read the first chapter of the book "Committed" by Jasper Heijting, published in 2020 by Tobi Vroegh in Amsterdam. A full translation of the book  is expected  autumn 2026. 

 

Committed

Surviving hate and violence in the foster care system

author: Jasper Heijting (pseudonym of Jimmy Groen)

 

Preface

Throughout the entire (investigated) period from 1945 to the present, physical, psychological and sexual violence occurred in the youth care system. Victims reported physical and psychological violence— primarily perpetrated by group leaders and foster parents—particularly from the years before 1970.

For former wards, psychological violence—such as persistent bullying, humiliation and isolation—has proven to have a major impact on their later lives. Frequently mentioned consequences include psycho-social health complaints, relationship problems and difficulties raising their own children. The prevailing negative societal view of children placed in care long facilitated violence. The youth care organizations had insufficient financial resources to find suitable staff and retain them long-term. For a long time, there was a lack of adequate training and methodologies, protective laws and regulations, and government oversight. Supervisors often failed to intervene in situations where violence occurred. The children in care could not or did not dare to talk about the violence and had virtually no one to turn to.

From the De Winter Committee report "Insufficiently Protected: Violence in Dutch Youth Care from 1945 to the Present"

 

 

FOREWORD

I have always felt different from others. This caused me many problems throughout my youth and later life. I usually couldn't explain how I felt about everything. Only later in life did it become clear that my feeling of being different was directly related to various childhood traumas.

Regardless of why I felt different, what I primarily needed was understanding, a listening ear, support and tailored help. In practice, this was lacking — often the opposite occurred, and I encountered incomprehension, aggression, violence and overt discrimination, which exacerbated many of my problems even into adulthood.  Visible but unclear symptoms of hidden psychiatric issues are often misunderstood or hastily interpreted through one-sided ideas, leading to prejudice. As a result, I was frequently treated differently — worse – than others. This also caused me physical injuries. A vicious circle emerged where more problems —with life goals, relationships, my body, identity and sexuality—developed, and I sank deeper into complete isolation.

It turned out no one was interested in who I was, why I was the way I was, or how I could be helped. A difficult search spanning over twenty years for appropriate mental healthcare yielded little concrete results and often brought me the opposite of what I needed. There were no social organizations or institutions I could rely on, and everywhere I turned, my requests for help were met with 'no'. I had no job, couldn' t participate in society and moved 57 times. Socially, I didn't exist.  Describing my childhood experiences has been a monumental task for me.

Now, at 57, I've found enough peace in recent years to write down my childhood story. My drive came from wanting to tell this story, needing to tell it, because what happened in my childhood has continued to play a dominant role in my life every single day.  Through this childhood story, I want to shed light on the development and various symptoms of 'dissociative identity disorder' and 'reactive attachment disorder' as they emerged during my youth. Dissociation— the splitting off of the 'self'—can occur when traumatic events are too overwhelming and persist over time. Then it 'runs away with you'. The traumatic experiences continue to exist separately, seemingly taking their own path. This alienates you from life. From dissociation, separate parts of the personality can eventually emerge, alternately determining thoughts, feelings and actions. In my case, I remember—partially—quite well how this was already happening in my childhood and progressively worsened. I called it 'living in multiple worlds', a life where I existed in increasingly different ways.

Another factor plays a role in my story: trauma sexuality . Very little is known about this in psychiatry, and hardly anything has been written on it. In practice, I've encountered no understanding whatsoever of the many problems related to it. Trauma sexuality is sexuality based on traumatic events—usually in early childhood—where others were all- determining. It is thus an imposed sexuality, which in my case has remained virtually unchanged. I've tried to write as openly and honestly as possible, because only this way the underlying feelings, questions, doubts and thoughts at different ages can be understood. All individuals in this story are real people, but their names are fictitious. The dates mentioned, the names of organizations and institutions, and all locations in this story are presented unchanged.

 

Jasper Heijting

 

 

Chapter 1

 

In January 1981, I was nearly nineteen. A month earlier, the state guardianship association called Jeugdbelangen from Utrecht, under whose care I fell, found a room for me in an ordinary residential neighborhood in Harderwijk. Well, ‘room’… it was really more like a large extension of the living room of the residents, Harm and Wilco. When they introduced themselves, they introduced themselves as a happy gay couple.

Harm was quite chubby, and with his small, scruffy mustache and big  smile, he looked like the kind of cheerful character you'd see on a jam jar label. Wilco was a tall, broad man. Whenever I saw him, he was usually wearing black leather clothes with buckles everywhere. Because of this, he looked as if he'd just stepped off a motorbike, though he didn't own one at all. What I really couldn’t understand was why anyone would wear such heavy, warm leather clothing even in very hot weather. Both men were friendly, always in good spirits, and generous to boot. The rent for the room was quite low, and there were often biscuits or packets of crisps on the counter that I was free to take.

