Horizontal Attachment in Residential Youth Care: The Ultimate Institutional Betrayal

Children as young as two to five years old are forcibly stripped from their mothers and families, only to be warehoused in state-run institutions. Within these walls, caregivers are strictly forbidden from forming any emotional bond with the child. They are prohibited from offering comfort during pain or grief—precisely when a child’s longing for their mother is most agonizing. No hugs, no physical proximity, no warmth. These caregivers are reduced to cold, robotic functions of a state machine.

Denied any adult connection, the child is forced to seek love, human intimacy, and physical touch from their only peers: other  toddlers, infants and   children. This is the mechanism of horizontal attachment.

After being conditioned by the state to survive without adults and to rely entirely on other children, the child is abruptly displaced into a foster home. When foster parents fail to establish a bond—the most logical outcome following such state-mandated neglect and abuse—the child’s orientation toward the safety and proximity of children becomes permanent. To them, adults are experienced as cold, hostile, and utterly irrelevant.

The complex devastation of this upbringing—affecting sexuality, identity, relationships, and worldview—remains largely unexamined and hidden. Instead of taking accountability, the State, society, and mental health institutions respond with gaslighting and victim-blaming. While the public views these victims as perpetrators due to the very survival mechanisms the State forced upon them, they are, in fact, the most profound victims imaginable.

This is the ultimate institutional betrayal and secondary victimization: the State creates the tragedy, then blames the victim for the consequences of its own design.