SOS Children's Villages “stunned” by Nehammer's statements about child poverty

2023-10-25 08:02:00

“Children are discriminated against because of their origin or their social class,” criticizes the new managing director of SOS Children’s Villages, Annemarie Schlack, and refers to the education sector and the situation of unaccompanied minor refugees. She is “stunned” by Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s (ÖVP) statements on the subject of child poverty.

“Unfortunately, it’s hard to beat the level of cynicism,” said Schlack in an interview with the APA about the video that became public in which Nehammer questioned the fact that children in Austria did not receive a warm meal due to poverty. This shows a lack of understanding of the situation in which families in Austria find themselves who have to consider whether they should send their child on a school trip or pay for the heating, said Schlack. At SOS Children’s Villages and its telephone helpline Advice on Wire you can see that the number of families and children and young people who need support is currently “exploding”.

In order to combat child poverty, Schlack is calling for a reform of the basic social welfare law. Another construction site is the education system. Schlack criticizes that higher education is hardly achievable for children affected by poverty. This means that an entire generation of children who grow up in poverty have no chance of ever getting out of it. Giving poverty-stricken children a school bag at the start of school is “washing out the eyes,” she criticizes. Instead of handouts, structural reforms are needed to make the school system fairer. Tutoring lessons, which currently start at 38 euros, are not affordable for those affected by poverty.

More support needed

At the same time, more support is needed for families at risk of poverty, demands the designated managing director of SOS Children’s Villages. High prices and the precarious financial situation often lead to families breaking up. There are too few resources for prevention work here. With early mobile family counseling, many out-of-home placements of children and young people could be prevented.

Schlack also sees an urgent need for action when it comes to mental health for children and young people. There are still far too few slots for psychotherapy and too few social workers in schools.

“No excuse for the government to default here”

The aid organization calls for child and youth welfare to take care of unaccompanied minors as quickly as possible. There is “no excuse for the government to be late here,” criticizes Schlack. Because it is against children’s rights that children and young people who come to Austria without a person they can trust are accommodated in primary care centers such as Traiskirchen that are not child-friendly and have to stay there. If something similar were to happen to an Austrian child, there would be an outcry, “but just because these children are not Austrian citizens now, is that okay?”.

SOS Children’s Villages also criticizes the fragmentation of child and youth welfare. As feared, this is the result of the transfer of sole child and youth welfare responsibilities to the federal states in 2019. In each federal state there are now different daily rates for children and young people in external care. “No one can explain to me why a child in Vienna should be worth different than a child in Styria,” criticizes Schlack, who will officially take up the position as managing director of SOS Children’s Villages on January 1, 2024, together with the previous managing directors Christian Moser and Nora Deinhammer takes over.