Samenvatting

The Dutch youth policy limits itself to children who have or cause problems. Our Youth Law is even only related to youth care.
The consequences are disastrous: the results are extremely poor, especially in comparison with other countries. Scandinavian and Eastern European countries have a comprehensive infrastructure to offer children a useful, relaxed and pleasant leisure time. The motto of these leisure time organisations is inclusion. They choose for dilution (some criminal or civil law children are placed together with normal children), while we organise compaction of the problems (we put them all together in one institution).
The Netherlands prefers an unbalanced youth policy, where anything has been professionalized, whereby we look at children through worrying glasses. We do not see chances for development, but worrisome developments.
Politicians do not want to be informed about a better solution. They are consciously incompetent. Criminal law should look at that situation.