Home education in Switzerland

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The residential care in Switzerland dates back to the 18th century.

history

Time from the beginnings of home education until the 1960s

The world-famous Swiss pioneers in the field of home education include Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg . Since the founding of the first orphanages , rescue institutions and poor education institutions, home upbringing has primarily affected children from the lower classes as well as illegitimate children or children from discriminated groups ( Yeniche , foreign workers ), as well as children of addicts.

The declared intention to offer these children better life chances than in their family and social environment often failed because of structural and financial issues that were related. Because the providers of the children ( welfare and guardianship authorities) were sworn in by the politically dominant groups at the lowest possible cost for such institutions, they preferred large homes, run by cheap labor (often members of Catholic orders or evangelical Protestant groups ) who also run through affiliated horticultural and agricultural businesses kept costs as low as possible by means of strict child labor by the pupils. Girls' homes were often affiliated with laundries. Likewise, the pupils of the closed institutions of forced care for young people had to do forced labor .

This regime was often at the expense of school education. Many children and young people left the homes and educational institutions without an apprenticeship and were employed as agricultural laborers or service staff in better-off households. It was very rare for children from homes or youth centers of this kind to complete a higher education .

The poorly qualified staff was overwhelmed by the high occupancy rates and the unfavorable ratio of children and young people to carers. On the one hand, this led to mechanical, serial care without much attention to the individual child in infant and toddler homes, with the corresponding manifestations of hospitalism and deprivation , as well as to military-like drill in the children's and youth homes, but on the other hand also to abuse and excesses of violence. Widespread, but often undetected and mostly unpunished, there were sexual assaults and abuse up to and including rape by the management, the staff or even older pupils. Bed-wetting people were subjected to humiliating sentences, which usually exacerbated their problem. Due to specific clothing and inadequate or missing footwear, home children were exposed to ridicule and exclusion from the surrounding social environment, in addition to the already existing stigmatization as "orphanage", home children and "prisoner".

In the first two thirds of the 20th century, psychiatric and curative educational assessments often intensified these stigmatizations by labeling them from the fundus of eugenic and hereditary hygienic ideologems such as “hereditary inferior”, “unfavorable genes”, “contaminated origin”; this while retaining older, derogatory labels such as “baseless”, “neglected”, “dissolute” and “difficult to understand”. The number of third-party placements in Switzerland was also very high until the 1960s because the welfare authorities preferred family dissolutions to financial aid to socially disadvantaged large or single-parent families, which was in some cases stipulated by law.

History from the 1970s

With the improvement in the training of home care workers, the introduction of social pedagogy as a subject, the implementation and reception of research on hospitalism, the 1968 rebellion against authoritarian parenting styles and the home campaign in 1971/72, marked improvements were made in the organization, financing and care conditions of many homes and educational institutions. Numerous homes previously run by religious or other religious circles were closed or handed over to professional secular forces, but the number of pupils in state homes was also reduced and many state homes were also closed and sold or converted into drug rehab stations or accommodation for asylum seekers . In some cases, however, the conservative, authoritarian style of upbringing persisted until the turn of the millennium, for example in the boys' home “Auf der Grube” near Bern.

The increased reference to human rights and fundamental rights of children and adolescents under the sign of the late ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights by Switzerland (1974) also contributed to rethinking, especially with regard to the so-called " administrative provisions " who were interned in closed institutions and prisons for years without a court order “Youngsters. More supervision , the four-eyes principle and better, legally anchored control mechanisms should be better today , especially since the introduction of the new child protection law, which replaced the civil law provisions from 1912 on guardianship and child and youth welfare on January 1, 2013 Ensure guarantees of a good education of the children in care without harm from mistreatment and abuse .

21st century

After protests and concerns initially put forward in individual autobiographies , newspaper articles, documentaries and television programs, around 250 former contract children , children in care and foster children demanded official recognition of the injustice they had suffered and a historical review of what had happened on November 28, 2004 in Glattbrugg . In parallel to similar demands in other countries (Ireland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Austria and others), the victims of compulsory welfare measures also made demands for financial compensation for the mistreatment , the forced labor , the poor education, the stigmatization and the associated physical and psychological problems and financial losses.

On April 11, 2013 in Bern, headed by Federal Councilor Simonetta Sommaruga (SP), representatives from the federal government , cantons , municipalities, churches, home associations and farmers' associations apologized to the media and the numerous victims present for all the victims of this injustice in the period before 1981. At the same time, contact points for this group of people were created at the victim support centers and at the archives (for the purpose of providing assistance with viewing, copying and correcting personal files with their often derogatory content). Individual cities and cantons (Zurich, Winterthur, Canton Vaud) are currently making payments as "symbolic gestures" to former victims of compulsory welfare measures.

A round table for victims of compulsory welfare measures, supplemented by experts without voting rights, was set up on June 13, 2013 in Bern under the leadership of the Federal Council delegate for the victims of compulsory welfare measures, Alt, composed equally of 10 representatives from the victims' side and 10 representatives from the successor organizations of the perpetrator - Council of States Dr. iur. Hansruedi Stadler (CVP). The round table is to develop recommendations for historical and legal processing as well as financial compensation for the damage suffered for the attention of the institutions it represents in the sense of the claims of the victims' side. Victims' organizations demand a hardship fund for urgent emergencies and compensation of 120,000 francs per injured person. Individuals affected make far higher claims in court, but often bounce off the defense of the statute of limitations .

The Guido Fluri Foundation , which started a research project to process the history of children's homes in Switzerland in 2010 and converted the former children's home into the national memorial in Mümliswil on June 1, 2013 , announced a popular initiative on July 11, 2013 to anchor the same goals in the constitution . This is to ensure that the desired goals are achieved and implemented and not blocked again , as was the case in 2004 with the demands for compensation for the forcibly sterilized . A parliamentary initiative submitted by Paul Rechsteiner (SP) to parliament in 2011 is also pending for the legal rehabilitation of so-called " administratively cared for " young people and adults .

See also

literature

  • Urs Hafner: Home children: a story of growing up in the institution. Hier + Jetzt Verlag für Kultur und Geschichte, Baden 2011, ISBN 978-3-03-919218-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from August 1, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fuersorgerischezwangsmasshaben.ch
  2. ↑ http://www.fuersorgerischezwangsmasshaben.ch/index.html
  3. ↑ http://www.kinderheime-schweiz.ch/de/pdf/antraege_finanzplan_runder_tisch_10_juni_2013.pdf
  4. ↑ http://www.kinderheime-schweiz.ch/de/gedenkstaette_kinderheim_muemliswil.php
  5. ↑ http://www.kinderheime-schweiz.ch/de/Interview_Beobachter_online_11.7.2013.pdf
  6. ↑ http://www.parlament.ch/d/suche/seiten/geschaefte.aspx?gesch_id=20110431