So where is God?  (30 x 40 cm  print)

From Destroyed collection orig. pastel on paper 1997

In 2019, the De Winter Commission presented its report on violence within the youth care system, entitled "Insufficiently Protected." This is a sickening euphemism. It should have been titled: "Not Protected at All. Not Even for a Second."

Motivation

The driving force behind publishing this archive of approximately 600 works (2019–2025) is simple: when a state shows utter contempt for citizens who paid with everything they had—losing their parents, children, family, home, childhood, identity, safety, their feeling of belonging and a future—making that trauma visible becomes an act of absolute necessity.  After they failed to erase my creativity in foster care, I rebuilt my life around it. The archive is a witness to a life full of creativity – previous major art collections were destroyed in 2002 and 2018, but this archive exists now.

Despite official, general apologies from the government and a monument to the victims of the system, I never truly belonged in society. For decades after leaving foster care, I was confronted with hatred, violence, and rejection from the Dutch government, all diversity and inclusion institutions, mental health services, and other organizations where I sought help. The answer was invariably: we don't need you, we don't understand it, we don't want to know anything about it, it is too complex, figure it out yourself. In 1989, a psychiatrist told me that suicide was the best option in my case – but I am still here, rebuilding my life after my foster care.

In an act of ultimate gaslighting, the Dutch government honored the foster mother who severely abused two of my brothers and me  with a gold medal in the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1995. [1]  Conversely, the official complaint filed by my  brother and me against the foster parents  one year later was deliberately dismissed by the Public Prosecutor (by a sepot 41). There has never been reparative justice, even though historically, the government spent vast amounts of money to fund the destruction of the child in state care.[2] 

Recognition and Apologies

The autobiographical urgency of this collection and the reality of the underlying trauma are formally recognized by independent official bodies, including the Schadefonds Geweldsmisdrijven (which recognized the case within the category of most severe victims of violence), alongside official, personal apologies from Pleegzorg Nederland and the Raad voor de Kinderbescherming.

Autobiography

This visual archive coexists alongside the autobiographical books Gepleegd and Hoe word ik Tim?, authored in Dutch under the pseudonym Jasper Heijting. These volumes contain the official apologies and describe Jimmy's fragmented childhood, as well as his later experiences and parts of his creative journey. The first chapter of Gepleegd is available in English. 

The origin: The French Netherlands & The Realm of Boys

Jimmy’s history within the Dutch youth care system is an epic of absolute survival. Born in early 1962 in Apeldoorn, he was separated from his mother in the autumn of 1964 and placed into a cold institutional world where he survived through peer-oriented attachment. At age four, he was abruptly removed from his toddler group and placed with a foster family. The following thirteen years (1966–1979) were spent in a state-sanctioned foster environment engineered around military discipline and fundamentalist religious suppression. The explicit goal was to permanently alter his gender, identity, and origin through extreme violence and dehumanization.

THEY FAILED.

During his primary school years, Jimmy claimed absolute sovereignty over his own mind. Confined to darkness for many weeks at a time, he survived by turning to beautiful, colorful hallucinations inspired by a single fraction of light that reached his eyes. He fragmented into self-created worlds, reigning as King of his imaginary island, The French Netherlands, which was constantly beset by enemies and natural disasters.

Guided by his imagination and the profound companionship of his stuffed animals—the cat Bimbam, the small horse Pietertje, and the pink elephant Dombo—he outlasted systematic gender based torture. Jimmy endured this hostile environment by mentally retreating to the safety of his original toddler group. In his mind, he created The Realm of Boys: an imaginary world where only little boys lived and ruled. At age seventeen, he broke free from his foster parents, surviving his final years in the system abandoned on the streets and in forests. In 1981, Jimmy left state care without qualifications or support—carrying permanent physical and psychological injuries, but carrying something much greater: his freedom, used to rebuild his identity from  the ruins of the past. 

[1] Digibron Goud, Woudenberg 14-09-1995
[2] The Foster Care Business Model: State-Funded Exploitation and Forced Labor (Case Study: 1966–1979)

Content Warning

This archive contains raw and  heavy depictions of institutional violence and trauma, that some people may find disturbing.

archive #1      Institutional violence,youth/  foster care  1-45

archive #2     Institutional violence, foster care  46-98

archive #3     Police violence and article 3 ECHR [1986]  99-120 

 archive #4    Institutional violence, youth/ foster care 121-162

 archive #5    Trauma Art and the Body   163-185

 archive #6    Institutional violence, youth and foster care  186-232

 archive #7    Institutional violence in foster care: gender based violence  233-280

archive #8    Institutional betrayal and violence in foster care 281-325

archive #9    Trauma art about youth care and violence in foster care 326-377

archive #10  Trauma art about violence in foster care378-428

archive #11  Trauma art 1992-1997   (Portraits, cult?/  Residential) 429-486

archive #12  (Project) Photographs and artwork: "Stigma by Design: The Enduring Pulse of the State 487-538

archive #13  Trauma art on institutional violence 541- 617

Related pages (artwork on trauma & identity):

Tim draws back   Work from Tim  about peer - only/ oriented  attachment in a children's home 

Soft queer rebels      portraits about queer identity in childhood, from the identity restoration studio (2021-2023)

They are everywhere but nobody knows who they are about marginalized, erased and voiceless identities by Tim and Alex

PUBLISHED  ZINES

Published books under the pseudonym

'Jasper Heijting'

Gepleegd   [English: Committed]  Gepleegd, published by  Tobi Vroegh Amsterdam

Editors: Ilona Barsony, Claire Hülsenbeck, Anouk de Jong, Rohan Karbet 

Executive Summary for Academics, Jurists, and Curators:
Gepleegd ("Committed") is a harrowing, autobiographical ego-document that exposes the catastrophic reality of state-sanctioned foster care abuse and institutional violence under the Dutch youth care system (jeugdzorg). Written with acute psychological precision, the book documents the systematic dehumanization of a child and the profound fragmentation of the human psyche as a survival mechanism against absolute terror.

Language: Dutch

Available in the libraries of the Netherlands and Flanders and bookstores.

2020  EAN   9789078761785

Read the first chapter of this book  in English

Hoe word ik Tim?  [English: How do I become Tim?]     

Executive Summary for Academics, Jurists, and Curators:
Hoe word ik Tim? ("How Do I Become Tim?") is the critical second volume of Jasper Heijting’s ego-documentary series. It traces the lifelong, agonizing aftermath of state-sanctioned childhood torture and details the psychological phenomenon of a fragmented inner world (also labeled as Dissociative Identity Disorder). Most importantly, this volume documents the exact historical turning point where the author begins to use raw visual art (art brut) as his sole mechanism for survival when all societal, medical, and legal institutions utterly fail him.

Language: Dutch. Image cover: Jo Coort

Available in the library of Flanders and bookstores.

2021   EAN  9789464068153