Status date: February 16, 2024. Authors: Folkert Lenz
In Bremen, there is a shortage of places to sleep for children who have experienced violence or are at risk. Image: dpa | Patrick Pleul
For the first time, the youth welfare office asked whether employees of care facilities could take in children and young people in an emergency. This causes irritation.
When the child and youth emergency service responds in Bremen, things usually get serious. If, for example, neighbors, relatives or friends have raised the alarm that something seems to be wrong in a family, a tandem of employees from the youth welfare office and social services come by and check that everything is going well. If the situation is too dire, the boys or girls are taken into care by the city – for their protection. There are 60 places for such cases in Bremen in homes and residential facilities and with transitional care families. Is that enough?
The situation is definitely tense. And in individual situations there are difficulties for certain target groups in finding enough places for every weekend because then there is only one emergency place for a certain target group. And then it gets tight.
Rolf Diener, Bremen State Youth Authority
Different places for different needs
The problem, according to Diener: Between two and sometimes ten children and young people have to be temporarily admitted to Bremen every weekend. But the authority does not know in advance how many cases there will be. And the emergency service doesn’t know who it has to care for in the end: boys, girls, infants, toddlers or teenagers? Different places are available for different needs. Simply increasing their number would not help because the providers of homes and youth residential facilities simply cannot find the staff to increase them. On the contrary: some people even withdraw from the care because they can no longer manage the business. The Bremen youth department is alarmed.
“This has a lot to do with the shortage of skilled workers in social work. This is a nationwide problem. Almost all municipalities face the same challenge. An additional challenge is that the number of so-called standby foster families, who also take children and young people into care, is slowly declining,” says Diener from the state youth authority. Because the need was great and there were apparently no temporary sleeping places available in Bremen for the upcoming weekend, a youth welfare office employee asked facilities a few days ago whether educators or social workers could look after children at home if necessary.
Some employees perceive the approach as borderline
That caused irritation. Some employees perceive this approach as “borderline”. The responsible department has long been considering how the bottlenecks that occur from time to time when taking people into care in Bremen can be avoided, according to the spokesman for the Youth and Social Senator, Bernd Schneider.
There is certainly an approach that you should turn to people with technical experience who are not directly involved in the operational business of the provider. However, under certain circumstances they can imagine taking a child home themselves and then looking after them for a few days or even two or three weeks as interim care.
Bernd Schneider, spokesman for the youth and social department
The idea is not a Bremen invention. A similar model already exists in other cities, such as Frankfurt – apparently legally protected.
However, according to media reports, some of those asked feel moral pressure from the authorities. And that’s bad: After all, many people who work at the Bremen Youth Welfare Office have been saying for a long time that they are at their limit. One of the Bremen care facilities recently had to close a residential group due to high levels of staff sickness. The reason was apparently not a wave of flu, but rather several cases of long-term illnesses caused by teachers’ work stress. that’s what you hear.
For FDP youth politician Ole Humpich, it is a no-go that social workers should now take children home with them. These considerations only show how poorly the Bremen system is set up, said Humpich. The question remains whether children and young people in Bremen should be afraid that they will not get the protection they need – because there is no place available for them to be taken into care. Rolf Diener from the state youth authority contradicts:
My experience is that people tend to play it safe. If it’s a balancing decision: does the boy really need to be taken into care or not? It’s better to be on the safe side than to take even a small risk.
Rolf Diener, state youth authority
Bremen learned this from the “Kevin” case, in which a two-year-old boy in the care of the youth welfare office was killed by his drug-addicted foster father in 2006.
More about children in need:
This topic in the program:
Bremen Two, February 16, 2024, 5:10 p.m
2024-02-16 14:39:11
#Bremen #sleeping #places #children
