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 the decades of hostility, contempt, and gaslighting with which the Dutch government responded to state-inflicted trauma. 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.

Personal motivation

Although violence in the youth care  system is a large issue in the Netherlands, involving many thousands of severe victims, I share my personal motivation to lift a part of my privacy, to show the devastating impact of childhood trauma in state care. 

As a child, I was allowed to see my own mother and separated siblings only  for an hour and a half once every  three years in a strange restaurant. My mother cried; she was so happy to see her children again - she gave me the only hugs during my childhood.  Back in the foster home, I was severely punished for any sign of  love for my own mother; Child Protective Services and foster parents just hated my parents, my siblings, family, and me, telling that we were 'the worst people on earth'.  I endured violence, humiliations and torture, but trembling and powerless, I also witnessed the extreme violence against my two brothers. This is what the government called 'care'.

I also witnessed the consequences of state care in later life. My youngest brother that I only met once in my childhood, who was completely detached,  froze to death at the age of 42 after being homeless for twenty-two years [1]; my eldest sister, tortured by her foster father who was a police officer, spent her adult life in a psychiatric hospital until she died of a common flu at the age of 61. I witnessed the lifelong struggles of my siblings directly related to the historical abuse in foster care. There is still today little improvement in the fundamental rights of the most vulnerable children in the youth care system—like in closed institutions or unsupervised 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. [2]  Conversely, the official complaint filed by my  brother and me against the foster parents about more than a decade of extreme violence 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.[3]

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 from Pleegzorg Nederland and the Raad voor de Kinderbescherming and describe Jimmy's childhood, as well as his later experiences and parts of his creative journey. The first chapter of Gepleegd is available in English. Created in the complete absence of professional mental health support, this body of work represents a raw process of survival. Due to a life spent in social isolation, Jimmy's earlier, extensive collections of artwork from 1992–1997 and 2004–2018 were almost entirely destroyed. 

The Origin: The French Netherlands & The Realm of Boys

BIOGRAPHY

Jimmy’s history within the Dutch youth care system is an epic of absolute survival. Born in early 1962, 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 extremely 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,  in which he rebuild his identity from the ruins of the past  as an act of absolute victory over the systems that tried to permanently erase him. 

[1] Omroep Gelderland 19-12-2009

[2] Digibron Goud, Woudenberg 14-09-1995
[3] 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- 604

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