Oudenaarde (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – 4 young care home workers in Oudenaarde were arrested for stealing from and abusing residents on March 18, 2025. Experts, including forensic psychiatrist Rudy Verelst, link their actions to stress and lack of training.
4 young people who worked at a care home in Oudenaarde, Belgium were arrested on March 18, 2025. They are suspected of stealing from and hurting the people who live there. Rudy Verelst says that this might have happened because the workers were feeling stressed and overwhelmed.
They mentioned that they may not have had the skills to handle the difficult job and this led them to act in a bad way. Even though most people in these jobs know how to deal with stress, there’s always a chance that people might become aggressive or do wrong things, especially when the work is very hard.
We are probably dealing with a profile of care providers who were confronted with tasks that were beyond their capacity.
claims forensic psychiatrist Rudy Verelst in De Wereld Vandaag on Radio 1.
Are stress and lack of training to blame for care home abuse?
According to Rudy Verelst, when people have too much work to do and feel very stressed, it can be hard for them to handle their emotions. If they don’t get help, they might start acting badly, like yelling, hitting people, or even stealing. This is what might have happened in the case of the workers at the care home.
Verelst mentioned that care homes should be very careful to notice signs that workers are stressed or might be doing something wrong. He says that every care home should check on their workers to see if they are feeling overwhelmed or if they need help.
He mentioned that there are not enough workers to care for everyone who needs help, so some workers may not have enough training or experience. This can make it hard for them to handle their jobs and they might become frustrated or even do wrong things. He said that if these problems are not dealt with quickly, it can lead to bad situations like what happened in Oudenaarde.
According to experts, supervisors can’t just assume that workers will tell them if they have problems because many people are afraid to speak up. Supervisors need to make sure their workers feel safe to talk about their feelings and know that they will be helped. They mentioned that this will make sure that workers don’t get too stressed or do wrong things, and it will keep the people in their care safe.
The police found videos of the attack on a young person’s phone. A doctor who studies the mind says that a lot of people like to watch videos that show bad things. He says that everyone has bad thoughts sometimes, but the internet makes it easy for people to watch these videos without feeling bad about it. He says that some people watch these videos a lot but don’t do the bad things themselves.
There’s a manual in forensic psychiatry that says,
Bad men do what good men think.’ I think we all have aberrant ideas sometimes, but we can frame them and deal with them. But we see that some people obsessively watch certain videos without actually doing those things in real life. So there is a target audience for that.
