Abstract

This essay - a curatorial statement  for the trauma art archive at this website - examines the paradoxical nature of state intervention in child welfare and criminal justice. By employing Giorgio Agamben’s concept of Homo Sacer and the empirical findings of the De Winter Committee (2019), it argues that the state creates a "state of exception" for vulnerable individuals. Through institutional gaslighting, peer-only attachment, and systemic torture, the state erases the individual’s identity only to justify further repression in adulthood. This process is compounded by "lateral violence" from social movements, such as the LGBTQ+ community, which historically excluded and dehumanized those whose identities were forged in the crucible of institutional trauma.

 

I. The Institutional Vacuum: Peer-Only Attachment

The state’s first act of violence is the forced severance of the vertical bond between child, parents and family. By institutionalizing toddlers and forcing them into "peer-only attachment," the state abdicates its protective role. This creates a developmental vacuum where the individual is sacrificed to the collective. A harrowing example is the enforcement of silence during physical injury: children were forced to endure bleeding and pain without crying, under the threat of abandonment. By rewarding the suppression of trauma (e.g., with a symbolic sweet), the state conditions the child to prioritize the group over their own survival [1]. This reduces the child to bare life (zoē)—a managed "Untermensch" [2] whose internal world is permanently frozen in a state of unresolved infancy and peer-dependency.

II. The Sovereign Exception: Torture and Reward

The findings of the De Winter Committee (2019) confirmed that violence in Dutch youth care was structural and pervasive. This state-sanctioned torture—including physical abuse, identity or gender erasure, and social isolation—is even  met with state rewards for the perpetrators. When the Public Prosecution Service issues a Sepot 41 for clear abuse in 1996, while awarding honors to abusive foster parents, it reinforces the status of the victim as Homo Sacer. They are outside the protection of the law, yet fully subject to its capacity for violence.

III. Lateral Violence and the Hypocrisy of Belonging

The destruction of the individual is finalized through social exclusion. For decades, victims of state-sponsored gender violence faced "lateral violence" from within the LGBTQ+ community—a phenomenon where marginalized groups perpetuate bias against their own who do not fit "homonormative" standards. This community often acted as a hostile gatekeeper, treating trauma-born identities with contempt and death threats. The sudden, opportunistic "inclusion" of these identities in 2023 under labels like "non-binary" is not liberation, but a final act of gaslighting: an attempt to colonize a survival-based existence into a political correct category after decades of systemic abandonment.

 

IV. The Moral Crusade: From Neglected Child to Public Enemy

The core hypocrisy lies in the state’s temporal shift of "morality." The child who was once treated as an "Untermensch" is discarded. However, when that child becomes an adult, the state adopts a "Child-as-God" narrative. This abstraction is weaponized against the now-traumatized adult, who is recast as a "new Jew of society" or a social pariah. Through Nazi-style rhetoric, psychological torture in custody, and systemic exclusion, the state finalizes the destruction of those who testify to its own failures.

 

Conclusion

The victim is caught in a perpetual state of exception: first as a child who was "killable" through neglect, and later as an adult who is "sacrificable" on the altar of public morality. To challenge this system is to refuse the state's labels and expose it as the true architect of the displacement and erasure of the human soul.

 

References

• Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.
• Commissie Onderzoek naar Geweld in de Jeugdzorg (De Winter). (2019). Onvoldoende beschermd: Geweld in de Nederlandse jeugdzorg van 1945 tot heden. Den Haag: Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport.
• Lubitow, A., et al. (2020). Exclusion and Lateral Violence in LGBTQ+ Spaces. Journal of Homosexuality.
• Sayer, L. (2022). Queering Sexual Abuse: The Impact on Lesbian and Gay Survivors. IHLIA Research

 

Notes

[1] This mechanism of de-individualization serves a specific sovereign purpose: by destroying the child’s trust in their own physical and emotional needs, the state creates a "malleable mass." The individual grows up with a fundamental distrust of their own instincts, replaced by an extreme orientation toward external approval or fixations, ensuring long-term psychological dependency on external systems of authority or collective norms.

[2] The term Untermensch is used here to describe the state’s re-emergence of dehumanizing rhetoric. It refers to the process where the government categorizes specific individuals or groups as sub-human or "lesser beings" who are unworthy of legal protection or defense. By demonizing these individuals—often those the state itself has traumatized—the sovereign power strips them of their humanity to justify state-sanctioned hostility, repression, and social elimination.

 

Keywords: Trauma Art, Institutional Betrayal, Homo Sacer, De Winter Committee