Co-organized in record time by the Syndicat des immenses, the demonstration on November 20, 2024, was a success. You can read the mobilizing flyer here (with the list of other organizers) and the press review there.
On Sunday, May 18, 2025, at 3 p.m., just a few days after the International Day of Families (May 15), a second demonstration will take place — once again at Place Poelaert, a stone’s throw from the Brussels Courthouse.
This demonstration will be based on the same principles but will be broadened to include more parents, young people, organizations, and above all, more professionals in child and youth welfare who share our analysis.
Indeed, when there is an alliance between the “beneficiaries/victims” of the system and the professionals working within it, the societal and media impact is far greater.
Otherwise, people can — rightly or wrongly — continue to suspect the “victims” of exaggeration and the professionals of acting only in their own corporatist interests.
But if both parties demonstrate side by side, it becomes undeniable that there is a real problem.
Some professionals were present at our November 20 demonstration, but too discreetly.
You can find the flyer in English, French and Dutch (it is provisional, as the list of co-organizing associations is not yet complete. If your association would like to be included, please email syndicatdesimmenses@gmail.com).
A FB event!
Name of the group behind the movement: Les désenfancé·e·s en colère! (“The dischilded in anger!”), with a double meaning — both the parent who unjustly “loses” their placed child and the child whose childhood has been stolen.
Two newly coined terms support our analysis:
– Principirisme:
The tendency to design systems and procedures — youth welfare, in this case — based on the “worst cases”, and then to apply those same procedures even to “less serious” cases…
This leads to a tendency to exaggerate the seriousness of those less severe cases to justify intervention — such as placing the child — and it works;
– Continuisme:
The assumption that there is a natural continuum between the “worst cases” and the “less serious” ones.
Principirisme and continuisme reinforce each other, and they are clearly at work in the youth welfare sector (and in other fields as well).
While everyone agrees on the need for a child and youth welfare system to deal with the most serious cases, almost no one realizes the abuse and trauma this system can cause for “less serious” situations — beginning with placement, not as a last resort, but as a kind of precautionary principle, which, in the name of the “best interest of the child,” ultimately protects the system more than the child.
And if hardly anyone is aware of these dysfunctions — which are not accidental but systemic — then it is crucial to raise awareness.
As we say at the Syndicat des immenses, we must bring this issue into the public and societal debate.
Hence, the demonstration on May 18, 2025.
Child and youth welfare only makes the headlines when there are too few placements available to protect children(see the latest example here), never when children are placed who should not have been!
Read: We are not against justice; we want to talk to her about Cathy.
The involvement of the Syndicat des immenses is linked to the theme “Where is the best interest of the minimenses?”— the focus of the third Summer University of the Immenses, to be held in December 2025 at ULB (Université libre de Bruxelles).
Clarification:
“Minimense” refers not only to
-
a child living in “immensity” because their parent(s) is/are “immense” (i.e. homeless or poorly housed),
but also -
any child placed in an institution, since they are, by definition, deprived of a true home.
Would you like to get involved — personally, professionally, or through an organization (and, if necessary, anonymously) — in the May 18, 2025 demonstration and beyond?
Please write to syndicatdesimmenses@gmail.com.
