A Greenlandic mother’s one-hour-old baby was removed from her by Danish authorities after she underwent “parenting competence” tests – despite a new law banning the use of the controversial psychometric assessments on people with Greenlandic backgrounds.
wtf is wrong with the Danes
The “parenting competence” tests, known as FKU (forældrekompetenceundersøgelse), were banned on people with Greenlandic backgrounds earlier this year after years of criticism by campaigners and human rights bodies, who argued successfully that the tests were racist because they were culturally unsuitable for people from Inuit backgrounds. As the law came into force in May, campaigners are asking why Brønlund was still subjected to a test.
Emphasis mine.
Brønlund was told that her baby was removed because of the trauma she had suffered at the hands of her adoptive father, who is in prison for sexually abusing her. The municipality told her she was “not Greenlandic enough” for the new law banning the tests to apply, despite her being born in Greenland of Greenlandic parents.
Local authorities started the testing on her in April – after an announcement in January that the ban was coming in. They completed the tests in June, at which point the law was in force. Brønlund was told three weeks before giving birth that her child would be taken away.
Brønlund told the Guardian: “I didn’t want to go into labour because I knew what would happen afterwards. I would keep my baby nearby me when she was in my stomach, that was the closest I would be with her. It was a very rough and horrible time.”
She said her first meeting with her daughter, earlier this week, was cut short early because the baby was believed to be overtired and overstimulated.
“My heart broke when she [the supervisor] stopped the time. I was so sad, I cried out to the car and in the car. It was so fast that we had to leave,” she said, through tears. “My heart is so broken, I don’t know what to do without her.”
Brønlund is allowed to see her baby, under supervision, only once a fortnight for two hours at a time.
I don’t want to minimise the racist and colonial aspects of this. Denmark has a long history of taking away inuit children while claiming to be doing so for the good for the child. But this is also a class issue. I have been in birthing units with social workers ready to take the child basically before the doctors and midwives. They hang out and openly talk about the “deficiencies” of the mother (In flagrant disregard of her privacy rights. I don’t need to know that a teen mother smuggled vodka into her room during her institutionalised childhood) and it is never the wealthy or educated moms they go for. It is one of the most disgusting aspects of our society and nobody knows or cares.
Inuits are in focus here and they should be, but I just want people to know that it also affects others and it also fucked up there.I also must point out that this practise did not begin in 2024 as implied by the article. I know someone this happened to and that happened in 2016 But also the practise of taking away Inuit children because the parents are judged unfit goes back generations. There is an entire “lost generation” of Inuits who were take and raised in Denmark (sometimes by taking away the child by force or deception, sometimes by judging parents unfit, sometimes by denying adoptions of orphans to Inuit family) in a deliberate program of cultural genocide, and these victims are STILL HERE telling their stories, and we have utterly refused to learn.
Oh hey, it’s the same shit the US pulled with throwing indigenous kids into boarding schools that later on turned out to have an alarming amount of child-sized human remains buried on-site. Not to mention the forced sterilizations that were still going on into the late 1970s.
The Danish government’s official eugenics program ended in 1963, although involuntary sterilisation of Danish citizens continued until at least 1980. Over ten thousand Danish citizens were sterilised for being “undermålere” which translates roughly to “subpar” (This doesn’t count severely mentally disabled people or the visibly disabled, those were sterilised through a different program. It also doesn’t cover the Greenlandic programs, those are also separate)
Thousands of inuit women (Girls at the time. As young as 12) through the 60s and 70s were given IUDs without parental consent (And obviously without their own informed consent) and by order of the government. This is of a population measuring about 50000 today.
In both cases the justification given was the preservation of the welfare state.
The Danish state has tried to eradicate both the culture and the population of the Inuits. People who are alive today bore witness to it and were the victims of it and yet we ignore it. The perpetrators are celebrated, their crimes barely a footnote. It deserves little credit, but there is at least a general awareness amongst americans that a wrong was done to the natives of the land they inhabit, Danes seem to believe that the inuits owe them.
:denmarkkk: emoji when?
It always baffles me how a lot of these countries have gotten away with keeping their colonies and having their claims legitimized by just switching up the language, from “colony” to “autonomous territory [of X]”, “unincorporated territory”, or the worst of both worlds: “self-governing overseas territory”.
Call it for what it is all the time every time. Greenland is a Danish colony and this is one of their many colonial things being done unto the native population.
France and French Guiana. Legally just part of France on mother fucking South America.
Yep, although french Guyane is actually a direct territory of France, no autonomy or anything like that. The closest would be New Caledonia, where the Kanak people have long fought the french government and have been treated like shit for it
The Fr*nch don’t even bother to hide it with Guiana :/
This is the sort of thing I always point out to people who say stuff like “you should have a license to be able to have kids.” It will never actually be used to target abusive parents and will just be used as a way to hurt minorities.
they know what they’re asking for
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The test includes things such as interpretation of facial expressions, which differ culturally.[5] Results may also be biased against parents who do not speak Danish as their mother tongue, causing them to mistakenly appear to have limited cognitive abilities.[6]
fucking 19th century scientific racists with calipers, god damn the danes
5.6% of Greenlandic children in Denmark being removed from their families.[
This equates to around 45 being trafficked each year, which is frankly insane. If you had 45 babies kidnapped in your small town (Greenland is 57k people) there would be crazy true crime specials about it for the next 20 years, let alone 45 babies each year
You are letting the Danish state off light. You are forgetting that these are Greenlanders in Denmark, which is a substantially smaller population
Brønlund was told that her baby was removed because of the trauma she had suffered at the hands of her adoptive father, who is in prison for sexually abusing her
So not only is it racist, it’s also an expression ofremoved culture victim blaming
Disgusting neo-nazi state
Hey now. K. k. steincke is an OG nazi and he’s the granddaddy of this shit.
Denmark was considered conquered by the nazis, forgetting that we were doing this tonourselves by our own free will, and we were therefore never even made to do the pro forma reflection Germany was. We never stopped being nazis, we didn’t have to revive it.
Is it racisim? Feels a lot like racism.
Yes, by the Danes against the Inuits of Greenland.
Racism? In my parental competency test?
It’s a form of eugenics, so yes
Sounds as if Danes aren’t Greenlandic-enough…they don’t have the longevity in the area that the native population does.
