Kiszolgáltatottság és bántalmazás 3 kisgyerekkel a családbarát Magyarországon

By the age of thirty, many things tend to settle and become clearer in a person’s life, marking their transition into adulthood. People make decisions about their career, relationships, and livelihood, and in most cases they can still turn to their biological family, their mother and father, with a basic sense of trust. They may have completed some education, gained work experience, perhaps obtained a driving licence — and are able to move forward along a socially familiar path. All of this can develop smoothly when safety is present from the very beginning: a room in a house or apartment that a person can close behind them. But this story is not about people with that kind of start. As the final story in our 1% tax campaign, we share Lara’s story — a story of exemplary perseverance despite all the hardships she has faced.

In 1995, Lara Tóth was born. Her real name has been changed in this article. She was only three years old when her mother left her, and she was raised by her father and grandmother until the age of fifteen. Her childhood was far from smooth, although today she is able to speak about that period with a smile. At that point, her life might still have followed the ordinary path described above, but at the age of fifteen she entered TEGYESZ, and from there she was placed in a children’s home in Csepel. 

The Regional Child Protection Service — commonly known as TEGYESZ — is the professional background institution of the child protection system. Among other tasks, it manages the cases of children taken into care, including the selection and preparation of foster parents, adoption procedures, and the preparation of expert opinions. Children’s homes and apartment homes, by contrast, provide long-term placement for children who, for various reasons, could not be placed with foster families. One such reason may be the severe overload of the foster care network.

According to Lara, compared with the child protection system in general, the situation in Csepel was relatively good. The home was not mixed-gender, and at night only female child supervisors were allowed to work, which greatly contributed to the sense of safety of the mostly teenage girls living there. Lara did not feel happy there, but at least she managed. She lived there for two and a half years, until at the age of seventeen and a half she decided to run away from the institution. Her mother had reappeared in her life — as it later turned out, she had just been released from prison — and Lara fled to her in the hope that, after seventeen and a half years of delay, a mother-daughter relationship might finally develop between them. 

Naturally, the police searched for her as a runaway minor, so she was forced to hide. She dropped out of school and stayed in her mother’s flat in Hős Street. This worked for the half year until she turned eighteen. Her relationship with her mother was ambivalent: Lara says that the first “educational” slap from her mother was only seventeen and a half years late. 

“Actually, that slap may have had its place — but not there, not then. It came far too late.”

In one way or another, everyone falls in love at seventeen or eighteen. Lara did too — at least that is how she experienced it at the time, although looking back she now sees it more as a passing infatuation. Until then, she had never truly belonged to anyone. She felt she had barely any control over her own life: circumstances, changing roles and people shaped the paths around her, without consistency or planning, except perhaps in traces. The rules changed from day to day. It is difficult to play like that — if not impossible. 

So Lara fell in love, and then became pregnant. She wanted to terminate the pregnancy, but ran out of time — “thanks be to God,” as she puts it now. Her mother, however, did not receive the news as a happy grandmother. Quite the opposite: she threw Lara out, saying she did not need a “bastard” in the small flat and was also afraid of child protection services getting involved. Too often, children are removed from otherwise loving families because of poverty, even though these families could be supported in many other ways to function safely. Instead, such removals often only deepen the problems, while the family receives no real, sustaining support.  

For Lara, the bubble of love burst quickly. It turned out that the boy had misled her and, while they were together, he also had a family on the side. Lara found herself eighteen years old and pregnant. Alone. The latter she was already used to; the former she was experiencing for the first time. She called her former guardian and told her she needed immediate help, briefly explaining everything that had happened to her in the previous period. Fortunately, the guardian took the situation seriously and did not rest until she secured Lara a place in an aftercare home in Kőbánya. 

“Within the child protection system, young adults may voluntarily apply for aftercare support after reaching adulthood,” states the website of the Directorate-General for Social Affairs and Child Protection. This form of care may take place in aftercare children’s homes, apartment homes, or external accommodation. The application must be thoroughly justified, and any young person leaving care who receives this opportunity can consider themselves lucky. The young adult must be in education or employment, and can normally stay between the ages of 18 and 24. With the provider’s permission, this can be extended until the age of 30, but by then higher education enrolment is usually also expected. In most cases, unfortunately, this is not very realistic: even for a young person raised in a family, this period of early adulthood can be extremely difficult — let alone for someone who has no model to follow and no safety net beneath them. Expectations hang over their heads like the sword of Damocles, and if they are not met, they may quickly find themselves without housing.

