Dunya bridges cultural divide in foster care

When a child is fostered, they are taken away from the surroundings that are most familiar to them, Karanfil explains. “For all of them, it’s a shocking and life-changing experience. Children experience a great loss and have to cope with that loss. It is our responsibility to ensure that no child experiences any extra pressure by having to learn another language or to adapt to radically new rules or habits.”

That is our Dunya’s approach with every child, she continues, “regardless of their background: finding a family that resembles the biological family as much as possible. To make sure that the foster child doesn’t miss out on chances in life and regains the exact same chances he or she had before the placement.”

The original idea for Dunya sprang from the mind of one woman: Mady Fernande. In 1998, Fernande was a foster care social worker in Antwerp province. “It started quite simply by reading an article”, she remembers, “about an Egyptian sociologist researching foster care by and for people with an immigrant background in the Netherlands.”

Back then, she continues, “the Netherlands had a growing number of foster children with a foreign background, and there was an urgent need for families mirroring this new diversity. Foster children need a good foster family match.”

Faced with the same need in Antwerp province, she saw it as her moral duty to contact the Egyptian researcher and start looking for foster families from different cultural backgrounds. “We absolutely needed immigrant families to volunteer for foster care,” she says, “and to get them, I knew I had to crawl inside the heads of the people of those communities.”

Then Fernande created a broad network of representatives from Muslim organisations and mosques to spread the word. “Soon, we found the first families with immigrant backgrounds to volunteer, who then served as an example for their communities.”

Fernande’s approach was not applauded by the local administration. “It was not the politically correct approach,” she explains. “But I was convinced that, in the beginning, we needed to take small steps. We needed to address a small group to make an opening.”

Targeting the whole immigrant community from the start, she continues, “wouldn’t have delivered any results, and the project would have been scrapped. We needed quick results on a small scale to show the administration that it was worth following this through.”

The last step: convincing judges in family courts of the need for culturally sensitive placement for children. “It’s not that the judges were opposed to the idea ” she says. “They simply didn’t believe we could find families with the right background who would volunteer. But by then, we had their names and addresses.”

Seventeen years after Fernande’s first attempts, culturally sensitive placement is anchored in the standard policy of Foster Care Flanders. Flanders has even surpassed the Netherlands – from where the inspiration had come but where intercultural foster care is limited to piecemeal initiatives.

Today, Dunya’s core team consists of a dozen intercultural specialists, spread all over the region, safeguarding cultural sensitivity in the foster care sector. In recent years, at least one out of four foster placements is categorized as a “Dunya” placement.

“We are still looking for more foster families with different cultural backgrounds,” says Fernande, “but we also must keep on raising awareness in the sector – with the judges, the administration and the other social workers – about the importance of culturally sensitive choices and guidance.

“It has been an uphill battle, but we made it. We planted a seed and now we see it taking root. It was needed back then, and it will be needed even more in the future. With every passing day, our society is growing more multicultural.”

But Dunya is still often met with criticism. “People can’t understand why children with a different cultural background need special treatment,” Fernande says. “They question why so much time and effort is spent on so few people and our approach, which they regard as being contrary to integration goals. After all, we look for foster families that have the same religion, beliefs and language as the child.”

For instance, in some cases, Dunya will advise against placing a child with an Islamic background with a same-sex couple. “That sounds harsh and conservative,” says Karanfil, “but say a child aged nine from an Islamic background is placed with a foster family in which the foster parents are gay. The child being this young, there probably won’t be problems. But when the child reaches puberty, they will soon realise the difference between the cultural norms of their biological family and those of their foster family.”

The child could then easily rebel, she says, “as kids going through puberty do. But in this case, the revolt can swell and easily spill into other areas of the child’s life, possibly threatening their futures. In cases like these, we should ask ourselves if such a situation could have been prevented – without judging the educational capacities or orientation of the foster parents.” 

According to Fernande, there are other ways society should tackle issues regarding gay rights and diversity. “We are dealing with children coming from poignant situations,” she says, “with all sorts of problems. Do we need these children to be used as guinea pigs to settle ideological discussions on what the ideal society should look like, bringing them into a situation that might cause extra problems for them? The answer is no.”