HASoday between 20% and 40% of children entrusted to social assistance for children (ASE) are disabled, whereas they represent 2% to 4% in the rest of the population. Presidents and presidents of departmental councils, we denounce the cruel lack of resources allocated by the State to psychiatry and the care of disabilities, which particularly impacts the children entrusted to the ASE.
“Child protection will be at the heart of the next five years” : these words are those of Emmanuel Macron at the conclusion of the debate of the second round of the presidential election against the candidate Marine Le Pen. But what is the reality behind the small campaign promise?
Certainly, reports have put their finger in recent years on situations of children named “complex cases”. We saw children in mental suffering, damaged, dangerous for others and sometimes for themselves. Children who no longer have a place in children’s homes or in foster families, and for whom the ASE desperately resorts by default to makeshifts. And staff who do not have the professional capacity to take care of them properly.
Some of these children should be cared for in specialized State establishments or services, capable of taking charge of their handicap or pathology. But, for lack of places, they are directed towards structures with solutions that are unsuited to their needs and inconsistent in view of their background: placement in associations beyond the authorized places, care in a distant establishment, in families of reception or in a structure where the professionals do not have the skills to take care of children with severe disabilities.
Unbearable human situations
Today, the shortcomings of these sectors are abysmal everywhere in France. You have to wait eighteen months for a first appointment in a medical-psycho-pedagogical center (CMPP) in Seine-Saint-Denis. You have to wait up to thirty-six months in Gironde to obtain a place in a medical-educational institute (IME) or in a specialized education and home care service (Sessad).
These lack of care cause unbearable human situations. Firstly because they aggravate the difficulties and the suffering of children, and this state of affairs is unworthy of our Republic, which must protect them in all circumstances.
Then, because they lead many parents deprived of the problems encountered by their child, often isolated or responsible for siblings, to exhaustion at the risk that they become negligent, even abusive, in spite of themselves.
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