Police, group leaders, judges—these were the people Jason Bhugwandass held in high esteem. “They are normal, I thought. Those are the safe beacons of society. If they turn out to be violent, then that’s quite different than that your brother is out of his mind or something.” Now Jason had a brother like that, an aggressive father and two neighbors who abused him for years. Jason is now 23 and his mission is to change closed youth care. Well, he tweets: “Hopefully there will be enough money left to cremate the youth care.”
NPO2 spent more than two hours on Sunday for Jason and his story: an hour and a half for the documentary Jason (VPRO) that Maasja Ooms made about him, plus pre-interview and after-talk. That was a lot, heavy and completely justified.
Much of the film is set in therapists’ rooms, where Jason undergoes intensive trauma therapy. There, aided by flashing lights and complicated assignments (count, cycling on an exercise bike, back from a thousand in steps of thirteen while you alternately tap the table three times with your left hand and four times with your right hand), he has to relive the events of his past. He sometimes disappears into himself for minutes – it’s like you can touch his pain. Those images only make it more amazing that this young man has managed to pull himself into life.
Jason’s distrust shines through many scenes. When the registry office formalizes his transition, he notices that the official pronounces his old name flawlessly, but chokes on Jason Michael. Also significant is his conversation with the surgeon who performs the breast operation to make him “completely flat”. Do people die during surgery? Almost not, she reassures, but that wasn’t his concern: “If I die, will you still kill me?”
Dirty vibes from Freud
It’s not Jason’s mistrust that you will remember most of it, not even his scars (“If I can’t cut, then my body is theirs,” he told himself in the asylum). It’s his resilience. Jason not only takes therapy, he also studies psychology. He giggles about the study material with his friends: “Freud does give dirty old-man vibes.” He suffers from Almere contempt, which is ubiquitous among Amsterdam youth, and he has himself reviewed by a primary school friend. “Remember when your ego was really big? You’re still stubborn, you’re just less insistent.”
In the last fifteen minutes of the documentary, we see Jason as an activist. No longer with a concealing cap on, but with an expressive scarf around his head. He allows himself to be interviewed at news hour, where an empathetic Jeroen Wollaars convinces him that he will not be portrayed as a victim. He debates with politicians and addresses students. He keeps telling the same story: that closed youth care can hardly be distinguished from a prison, that it cannot be the intention that as a sixteen-year-old with suicidal complaints you are locked up in your room for 22 out of 24 hours. He received no therapy of any kind.
After the documentary spoke Nadia Moussaid with Jason and some (experience) experts. His history was placed in a humiliating perspective. It was told how young people, who have not broken any rules, are handcuffed and transported in detainees’ vans. The physical visitations the children have to undergo were linked with the statistic that 85 percent of girls in the institutions have been sexually abused before. It was just more support for the rhetorical question Bhugwandass already asked in the film: “Why don’t we stop tomorrow?”
#resilient #Jason #fights #youth #care