The Suspicion Machine. The Fraud Hunters. Now Reading. The Welfare War. The Dirty Secret. It was October , and Imane, a year-old mother of three, was still in pain from the abdominal surgery she had undergone a few weeks earlier.
She certainly did not want to be where she was: sitting in a small cubicle in a building near the center of Rotterdam, while two investigators interrogated her. But she had to prove her innocence or risk losing the money she used to pay rent and buy food. Imane emigrated to the Netherlands from Morocco with her parents when she was a child. She started receiving benefits as an adult, due to health issues, after divorcing her husband.
Since then, she has struggled to get by using welfare payments and sporadic cleaning jobs. Imane says she would do anything to leave the welfare system, but chronic back pain and dizziness make it hard to find and keep work. She was questioned and lost her benefits for a month. She recalls the stress of borrowing food from neighbors and asking her year-old son, who was still in school, to take on a job to help pay other bills.
Now, two years later, she was under suspicion again. In the days before that meeting at the Rotterdam social services department, Imane had meticulously prepared documents: her rental contract, copies of her Dutch and Moroccan passports, and months of bank statements.
With no printer at home, she had visited the library to print them. In the cramped office she watched as the investigators thumbed through the stack of paperwork. One of them, a man, spoke loudly, she says, and she felt ashamed as his accusations echoed outside the thin cubicle walls. They told her she had brought the wrong bank statements and pressured her to log in to her account in front of them.