Five years of relative peace followed. Lara had her own room, which she could arrange according to her own and her daughter’s taste. The bathroom and kitchen were shared, but that did not bother her at all. Her daughter was born there, and the two of them were happy. But at the age of twenty-four, she had to leave aftercare. That is what the rules say. Lara and her little girl had to move into a mother-and-child shelter. From one institution to another. 

They could only stay in the mother-and-child shelter for two or three months. At the time, the monthly fee was around thirty-something thousand forints, which was equal to Lara’s income from student work. She ultimately chose food over rent, and so she ended up staying with her mother’s former partner. The man had a serious substance addiction, did not work, struggled with severe financial difficulties, and took Lara’s money. She could not stay there long either. 

Later, she learned that her mother had gone back to prison for burglary, this time serving four years. She was released around early August. She did not get to enjoy her freedom for long: in December, she was diagnosed with cancer, and surgery was unsuccessful as the disease had spread to her internal organs. She died in March at the age of 46. Lara was 24.

So Lara had to leave her mother’s former partner as well, together with her daughter and carrying the strange feeling of grief — because however far from exemplary their relationship had been, she was still her mother. She then rented a flat together with an acquaintance. Her friend had two older children who could sometimes look after Lara’s daughter. At the time, Lara was working as a night cleaner at Arena Plaza, while also trying to manage adult life and fulfil her role as a mother. It was an enormous challenge, especially having to improvise without any model to follow. All the money she earned went toward rent, which she paid alone, because her friend had meanwhile become unemployed and could not find work quickly.

This situation became unsustainable, and the tensions caused by living together escalated further. Lara eventually fled into a bad relationship, which soon proved to be strongly abusive. She moved into a house in Pest County, where she lived with her partner’s grandparents. The grandmother was already very ill at the time and died after six months. The man used drugs and alcohol, and was pathologically jealous. He repeatedly locked Lara in the house, took away or destroyed her phone, cutting her off from the outside world. Lara knew the situation was not right, but she believed, trusted, and hoped — even while carrying their first child together.

 “I thought he would change once he became a father.” 

Sadly, her hopes did not come true. The situation became even worse, with severe beatings occurring daily. Lara tried to find a way to leave as soon as possible, but on the one hand she had nowhere to go, and on the other she feared that her children would be taken into care. Time passed like this, and they lived there for nearly three years. When she became pregnant again, under far from ideal circumstances, she wanted to terminate the pregnancy. But this happened during the Covid period; the hospital process was difficult, and once again she ran out of time.

So there she was: a young abused woman with three children — her eldest daughter, her little son, and a newborn. She felt helpless, but on one decisive night she made the decision that she had to leave, whatever happened, because her life was now at risk. Secretly, she contacted mother-and-child shelters, who interviewed her via video call and agreed on a Saturday move-in date. But the man stayed home that day, so she could not leave. The shelter sent a notification to the local family support service, who went to the address and told the grandfather who opened the door why they had come. Lara’s partner found out, flew into a rage, took her phone again, and the “punishment” followed. 

Szakmailag felfoghatatlan, hogy egy ilyen, tudvalevőleg bántalmazó helyzetben ez előfordulhatott, a családsegítőnek a nő és a gyermekek érdekeit szem előtt tartva, nem kellett volna ezt az információt közölni a rokonnal. Egy tévedés, aminek az árát épp a legkiszolgáltatottabb és legelesettebb fizeti meg. De alapvetően tetten érhető az általános félelem, mert családsegítője válogatja, hogy mennyire fog szakszerű segítséget kapni az egyén vagy a család, és félő, hogy a probléma nem megoldódni, csak fokozódni fog, ami jelenség pedig rendkívül aggasztó.

Lara knew: she had to leave now. Her eldest daughter had a prospective godmother in Budapest, and she fled toward her — but on the way, she received the news that they could not go there after all because of family problems. She was standing there with three children, not knowing where to go. She returned to an old home she knew to ask whether they had a crisis room, but unfortunately they did not. However, they gave her the phone number of OKIT, the National Crisis Management and Information Telephone Service, and told her she had to file a police report in order to access help. By then, they had been on the road for fourteen hours. At 8 p.m., she rang the doorbell of her mother’s former partner, where she had stayed for a while before. 

