31 March 2026 · analysis
When the state starts to feel: Rousseau, Weber, and the failure of youth care
Youth care is not failing because there is too little empathy — Rousseau will not save Lex without Weber
31 March 2026 · House of Viridian · Statecraft
On 26 March, Zembla documented in Children Nobody Wants how at least 400 young people over the past three years ended up in solo placements at holiday parks, campsites, and rented chalets. Supervised by freelance support workers, without professional care, sometimes for longer than a year, at costs running up to €1.75 million per child. The alderman of Smallingerland summarised the municipality’s position: “As a funder, we stand on the sidelines.” The Inspectorate (IGJ, the Dutch Health and Youth Care Inspectorate) said it had no idea this was happening at this scale. Minister Sterk announced consultations.
The reflexive response to broadcasts like this is predictable: more money, more places, more specialism, and above all more empathy. That reflex is understandable. It is also part of the problem.
Two roles, two logics
The youth care professional and the state each have their own function, with their own rationality that cannot be substituted for the other’s.
The professional is permitted to be Rousseauian. That is his trade. The child is not his behaviour. Trauma explains what goes wrong. When the environment changes, behaviour changes with it. The orthopedagogue in the broadcast who explains Lex’s violence as fight/flight/freeze, pure reptilian brain, is doing exactly what is expected of him: looking beyond visible behaviour to what lies beneath. The guardian who has been advocating for Lex for years, who sits at his mother’s bedside, who says “that is not you,” is fulfilling his role. It is good that there are people who look at children this way. Without them the system would not merely be dysfunctional — it would be inhuman.
The state has a different mandate. That mandate is not to feel but to function: to set rules, fund, audit, intervene, organise accountability. Not out of coldness but out of role. Weber called it Zweckrationalität: purposively rational action. The legitimacy of the state rests not on empathy but on reliability, lawfulness, and the capacity to foresee and bear consequences. When a state spends €1.75 million per child, the administrative question is not “do we feel for this child?” but “what is being delivered for that money, is it lawful, and is there an alternative that works better?”
These two roles are not opposed. They are complementary. The professional who believes in the child needs a state that organises the preconditions: places, budgets, quality standards, oversight. The state that steers on efficiency needs professionals who see the child as a human being and not a cost unit. Rousseau and Weber need each other. The problem arises when one takes over the role of the other.
The state that became Rousseau
What the Zembla broadcast documents is a state that has abandoned its own role.
The political decision to phase out secure youth care to zero places by 2030 was made from moral conviction. Jason Bugwandas’ documentary exposed serious abuses. The State Secretary said: “This should never have happened.” The cabinet decided: phase it out. That decision is understandable as a moral judgement. But it is a Gesinnungsethik decision — based on the inner conviction that detention is reprehensible, not on an analysis of foreseeable consequences.
The Weberian counter-question, the one demanded by Verantwortungsethik, was never asked: if we phase out secure youth care, where do these children go? Who funds the alternatives? Who provides oversight? And who is responsible when things go wrong?
The answer turned out to be: no one. Peter Dijkhoorn says it in the broadcast: “We never thought about what should take its place. That was left to the market. But it didn’t happen.” The state took a moral position, delegated implementation, and left the stage.
That pattern repeats itself at every level. The alderman who says he stands “on the sidelines as a funder” is not describing a legal constraint but a confusion of roles. A funder who spends €3 million over two years and claims to have no say is no longer a funder. The IGJ that does not know 400+ children are living at holiday parks is not providing oversight. The legislature that has allowed the Wams (a bill to legitimise cross-domain data sharing) to stall through two cabinet crises is not regulating.
At each of these levels, the administrative function — setting rules, auditing, intervening — has been replaced by an attitude that closely resembles the Rousseauian frame of the professional: we trust that it will work out. We leave it to the market. We stand on the sidelines. That is not policy. It is the absence of policy, expressed in the language of trust.
The consequences of role confusion
When the state stops fulfilling its Weberian function, four predictable consequences arise — each of them documented by Zembla.
The information symmetry disappears. Providers know more about their own capacity and costs than municipalities do. Municipalities do not know what other municipalities pay for comparable trajectories. No one has an overview of the child as a whole. Without information, the state cannot steer, cannot audit, and cannot intervene.
Financial discipline disappears. Care enterprises billing €20,000 per week per child operate in a market without price comparison, without quality assessment, and without competition. This is not market failure in the classical sense — it is the consequence of a state that does not use its financial steering instruments.
The accountability chain breaks. The court determines that a placement is contrary to law and to international treaties. The IGJ establishes that permanent supervision without judicial review is not permitted. But no one intervenes, because no one knows it is happening, and no one feels responsible for the whole.
The professional is left unprotected. In the legal vacuum — the Wams is stalled, the VIR (the national youth risk referral index) is being abolished without a successor — the professional who wants to share information in an emergency is protected by nothing. The conflict of duties offers legal space; the vital interests ground under GDPR does too; but there is no instrument to record that weighing process in a traceable way. So he does not share, and the situation escalates.
The professional has no administrative mandate — and should not be given one
The temptation after a broadcast like this is to give the professional more responsibility. More mandate, more override authority, more capacity to “sort things out in the child’s interest.” But that is precisely the same mistake again: placing an administrative mandate with the professional where it does not belong.
Lex’s guardian is not an administrator. He should not be calling 30 organisations to find a place. That is a system task. He should not be weighing whether sharing information gives him legal protection. That is an administrative responsibility. He should not be assessing the costs of a trajectory. That is financial oversight. Every minute he spends on system management is a minute he does not spend on Lex. And Lex is what he was trained for.
Restoring the administrative function is therefore not a cold alternative to good care. It is its precondition. When the state restores its information position, its financial steering, its oversight, the professional gets his role back. Rousseau can be Rousseau again, because Weber is Weber.
What that concretely requires
The state has three instruments: regulation, funding, and information. In youth care, all three are functioning inadequately.
Regulation: the Wams, the legislative proposal meant to legitimise cross-domain data sharing, has failed to land after two cabinet crises. The corrective economists prescribe for market failure — regulation — is still waiting.
Funding: municipalities pay whatever is billed without any grip on what is being supplied. The Act on improving the availability of youth care obliges regional cooperation via 42 youth care regions from 2027 onwards, but the instruments to make that cooperation real are missing.
Information: the VIR (Verwijsindex Risicojongeren — the national referral index for at-risk youth) is being abolished without a successor. Solo placements are not registered. The inspectorate is blind. The professional has no shared picture of who is involved with which child.
Of these three, information is the instrument that does not need to wait for legislation. Recording which organisations are involved with a child, on what legal basis information is being shared, which interventions have been deployed and with what result — that requires no new law. It requires infrastructure. That infrastructure is what we are building with iRecord: legal basis registration, cross-organisational network visibility, and an audit trail that both protects the professional and enables the state to fulfil its role.
But the point of this piece is broader than any single platform. The point is that youth care is not failing because there is too little empathy. It is failing because the state is not fulfilling its own function. As long as the state speaks the language of care instead of the language of governance, no professional — however committed — will be able to help the children Zembla brought into view.
Rousseau will not save Lex without Weber. And Weber without Rousseau should not want to.
House of Viridian develops administrative and digital infrastructure for the Dutch social domain. iRecord is our coordination platform for legal basis registration and cross-organisational network visibility. Statecraft is where we write about the institutional questions that lie behind it.