion about her parents, according to Youth Protection. The foster parents attempted to block the decision, but to no avail.
“They find us difficult,” say H. and R., who recall how in the more than two years that Naomi stayed with them they had to deal with as many as five different family leaders of Youth Protection. “We also find them unreliable and inaccessible,” says H.
Roller coaster
Now that their adopted daughter has been taken away from them, H. and R. think back to their years of foster care in an Amsterdam restaurant. They experienced it as a “rollercoaster”.
The fact that Youth Protection asked the juvenile court to terminate childcare at H. and R. at the end of September is still unpleasant for them. They say they wanted to do their best for an acquaintance and her nephew with the best will in the world and in the end they felt inadequate. They had no experience with foster care and lacked guidance, they say.
Park de Riethoek in Gaasperdam, where little “Naomi” was born on 21 February 2021. Image Desiré van den Berg
Both foster parents say Youth Protection never warned them of the emotional impact foster parenting can have. “There have never been any preparatory discussions with us. On the contrary. We think that biological parents, grandmother and JBRA have incredibly parasitized us. They allowed us to take them in, pay for everything and more than two years later we were thrown out on the street like a sack of shit. We do not recommend anyone to become a foster family,” say H. and R.
They filed a complaint against JBRA with the National Healthcare Reporting Point in mid-October. The complaint has now been forwarded to the Health and Youth Inspectorate.
Stay awake
A few days before her departure, they broke the news to Naomi at home. H: “Well, how do you do something like that? It was so strange to do and not really easy. My partner told him. Naomi was angry and she didn’t understand what was happening. She was throwing balls around the room. It was so hard and sad to watch. Then I told her that we loved her very much.”
The next step, Naomi’s departure, was even more difficult. “It’s like I lost a son.”
“We found out two days later that she had been very restless and talking in her sleep since she left us. There were a lot of things in that head,” continues H., who stays up at night about it. “I hope to have a chance to explain it to him later.”
R. says they were never listened to. “JBRA asks me to give up my life and then they don’t care about anything I tell them. They act as a supreme power. We have been lived in by them and we feel used.”
“You made us proud”
Shortly before his departure, H. wrote Naomi a letter that he hopes she will see later. In the letter he describes how she unexpectedly entered their lives when they were four-month-olds. ‘Many people love you because you are a very special child; beautiful with the (sometimes mischievous) light in your eyes, a very cheerful little girl (…) who can sing and dance well, a very intelligent girl (…) who has the best morning mood in the whole world.’
And: ‘On many occasions you made us melt or made us very proud. (…) Know that we love you very much too.’
The last hope of having a role in his life seems to have disappeared. Contact between H. and R. and Naomi has recently stopped. “It is no longer possible to have contact with Youth Protection,” says H.
R.: “Now let’s go and clean our house, we don’t want to see all those toys. We are in mourning. But he can always come to us. We continue to love her.
“It seems like we no longer exist in his life,” adds H.. “We miss him immensely.”
H. and R. are not the initials of the adoptive parents’ real names. After proceedings by the Youth Protection Amsterdam, the court ruled last September that the initially invented pseudonyms of the adoptive parents could not be mentioned in full in Het Parool, because this would have violated the privacy of the minor Naomi. Naomi is also a fictitious name.
Response Amsterdam Youth Protection Region (JBRA)
“Sometimes a child can no longer continue to live in a foster family. As sad as this is for everyone involved. This can have several reasons and is often a combination of several factors. A child may need more than the foster family can provide. It is also possible that the foster family itself declares that it can no longer take care of a child.”
“Detailed discussions are held with everyone involved, including birth parents and foster parents, after which the decision is made in a broad team context. The safety and development of the child are always central. It is a big dilemma for young people’s guardians, health workers and the court to make this difficult decision.”
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2024-01-19 11:32:37
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