In the 1960s, children entrusted to the care of the Dutch state were governed by a brutal regime. Babies and toddlers were forcibly torn from their mothers and locked inside cold  residential institutions. Here, the female daily caretakers deliberately withheld all vertical, motherly affection, touch, comfort... making vertical adult  bonding impossible. The State did not act out of ignorance, but out of conscious institutional negligence: the attachment mechanisms for babies and toddlers were well known (Bowlby, Ainsworth). Stripped of any adult love and intimacy, these children were biologically forced to seek emotional survival among peers and infants. This state-enforced horizontal attachment altered their psychological blueprint for life, freezing their identity for belonging, intimacy, and safety.

This inconvenient reality remains a massive taboo. To cover up its historical crimes and evade accountability, the State now pathologizes the survivors, framing their altered identities as 'deviant' and 'wrong', while abandoning them to an ignorant society and refusing to offer them protection. This is the highest form of institutional betrayal. Yet, this identity is not a pathology—it is a logical survival mechanism triggered by an insane system that ruined thousands of lives.

Pride

We are a tribe without a flag, completely excluded from society's modern concepts of inclusivity and understanding, yet we celebrate our identity with pride. And I'm not alone. There are many thousands like me in society. As Tim and Alex framed it:  They are everywhere but nobody knows who they are.

The project