"If you're short of anything, just help yourself—we were eighteen once too , lad," Harm said with a wink. The rented room was actually the short leg of their L‑shaped living room. It had been separated from the kitchen and the rest of the space by two tall white cupboards placed about half a meter apart. Between them ran a narrow passageway that led into my room. From the kitchen you looked straight at the rough hardboard backs of the cupboards, which stood out sharply against the otherwise neatly furnished house. Both men always let me use the kitchen to prepare my meals. That was incredibly convenient, because I owned almost nothing at the time—not even a spoon, a mug, a plate, or a pan. My cooking skills didn’ t extend much further than boiling water or frying an egg.

 

Harm and Wilco lived a very ordinary life, nothing remarkable about it. Yet one thing did strike me: it often felt as though they didn’t really live there at all, and that I was the main occupant. I rarely ran into either of them in the house. That gave me the freedom to play loud music whenever I felt like it and generally do as I pleased. The kitchen was always free as well. In the little space behind the cupboards, I didn’ t have many belongings. There was a mattress on the floor where I slept under an old, flattened‑ out sleeping bag. A simple wooden chair from the house stood there too, though I hardly ever used it—I usually just sprawled out on the mattress. In one corner, right on the floor, sat my cheap little suitcase record player, bought for a tenner, with a small pile of LPs and singles leaning crookedly against the wall. The music I played was mostly tracks by The Ramones, The Rolling Stones, and Cuby and the Blizzards. My collection wasn’ t very big yet; I’d only recently started listening to music and had no idea what existed. And of course, I owned so few records simply because I didn’t have the money to buy more.

In one of the tall white cupboards I kept my clothes, which easily fit into a small plastic bag. There was also an old shoe box containing my only valuables: a book of fairy tales, a small tin sweet cup I’d been given to mark the centenary of the children’s home where I’d once lived, a dozen old photographs in an envelope, and a brown folder with my passport. Anyone looking closely at my sleeping spot would have noticed two small stuffed animals at the head of the mattress — a brown plush kitten named Bimbam and a pink, sawdust‑ stuffed elephant called Dumbo. They were my only companions, the only ones I truly talked to.

 

It was here, in this room—perhaps because for the first time in my life I was living independently — that I realized something was seriously wrong with me. Yes, it felt like something bad. Slowly, the awareness grew that I was heading into an incredibly heavy and difficult life. I was nearly nineteen, yet somehow boys of primary‑school age were my role models for who I wanted to become. Who on earth felt something as strange as that. Why would I feel this way?

Yes, I wanted to be exactly like the boys I saw everywhere—to look like them, to wear the same tough boys’ clothes. But it went further than that. I actually wanted their bodies too: slim, slight, completely hairless. I wanted to live in their world. I hated the hair that had begun to sprout in different places on my own body. My body? That body, which didn’ t feel like mine at all and kept changing against my will.

At first, I hardly noticed it—it crept in so quietly, so insidiously. A tiny hair here and there, soft at first, pale and downy. Slowly but surely, those hairs grew darker and coarser, turning rough and impossible to ignore. An irreversible fact. It began in my pubic area and under my arms. Frightening, yes, but I resigned myself to it. Maybe because it was hidden there, where no one could see. Still, even if no one saw it, I hated it. It didn’t suit me at all. If I could have chosen, I would have wiped out every last strand of body hair. I would have needed to be completely boyzilian before I could accept my body. Then I discovered hairs on my chin as well. Strange, prickly weeds seemed to be taking over a smooth tiled floor. My chest and legs were soon invaded by the same hair virus. My body, it seemed, had betrayed me behind my back. It was presenting something —someone —that I wasn’t at all. What I really wanted was to be like all the other boys—to go to school and play with friends. Climbing frames, days at the beach, kicking a ball around on a field. Wonderful. Yes, I wanted to build dens and do everything boys did—that’s what I longed for.

In that little room, lying on my mattress between my stuffed animals Dumbo and Bimbam, I closed my eyes and thought about my situation. Who was I, if boys were still my role models? Worse —if I longed to become as masculine as they were? Officially, I was already older. And a man— masculine —that wasn’ t how I felt at all. How awkward. A man was something I never wanted to be. Never. Men had never been my role models. Boys had. In fact, all of them.

What would you call it, if someone saw boys as their role models? Did that even have a name? Harm and Wilco had told me the name for what they were: gay. At least they were something. Though maybe that wasn’t so great either—back in the deeply religious Veluwe -region, I’d been taught that gay people weren’t good. They were “on the wrong side.” Strange, disturbed, even “people to be fought”—that’s what I’d been taught. Later, of course, I learned that wasn’t true. Because to me, they were simply on the right side—just different.

According to Harm and Wilco, I probably wasn’t gay—because not long after we met, they openly told me more about their own sexuality.

