Confusing Citizenship
The Making Up of Confusion in the Netherlands
This project traces the Dutch policy phrase “confused behavior” in order to study how the way in which policy makers, professionals, and at-risk and risky citizens care for each other, and keep each other safe, shapes state-citizen relations in the Netherlands.
In 2011, the Dutch police introduced registration-code E33 to keep track of the number of incidents of nuisance caused by “confused persons”, defined at the time as “anyone who, because of their temporarily or permanently impaired judgment, behaves in a way that puts themself or any other person in danger and/or poses a threat to public order and safety and/or which shows that this person needs help.” Since then, each year, police professionals used this code more often, from 40.012 times in 2011 to 138.000 times in 2022.
By 2015, the apparent explosion of confusion had led to a sense of crisis, so when, in that year, the murderer of former minister for health Els Borst was found to be a confused person, parliament began to debate the issue with a sense of urgency. Since then, subsequent governments have introduced new laws, such as the Domestic Nuisance Act (2018), the Care and Coercion Act (2020), and the Compulsory Mental Healthcare Act (2020), as well as well-funded national action programs, through which municipalities can acquire funds to increase know-how, and set up Care and Nuisance Hotlines, neighborhood-based emergency mental healthcare services.
In the meantime, researchers began to refine and critically assess the figure of the confused person. Before soon, this led to some sense of a consensus, namely that the police numbers make the actual problem seem bigger than it is, because they concern number of incidents and not the number of individuals responsible for those incidents, and because they do not distinguish between the large group of people who merely need help, and the small minority of people who also pose a threat. Along with activists, researchers also successfully pushed for a change in terminology, from confused persons to confused behavior to ununderstood behavior, which is supposed to better distinguish between the person and their behavior, and to question whether it is the behavior that is confused or the beholder who lacks understanding. Still, so-called people are coming out – and use that language - to claim expertise on confusion by experience.
In this project, I take these interrelated processes as part and parcel of the process of making up the figure of confusion, before destabilizing that figure by studying how policy-makers, professionals, and vulnerable citizens negotiate care and security within the context of the new laws and policies.