The man was shocked by Lara’s condition, and she told him everything. She spent two nights there, then moved into one of the S.O.S Crisis Foundation’s homes in Budapest. Lara recalls that the stroller survived the two-day ordeal, but its wheel fell off right in front of the shelter. “Final stop,” she thought — but it soon became clear that this too was only another station. A station that lasted a year and a half. She hoped she would eventually move into a “step-out” apartment, a form of transition from institutional care to independent housing, but no place became available. The head of the shelter told her about the Utcáról Lakásba! Association’s housing application at the time and urged her to apply. By then, Lara was exhausted and sceptical. As she put it, she had no energy for “another pointless round.” But after enough encouragement, she finally submitted the application. For a week after submitting it, nothing happened. Then she received a phone call asking about the ages of her children. “Is that a good sign or a bad sign?” Lara wondered, but she still did not dare to get her hopes up.

Time moved painfully slowly over the next week until her phone rang again: based on the scores, she had made it into the top five, and they wanted to invite her for a personal interview. As she remembers, two kind social workers welcomed her and listened to her story. She learned that she was the last of the five. The interview left a deep impression on everyone, and a few days later the news arrived: Lara and her children had been chosen for the apartment. She could hardly believe her ears — and later could hardly believe her eyes when she first visited the flat with her social worker, which was me. I will never forget Lara and her eldest daughter’s tears of joy, the two little boys running around freely, and the careful exploration of every square metre of the apartment. That was three years ago. 

Lara opened a new chapter in her life. Finally, she could create a rhythm of life that suited her and her children. There was no one controlling her. She learned that she was responsible for each of her decisions because she made them herself — instead of being thrown around by circumstances, as she had been for decades. 

Of course, she had to recover from countless humiliating situations, traumas, hardships, trials, and unresolved grief: grief for her mother, and grief for a life she had never been given. Love eventually knocked on her door again. She is now married to the man with whom she is expecting her fourth child. Her face reflects a happiness I had barely ever seen before. “My children finally have a father,” she says — something she had never experienced before. Her husband relates to her daughter and two sons as a father, and together they function as a happy family. But for these basic things to become possible, they first needed an apartment: a place she could enter and leave whenever she chose.

Lara worked throughout. At first she took student jobs, later she worked as a cleaner. No job was beneath her — she just wanted to earn some money. But on the one hand, she could not gather enough money to rent on the private market; on the other, hardly anyone was willing to even speak to her as a single mother raising three small children. 

Az Utcáról lakásba! Egyesület egyik programja a Lakhatást most! Lakásügynökség, amelyben magánszemélyek ingatlanjait kezeljük, vállalva az életvitelszerű használat melletti állagmegóvást, cserébe pedig lakbérengedményt kérünk a tulajdonosoktól. A programon belül kétféle konstrukció létezik: egyik az ún. szolgálati lakás típus, ahova a szociális ágazatban dolgozók (SZÁD), illetve a bölcsődei dolgozók (BDDSZ) pályázhatnak, ezek bérleti díja nagyjából 20-30%-kal megy a piaci ár alá, a másik pedig a szociális típusú lakás, amely bérleti díja az előzőnél kevesebb, így meg tudják fizetni a lakhatási szegénységben élők, akik – Larához hasonlóan – intézményi ellátásból vagy más, nem rendezett és biztos lakhatási formából kerülnek be a programba. 

Ezeket a lakásokat általában középhosszú távra bérelhetik, ami a gyakorlatban nagyjából 3-5 évet jelent. Kaució nincs, a bérleménybe – igény szerint mint állandó vagy mint tartózkodási címre – bejelentkezhetnek, a közműszolgáltatásokat pedig átírjuk a bérlő nevére. A lakcímbejelentés megannyi szolgáltatás elérését lehetővé teszi, jelesül az iskola, óvoda, az egészségügyi ellátás, illetve egyéb helyi, területspecifikus lehetőségek és szolgáltatások. Sajnos az albérletpiacon ez nemigen szokás, a tulajdonosi részről kialakult egyfajta bizalmatlanság ezzel kapcsolatban, holott a lakcímre történő bejelentkezés semmilyen kockázatot nem rejt, ellenben a bérlő biztonságérzetét nagymértékben növeli.  

In the case of social housing, we provide tenants with long-term social work supportmely that responds to the many situations that arise in the life of a household. This work is based on partnership, not control. Its aim is to help tenants maintain their housing, because moving in itself can represent a kind of crisis for people who have been through many hardships. This can and must be addressed through responsible, trauma-informed social work so that residents can live safely, peacefully, and in a way that allows them to realise themselves. In our experience, this is the foundation of every dignified life. 

Szerző: Jakab-Aitner Anna, az ULE szociális munkása

At , we believe that everyone deserves a safe home and a second chance. By donating 1% of your income tax, you can help people like Lara and her children gain stable housing and a more predictable future.