During the conversation that followed, I cautiously told them that boys between seven and twelve were my role models, even for things I saw as truly masculine. Harm smiled warmly, but I could tell he found my story rather strange. I definitely wasn’t gay. No—my sexuality wasn’t really like theirs at all, I thought. It felt more like a keyboard on which someone else was pressing the keys, forcing me to play a tune I didn’t recognize, making me wander into a story someone else had written for me. Wasn’t I still living in some cruel, eerie fairy tale every single day?

In my sexuality—if you could even call it that—there were witches. And animals. At best, I was still just a baby, a toddler, simply a small child.

Or perhaps some kind of creature. Everything was mixed together, always with so much violence. And such terribly strange, unpleasant things. None of it felt like it belonged to me. Did a sexuality like that even have a name. I didn’t understand. Why was I stuck with something so difficult.

Did others feel this too?

Wilco went on to explain that many people didn’t even consider gay people entirely normal—some even thought they were mentally disturbed. That they supposedly belonged in a psychiatric institution. The idea shocked me. Mentally disturbed… didn’t that mean you belonged in a lunatic asylum, that they would try to treat you for your sexuality. Was that even possible? I knew enough to be afraid of being labelled “mentally disturbed,” so I wisely kept quiet about my strange desires.

Almost everything about my life seemed “weird” in other people’s eyes. Having little boys as role models for my identity, having bizarre images in my sexuality. And that was only part of the peculiar feelings I carried. Take my age, for instance. It often felt wrong. Or sometimes completely off. Officially, I was eighteen. Me. Ridiculous. Nonsense. What was someone that age even supposed to do. What did an eighteen‑year‑old look like. I genuinely had no idea. Lying on my sleeping bag, I suddenly found myself wrestling with so many questions. Was I supposed to become an adult, or was I already one simply because I lived on my own?  When was someone actually an adult? Who decided that? Being an adult now would be an absolute disaster for me—the greatest tragedy that could ever happen in my life. An adult. Under no circumstances did I want to become that. It couldn’t possibly be the intention, because who in their right mind would ever turn into such a horribly awful person. But at the same time, if I was already an adult, then it was irrevocably too late. That would mean I had suddenly arrived in the time after my childhood while, judging by how I felt, everything was still supposed to be ahead of me.

My entire life seemed turned upside down. I couldn't deny it—I was probably mad. I felt empty, like I was nothing at all. A deep loneliness lived inside me. I felt extinguished—no, wrung out. My whole life seemed turned upside down. I couldn’t deny it—I was probably mad. I felt empty, as if I were nothing at all. A deep loneliness lived inside me. I felt extinguished—no, wrung out. As though at eighteen I had already reached the end of my life while, paradoxically, it felt as if I hadn’t truly lived a single day of it yet. I got up, walked between the tall cupboards into the kitchen, quickly rinsed a mug and made a cup of brown liquid with a spoonful of instant coffee and hot tap water—something I called “coffee.” Most of the time I couldn’t be bothered to boil water, so it was warm enough like this. Through the narrow gap I returned to my room. I set the coffee on the floor beside the mattress and stretched out again on the sleeping bag, my head resting precisely between Bimbam and Dumbo. I gave them a quick hug , “You don’t know either, do you?” No answer came. The silence felt eerie. Even my stuffed animals  had nothing to say that day. To understand how everything had come to this, I had to go all the way back to the very beginning of my life.

2

 

I lived with my parents for only a short time, from my birth in early 1962 until the autumn of 1964. Yet that world—the place where I spent my earliest years as a baby and toddler—has always lingered in my mind. My own house, the place that has always felt like my only true home, is one I never really left.

Home was partly the ordinary world where I lived with my parents and my three brothers and two sisters. My oldest brother, Remco, was six years older than me. Then came Bram, five years older, and Gert, about two years older. My big sister Linda was four years older, and my baby sister Elly was born a year after me. We all arrived roughly a year apart. My parents’ presence, during the time I still lived at home, was something I took for granted without ever thinking about it.

Of my father and mother, I remember very little from those years— mostly just a lingering feeling. The only vague image I have of my mother from that time is a single still moment, just the two of us.

Bathed in the warm orange glow of the large sodium lamps lining a cobbled road between tall trees, I sat perched on her arm, waving goodbye to relatives driving away. A perfect we‑moment, just my mother and me. Of my father, I remember nothing. Except that whenever I even briefly think of him, two images automatically surface in my mind. The first is that of a large black bird that always frightened me. The second, stronger image is that of a rooster’s head—with fierce, piercing eyes and a sharp pointed beak beneath those dreadful dangling wattles. Yes, to me, my father has always existed as either a crow or a rooster‑head.

Even now, a warm feeling washes over me when I think of the large zinc tub in the courtyard behind my parents’ house. Sheltered by tall green‑painted wooden fences, that little space gave me just enough safety to dare explore the outside world.