Meral Ö's lessons: get into the problems of hunted allowance parents
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Meral Ö's lessons: get into the problems of hunted allowance parents
Harriet Duurvoort September 3, 2024
Admitting you were wrong is one of the harder things in life. For example, I regret a critical column that I wrote some time ago about Princess Laurentien's role in recovering from the benefits scandal. It didn't do her justice. The princess has really helped a lot of allowance parents.
Critical self-reflection, or rather remorse, is what I hope to see in the officials who spent years hunting for allowance parents and, to their surprise, found out that these parents weren't fraudsters at all. Because they now have a key role in repairing the unprecedented injustice they've done.
About the AuthorHarriet Duurvoort is a publicist and columnist of de Volkskrant. Columnists have the freedom to express their opinions and do not have to follow journalistic rules for objectivity. Read here our guidelines.
How Princess Laurentien was dealt with is devastating. What is transgressive behavior? Raise your voice? Showing emotion? Isn't that just a very fair human response to this unprecedented suffering? Of course, I'm speculating, because, as often, what that cross-border behavior consisted of remains unclear.
Rather, I think that officials who cowardly complain anonymously to willing, ravenous media to save their own skin are guilty of transgressive behavior. The only way this hopeless file can ever be solved, yes, healed, is with empathy. Officials should really try to put themselves in the shoes of the benefit victims.
Maybe it can the haunting feature film The Hunt for Meral Ö. by Stijn Bouma play a role in this. I attended the premiere at De Balie in Amsterdam. Meral has 34 thousand euros of childcare allowance debt and is also being monitored in a fraud investigation. Due to the wage burden, she can't help but update herself to survive.
Things go from bad to worse. Social detectives who wreck her entire house in search of a few tens of cash. Who make racist remarks to each other. Youth care that wants to remove the children. Out of desperation, she sells her body and tries to flee abroad.
The main character Meral Öztürk is based on the average benefit victim: a bicultural, hardworking and often single mother who, if not wrongly accused of fraud, could just make a living. Women whose government would have had an excellent source of income through regular payroll taxes.
There are scenes where you think: that's not possible anyway. Shading someone to prove how she is' fraud 'by taking a bag of Chinese takeaway from her friend. But after the movie ended, the benefit victims corrected me. This is quite normal when it comes to fraud hunting.
We have lost common sense when it comes to so-called fraud prevention among the poorest Dutch people. What does it cost to pay these officials full-time, and what does this fraud hunt for “master scammers” at the bottom of society mean below the line? The costs of the recovery operation are at risk of increasing up to 14 billion euros.
The money barely reaches the affected parents, but remains in the pockets of highly paid consultants and interim lawyers whose unpleasant job it is to once again deal with distrust and nitpickery with suspicion and nitpickery.
And then there's the surreal Council of State ruling, who stated that you can indeed expect allowance parents who borrowed money from family or friends to prove this with a deed from the notary. So if you borrowed 75 euros from your mother in 2009 to buy groceries to feed your children, you should have had a notarial deed drawn up for 300 euros to substantiate that you are not fraud.
Unprecedented injustice and unprecedentedly absurd.
An elderly Turkish man remarked at the premiere: The Netherlands used to be different. When life was tough, you could just call on a reasonable government and that made me feel safe. Of course, that also attracted bad apples. But now it's assumed that everyone is a bad apple.
The only structural solution is a government that citizens will trust again. That we subtly fix absurd legislation on notarial acts for small loans. That officials dare to admit that they were wrong and that they are given the space to put their humanity first.
What remained of the welfare state has become a dystopian, intimidating control bureaucracy since the Participation Act. That bureaucracy costs so much money that it could almost finance a basic income.
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