Zembla exposé reveals the price of coordination failure: hundreds of children stranded in a system without oversight

On March 26, Dutch investigative journalism programme Zembla aired "Children Nobody Wants" — the first systematic account of how many young people in the Netherlands end up in so-called solo placements: at least 400 in three years, scattered across holiday parks, campsites, and rented chalets, supervised by freelance care workers who often do not know what their assignment entails. Costs per child run up to €1.75 million. One municipality spent €3 million in two years on a handful of cases — nearly 10% of its entire youth care budget.

The Netherlands has a highly decentralised social care system. Since 2015, municipalities — not the national government — are responsible for youth care, mental health support, and social services. This means dozens of organisations may be involved with a single child: certified guardianship agencies, the Child Protection Board, neighbourhood teams, care providers, schools, GPs, and police. None of these organisations has a shared overview of who else is involved.

The coordination gap

The case of 17-year-old Lex, placed in care more than ten times since the age of four, illustrates the mechanism. His guardianship institution sometimes had to approach 30 organisations to find a placement — all of them could say no. Professor emeritus Peer van der Helm, who tracked 22 solo-placed youths on behalf of the city of Rotterdam, calls the result "mini closed youth care facilities." One girl at a holiday park turned out to have fallen into the hands of a sex trafficker while officially receiving day care.

The only national system that addressed cross-agency coordination — the Verwijsindex Risicojongeren (VIR, a referral index for at-risk youth) — is being abolished. The Dutch Ministry of Health has confirmed that no replacement IT system will be built. The 42 youth care regions that will be legally required to collaborate regionally from 2027 will have no infrastructure to make that collaboration work.

Waiting for the Wams is not an option

The standard response to the legal vacuum around data sharing is to point to the Wams — a legislative proposal intended to regulate cross-domain data sharing in the social domain. After two cabinet crises, the Wams has stalled politically. But the claim that professionals may not share information until the Wams passes is incorrect. The existing legal framework provides more room than professionals currently use.

The Dutch GDPR (AVG) provides in Article 6(1)(d) an explicit legal basis for processing data to protect vital interests. The established legal doctrine of "conflict of duties" allows a professional to breach confidentiality when a compelling interest justifies it — such as a suicidal child or a young person at risk of criminal exploitation. The reason professionals do not use this latitude is not ignorance of the law. It is that they have nowhere to record that they made a judgement call, what that assessment entailed, and how long the exception applies. Without an audit trail, the professional is unprotected in any subsequent investigation. So they do not share, and the situation escalates.

Recording what you do — even when you deviate

This is precisely the design choice that distinguishes iRecord. The platform offers a vital-interest legal basis as a full registration route alongside consent, statutory duty, and public interest. When a professional judges that the situation warrants deviation from standard procedure, they register it: the reasoning, the parties involved, the life domains affected, the intended duration. This creates the traceable assessment that Dutch administrative law principles require, and the audit trail that protects the professional.

The children featured in the Zembla investigation needed that infrastructure. They did not have it.

iRecord is the coordination platform built by House of Viridian for the Dutch social domain: digital legal-basis registration, cross-organisational network visibility, and multidisciplinary consultation support with full audit trail.