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 their fathers and siblings) and locked inside cold  residential institutions (such as the Helper Haven in Groningen), and deliberately left without any vertical bonding. Adults didn't speak, they didn't comfort, they didn't help or interact...they were like cold creatures that look like humans but were more "robots for care".

This state-enforced horizontal and disorganized attachment  in residential and foster care altered their psychological blueprint for life, freezing their identity for belonging, intimacy, and safety. 

The very inconvenient reality of attachment outside the biological calendar -a lifelong blueprint of attachment to peers from childhood, deliberately concealed by the state to hide their responsibility-  is however a healthy, normal reaction to an insane and inhumane system imposed on the most vulnerable children, taken from their mothers, families and homes.

Cowardly, to avoid their responsibility and accountability, the state responds with great hostility, gaslighting, criminalizing and victim blaming on the victims of  forced peer oriented attachment, leaving them in an absolute void as easy prey for society. 

Pride

From ignorance, this frozen blueprint is regarded as 'wrong', 'deviant' and even 'criminal'' and generally rejected.  Completely excluded from society's modern concepts of inclusivity, diversity and understanding,  we are a tribe without a flag, yet we celebrate our identity with pride. 

And I'm not alone. There are many thousands, if not millions like me in society, all over the world,  that were not born this way, but made this way for life- that never had the chance in childhood to receive any vertical binding.  As Tim and Alex framed it:  They are everywhere but nobody knows who they are.

The project