Danish eugenic tradition: Removing the inuit children and giving them to Danish foster parents

Brutal removal of inuit children to Danish foster parents is still  a tradition in Denmark.

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On 24 October, a Greenlandic woman local municipality authority  in Thisted Denmark decided that her child, when it would later be born, should be handed over to the anxiously waiting foster parents, who apparently had no qualms about that procedure, shortly after birth. Thus, between the decision and until the birth, she was  forced incubating mother. This is legal in Denmark!

The child is now born, and it was handed over shortly after birth.

 

I expect that the Board of Appeal will confirm the strongly criticizable decision from Thisted Municipality. The Board of Appeal does not usually go into the substance of the cases in any way, but only takes a position on the documents the municipality provides it with and is content to look at whether the boared “(Children and Youth Committee”) formally had the competence to make the appealed decision. Indeed, it has this competence.

 

The trouble is, that in spite of international standards, Danish Psychologists still use Danish Psychometric adapted test methods as WAIS IV, WISC, Baliey and Rorschach on inuit. Greenlandic way of thinking, language, cultural imagination etc. differs not only slightly, but very distinctively  from Danish. Inuit culture and language is indigenous.  I lived in Nuuk for 4 years and cannot speak or read Greenlandic.

 

 

The case was discussed  in Danish press, and the skilled psychologist Professor Ask Elklit has called for the use of Parental Competence Examinations (FKU, PCE) to be dropped on Greenlanders in Denmark.

According to international standards, Danish adapted personality tests may only be used on Danes with Danish as their mother tongue, Danish culture etc. and with Danish psychologists.. PCE is the normally used method to measure parents skills in Denmark and with specail attention to IQ and mentalization.

I don’t know what was going on in the minds of the Danish “child experts”. Perhaps the legal authority to place on the grounds of low intelligence seemed to them inescapable. They believe that if you are not allowed to use psychological tests, you cannot assess parents’ parenting skills. To the extent that that thought is internalized in their imagination, they themselves have eaten the basic premises of racial hygiene.

Greenlanders, as I understand them (possibility of misunderstanding exists), think more in skills than in intelligence, which is after all more abstract and less practically oriented.

The press (DR, newspapers etc.) have given very good access to Thisted Municipality’s director of the Family Department. He has paddled and wrapped it all up. Thorough investigations, free choice of method.

He has refused to comply with demands for rectification under the Data Protection Regulation. Among other things, with an apparition in Thisted on the occasion invented claim that the mother in Greenland should have lived in an alcoholic home. She has requested that the claim be corrected as false, because according to her sober recollection, her parents drank extremely rarely, once three or four times a year and otherwise not at all.

 

It is about racial hygiene and bad administrative law practice.

 

 

The simple thing in the Thisted case, as in other cases, is that you measure the intelligence quotient. If it is too low, the person in question is for that reason alone unsuitable as a mother or father. The tradition originates from K.K. Steincke’s social reform (1920) , which on this point was characterized by racial hygiene. Steincke’s thoughts were based on a particular interpretation of Darwin’s teachings, which also became part of the Nazi racial doctrine.
Low intelligence is inherited, and since the unintelligent can reproduce, the Danish tribe is threatened by increasing stupidity and the downfall of civilization. Therefore, it was necessary to limit the reproduction of the people who threaten the survival of the Danish tribe.

 

“If we therefore do not want to risk the gradual decline and eventual downfall of modern European Civilization, we must engage in a systematic counteraction of the mentioned unfortunate consequences of Civilization and also aim for a refinement of the race, the so-called eugenics[4], in Germany and the Nordic region in particular called Race hygiene or Race improvement.” K.K Steincke,

 

But as is well known, this way of thinking also contained an idea that the Aryan or at least the Nordic race should be superior to other species.

Now you would think that the more racist mindset would have evaporated after WW2, introduction of human rights etc.

I do not want to waste the readers’ time by unfolding my experiences with regard to the Danish ruler mentality towards the Inuit in Greenland and in Denmark in general. In short, it can be said. As long as it all bears the stamp of a post-colonial civilization project, the so-called child experts will support the view that all the tests that have so far been carried out on Greenlanders have been relevant and correct. This can also be seen from the fact that the children are never or almost never sent home to their inuit parents. Thus, they lose their inuit identity.

 

The placement system as we know it today, I am researching, I want to shed light on it. In the coming time, I will try to drive my prejudice to the ground: It goes against basic legal principles. I’ll see if I can find a plausible defense for that. My optimism on that point is limited.

 

After the “Service Act”, now replaced by the “Children’s Act”, there was a direct authority to place a child if its parents were too lowly gifted, measured by the intelligence quotient. In the cases I know of against Greenlanders, the intelligence quotient is always mentioned and the allegation of drinking is rarely documented. When, as here, it concerns coercive intervention outside the criminal justice system, there are particularly strict documentation requirements for the truth value of the allegations on which a decision is based.

The much-hyped talk about thorough investigations and great work can be boiled down to the reasons.

The mother from Thisted has previously had children forcibly removed because she scored low intelligence and because, under the observation of Danish caseworkers, she was not good at passing a mimicry exam. (look a baby in the eyes in a Danish way, “mentalizing”. As a Greenlander, she failed twice. And then the old tests with low FKU intelligence – deeply misspecified – are used partly as justification for the third removal, this time from birth It is stated directly in the justification. The same psychologist who made the two earlier, has just made the thirdr one. The child is removed from his mother because the mother is falsely alleged to have a for low intelligence and because she had difficulty looking at a doll as a pregnant.  She has not played with dolls in Illuullissaatt.

IThe new Social Minister Sophie Hæstorp’s  made a new statement: for  the future, FKU may not necessarily be used with Greenlanders. But what about the past?  The new positive announcement, which are supposed  then suddenly all the hundreds of placements based on useless personality tests topple over. It’s called too big to fail. The system with KL (municipalities common board) , the National Board of Social Affairs and the uncritical psychologists who have had their way, can hardly sustain that. So, “same procedure as every year”.

The Thisted case also shows the historical perspective. Prejudice and colonialism go hand in hand.
In Thisted and the rest of the country, the case handlers still live with prejudices  that Greenlanders are less gifted and drinkers.
And that should not be changed, according to them.

I would recommend that you dig up all placements of Greenlandic children in Denmark since 1990 and look for the justifications in the seams.

Black and white half portrait with a young mother with braids and her child on her back