The number of external aid measures provided by the child and youth welfare agency went up in recent years. In 2014, the child and youth welfare agency had to intervene in 4,735 cases. In 2018, the number of those cases was up to a little over 7,000.
The number of people taking advantage of direct aid measures by the national children's office (ONE) has also gone up. Last year, around 3% of young people under the age of 26 received financial aid by ONE. Back in 2014, this number was only at about 2%.
These numbers were provided by the ministry for education and the ministry of justice in their joint answer to the parliamentary question.
CSV MP Marc Spautz posed the parliamentary question after having read an article in the Luxemburger Wort (LW) newspaper entitled "Forced into a strange home". The article claimed that there are children in Luxembourg that have been split up from their parents because of the family's financial troubles and have been placed in another family or even a children's home.
The LW article went on to say that in Luxembourg, about 1,300 children and teenagers no longer live with their own family. About 81% of those are minors that have been placed elsewhere following a legal decision.
The ministries of education and justice refuted these claims. They stated that these types of measures, in particular children being places in homes and with new families upon a court order, could and would never be taken purely on the basis of the parents' financial standing.
While judges and juvenile courts can decide to remove minors from their home, they have to be considered to be at risk. This means that the child or the teenager in question would have had to be neglected physically and mentally, or on the level of their education, to warrant such an order. The abuse of minors is another case in which child protective services usually have to step in.
However, the government's answer to the parliamentary question revealed that there is often a correlation between financial difficulties and mild mistreatment in cases where children have to be removed from their homes. But before families are broken up, a host of other aid measures will have been taken first.
