Child Protection in Spain…Government struggling to over-run the family.

Heavily Roman Catholic Spain (and a few other Mediterranean societies, such as Italy) has been relatively “Child Protection” “Services” (CPS) immune, due to the hold that the church has had in this area for millennia. In Spain, it wasn’t until 1987, for example, that the first national law dealing with so called “child protection” was passed; and, to this day, Spain has been blessed with a much smaller problem with government-sponsored child-trafficking and state abuse than most of the “more prosperous” Western societies.

Indeed, even that 1987 law was not for the establishment of the horrendous CPS milieu that most Western nations endure, but rather, simply the first time that the national government sought to regulate foster homes and foster families. Spain’s social service systems are not nationally based, but almost everything in this area is handled by Spain’s 17 departments. Even the laws dealing with family intervention are departmental, versus national. Even this modest national oversight did not really begin to take hold until the mid 90s throughout most of Spain.

(Spanish Catholic priests, courtesy of alamy.com.)

The Church has always been the main locus of child care outside the family in Spanish society. Missions and Catholic-run children’s homes still permeate the country. You can not overstate the difference between secularized nations and so-called “backward” strongly religious ones when it comes to the pre-eminence of the family v.v. government. Families are still central to Spanish culture, and that same influence can be seen across South and Central America, where such invasive processes as “advanced” nation’s CPS systems are mostly unknown.

(Image courtesy of bilrelocation.com.)

The following article does a good job describing government involvement of families within Spain:

https://journals.copmadrid.org/pi/art/in2013a26

Here is a key excerpt from the link above:

“Looking at the data from 2011 (latest published data) in Spain, 35,505 children were found to be in OOHC (the data refers to December 31st that year), that represents a ratio of 45.7 per 10,000 minors in the population. Of those, 60.4% were found to be in foster care and the remaining 39.6% in residential care.”

In comparison to the United States, these numbers are astonishingly low. Spain has 46.5 million people, and the USA an estimated 320 million. So the USA has almost seven times the population, but approximately 15 times the number of children in state custody. Making the contrast even more extreme is the fact that almost half of the children considered to be in “state custody” in Spain, are actually living with extended family.

So, in summary about 20,000 children are outside the extended family unit in Spain, v. more than 400,000 in the secularized and “modernized” United States. Anecdotally, as well, we hear far, far less about children being abused while in state custody in Spain than we do in America. How much of this is due to religious tradition and practice in Spain is hard to assess, but it certainly can not be ignored. The impact of neighborhood/community/societal pressure on parents to treat their children properly and according to centuries-old mores can not be understated, either. These may not be the “advanced” methodologies of the more secularized/modernized nations, but they sure seem to be effective in keeping the state out of the home and the local community.

While there are only 20,000+ Spanish children in residential care in Spain, there have been studies done showing that these children, predictably, struggle with adjustment, behavioral, and transition-to-adulthood issues, as they do in any nation where children are kept for long periods in such settings. But, another very interesting tidbit about Spain, is that has not yet been overwhelmed and cowed by modern psychiatry.

(mindfreedom.org.)

Here is the next excerpt:

“In recent years the focus of research in residential care has been directed towards the growing emotional and behavioural problems of these children and young people and the problems an adequate treatment poses. Data from international literature shows a large incidence of these types of problems and the difficulty of good detection, referral, and treatment… The first Spanish research to provide data on the prevalence of these problems in residential care was carried out in the autonomous community of Extremadura…and showed that 27% of the children between 6 and 18 years old were having psychological treatment.”

The article is clear that this low usage of “professional” treatment to address the few children unfortunate enough to need institutional care is “unacceptable,” and that something must be done to boost these rates. But is this really a problem? I think you know how I feel about that. Spain’s kinship care children do much, much better than their residential care kids, and they have almost zero interaction with the psychiatric profession. It is admitted that the vast majority of kids raised by their grandparents (the vast majority of kinship arrangements) emerge well-balanced and successful, as compared to their peers in Spain’s residential care programs—even those who have been in “treatment.”

(shutterstock.com)

Compounding the disparity between Spanish children in kinship care and those in institutional settings when it comes to success rates is the fact that almost half the children in the latter setting are NOT Spanish, but recent illegal immigrants from North Africa. Difficulties in acculturation and in learning the language make the challenges of producing well-balanced and successful adults with such children a much more difficult proposal; but, the article suggests, the Spanish government has somehow managed to reduce the incidence of this influx where other European nations (and the U.K. and the USA) have not.

From an outsider’s perspective, I would have to say that Spain’s child protection situation is far, far better than almost anywhere else in the Western world, and while I am sure “professionals” would disagree with me (especially bureaucrats and psychiatrists) I attribute this to a couple of obvious factors:

*** The lack of of a national, large-scale bureaucracy charged with dealing with “the problem.”
*** The influence of the Catholic Church and Christian family values.
*** The high incidence of kinship (especially grandparent) care for those few kids who are taken from their original parents.

Sadly, Spain is a signatory to the dangerous “U.N. Convention of the Rights of the Child,” so the camel’s nose is already under the tent sniffing around. Spain’s families are going to have to be ever vigilant to avoid the bureaucratic class from using this foothold to declare a “child protection crisis” as they are so often wont to do, and to therefore create a crisis where none now exists.

International "child protection" bureaucrats have largely left Spain alone to this point, but that is due to change. They ARE the problem looking for any pockets of family/conservative cultural systems to invade and destroy.