Delaware Top Blogs

Friday, January 19, 2007

The social work model for dealing with criminal youth

The Dutch try kindness and understanding:

Following the 2004 assassination of Theo van Gogh by a young Moroccan immigrant the Dutch minister of Integration, Rita Verdonk, installed four so-called “intervention teams for interethnic tensions.” The teams are made up of social workers whose task it is to advise local authorities on ways to deal with groups of unassimilated and criminal youths. []

Dick Corporaal, the coordinating president of the intervention teams, told Dutch national radio on Wednesday that “multicultural tensions between youths threaten to lead to an uncontrollable situation.” ...He advised the government to devote more funds to youth work and to increase the number of intervention teams. He also accused the local authorities of treating all troublesome youths similarly, while according to him different approaches are needed when confronting the various groups[]

The intervention teams recommend an expansion of the social worker approach to defuse the situation. ...Last year the police of The Hague sent officers on a “cultural training” trip to Morocco because, as Gerard Bouman, the The Hague police chief (who has meanwhile been promoted to head of the Dutch state security services), said, “Criminal Moroccan youths […] do not behave like indigenous Dutch. They rave about Moroccan culture. Hence, we have to know the latter, too.” In Morocco, the Dutch police officers discovered that their Moroccan colleagues were astonished to hear that the Dutch have problems with criminal Moroccan youths. In Morocco officers are known to beat the hell out of criminals.

Corporaal’s recommendations, however, do not seem to go down well with many ordinary native Dutch. A poll conducted by Elsevier, the largest Dutch weekly, indicates that 80% of its readers prefer a “harsh treatment” of troublemaking youths rather than “sending in more multicultural intervention teams.”


Maybe we can learn something from the Moroccans after all.

For the link, many thanks to hillbilly white trash.

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