Giggling, she sat in the waiting room of the police station. Be a little jolly, make funny comments. “Really good jokes,” says social worker Natascha Wolvers, who accompanied her 19-year-old client. “Only, not really handy at that moment.”
The young woman hadn’t felt like filing a report at all. Natascha Wolvers saw her lingering at the counter. She knew how hard it was for her. The woman was anxious, had pain in places you would rather not mention. She could barely comprehend what had happened to her. She was terrified. And she had a mild intellectual disability.
Once in conversation, she couldn’t get her words right. She tried to tell officers that she had been dumped at an ER after being gang raped. But telling the story coherently was difficult. The officers kept asking the same questions and the woman couldn’t understand why, and the nerves only made her giggle more and made her story even less convincing. It went so smoothly that when Natascha Wolvers asked how it was possible that twelve different types of sperm had been found on her body in the hospital, an officer replied that sexual preference differs per person.
Being mildly mentally retarded carries a stigma
Ina Hut director of the Coordination Center against Human Trafficking
It was not even the agent’s fault. Natascha Wolvers of Koraal, a care institution in Brabant and Limburg, has been working with young people with a mild intellectual disability (MI) for 23 years and she knows how difficult it is for authorities to take someone’s cognitive abilities into account. Especially since such a limitation is not always known or visible. In addition to the police, municipalities, schools and healthcare institutions do not always respond adequately. While people with an IQ below the average in an increasingly complex society are extra vulnerable.
For example, the police see an over-representation of MIDs among the victims of human trafficking. But also in the case of criminal exploitation, such as theft or drug trafficking under duress, and sexual exploitation, such as forced prostitution. Young people with a mild intellectual disability – male and female – are recruited for criminal organizations in all sorts of ways.
Natascha Wolvers has seen it happen so often that she wants to shake up the country. Together with Irene Vissers, program leader for human trafficking at Koraal, and Ina Hut, director of CoMensha, the Coordination Center against Human Trafficking, she conducted a series of four interviews with a total of ninety organizations throughout the Netherlands in the past year to make them aware of the vulnerability. of lvb’ers. From mayors to the Ombudsman for Children and the Salvation Army; everyone joined in to think about a better, national approach to this exploitation. It resulted in the report Exploitation & LVB that will be presented to the cabinet this Tuesday.
Not on the forehead
“Lvb?” Ina Hut from CoMensha knew about the group but hadn’t noticed it. Until a few years ago she posted on LinkedIn that there are three vulnerable groups in the Netherlands: refugees, migrants and minors. “Whoa, whoa, you forget the mildly intellectually disabled,” one wrote. “Since then I have taken it seriously.”
Only, how do you do that? The Netherlands has more than 1 million people with an intellectual disability. They are people who cannot live up to what is expected of them given their age and culture, usually due to lower intelligence (IQ score between 50 and 85) or – and then it can be temporary – due to one or more traumas. But the group is by no means uniform: one has difficulty with language or arithmetic, the other only with daily activities or with social contacts. The diagnosis ‘MID’ is by no means always given, an IQ is not printed on someone’s forehead and, for example, when labor migrants are exploited, their cognitive abilities are often completely unknown. “Subjecting everyone to an IQ test is also not the solution,” says Ina Hut. “There is a stigma on lvb.”
But as a result, many have a blind spot for ‘MID’. This certainly applies to policymakers, such as CoMensha, which registers all reports of human trafficking in the Netherlands from agencies such as the police and the labor inspectorate: from underpaid Filipinos in kitchens to Polish women behind the window. There are more than seven hundred reports every year and no one ever mentions that the victim has an ‘MI’. While limited cognitive abilities of victims are a relevant factor in human trafficking. Hut: “Perpetrators abuse it, because people with MID are sometimes extra dependent on their environment, or more gullible. Or have a lower self-image or do not oversee their own actions, or do not even realize that they are victims.”
Only, how do you prevent exploitation without directly labeling people with ‘MIB’?
Social media influence
By making the country aware of what is going on, says Natascha Wolvers, especially online. Even in the past, girls with MID sometimes fell into the wrong hands. Then a loverboy stood in front of the gate of the institution with a nice car. But that seduction always took some time “and as a counselor you could try to slow down the process”. The arrival of Instagram and Snapchat has changed the practice. “Girls are sometimes behind the window in Antwerp within 24 hours after the first contact.”
How is that possible? Society is increasingly focused on performance and success, and people with MID cannot always go along with this, adds program manager Irene Vissers. “Lvb’ers are going to profile themselves in a different way. Like with their appearance.” Wolvers: “Many of our young people spend all their money on that. They have the idea: ‘Then at least people will still see me’.” Human traffickers have feelers for that. They search for a provocative profile picture on ‘Snap’, send a compliment, ask for a photo with a little more nudity and even more nudity and threaten to distribute it if she or he – “it also happens to boys” – does not come to an agreed place . There are also other men ready to give her a blowjob. That is filmed, new blackmail material, “and before you know it someone is in a criminal network”.
Wolvers has seen it happen dozens of times. Sometimes a client disappears from view for a while. Picked up for the Albert Heijn and dropped off at the same place a week later. “In the meantime, they have worked as an escort, in expensive clubs and in a red light district in Germany.”
Social media are used to keep victims in the network, says Vissers. “Criminals know via Google Maps where someone lives and where the brother goes to school. They use that information as leverage.” The same happens with criminal exploitation, in which boys in particular are seduced to transport drug packages or to take out several telephone subscriptions, or to commit theft under duress. “Victims are sometimes also made perpetrators.”
No adequate response at school
The conversations they had showed that the authorities involved also see this, but do not always respond adequately. Then the police think that a girl voluntarily goes back to a pimp while being manipulated and not seeing her choice. Or teachers at a secondary school say ‘this is really your last chance’ to a student with behavioral problems, while such a remark to an MID who already has few successful experiences in life has the opposite effect. Wolvers: “That is like saying to someone with a spinal cord injury: ‘Get up’.”
According to them, what makes tackling exploitation more difficult are the ‘divisions’ between authorities. The care has been made so complex that people with MID often have to search for a long time before they end up at the right place of treatment. Institutions then say: “Sorry, not our expertise. We do treat addiction, but not MID”, and vice versa. “There is thinking in boxes.” The result: an MID who has been criminally exploited for years can go to one municipality and not to another. “We had a boy with MID who was in 21 institutions. They are pumped around.”
Privacy law
More cooperation is the motto. But a major obstacle, as the series of conversations showed, is the privacy law. Institutions are wary of sharing data with each other, because they think that nothing should be shared. That is not always right, says Natascha Wolvers. “But you have to look carefully at what you can share.” For example, there was a counselor who wanted to report the criminal exploitation of an MLV client, but declined to do so for fear that her name would end up in the criminal file. “While: you can also work with the police to find out what you can report.”
Read also: In Rotterdam, suspects with a low IQ are given a special process
To prevent exploitation, they would prefer to see authorities become more aware of this group. And no, that is not easy, says Wolvers, because most of her clients do not show that they have an MID. “On the contrary. Young people with MID are often very streetwise. Do you have to travel from Limburg to Amsterdam without money? Well, with them you will be there in two hours.” In any case, do not adopt a Jip-and-Janneke tone in a conversation, says Wolvers, who experienced this when a civil servant visited the institution. “That client looked at me like: I’m flying at this lady!”
But if those involved realize that some people in society are easily overburdened, they are already on the right track. Because that 19-year-old client who wanted to report gang rape, eventually turned around.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 14, 2023
#Institutions #blind #spot #people #mild #intellectual #disabilities