Cultural Hegemony or a Question of Ideological Interpretation? A Rejoinder to Shlasky Erik J. Knorth Lotty Eldering Leiden University, the Netherlands It is interesting and at the same time disappointing to see how easily an article meant to point out the state of affairs in research on the care and treatment of immigrant adolescents in residential set- tings in the Netherlands can be misinterpreted. In his comment, Simha Shlasky ascribes to us--and not only to us as researchers, but also to social workers in the Netherlands--an attitude of cultural he- gemony. This misinterpretation may be due to the translation of our text from Dutch into English, but it is probably more due to the differ- ing ideological climates in which researchers and social institutions work in different countries. The Ideological Climate Before discussing this attitudinal perspective, we want to comment on a change in ideology in these matters in the Netherlands. From the 1970s to the early 1990s, the official Dutch ideology was to recog- nize the equivalence of cultures: the dominant Dutch (Western) cul- ture and the ethnic minority cultures (Eldering, 1996). This ideology, however, denies the objective reality that immigrants comprise less than ten percent of our total population and that it is unrealistic, under the circumstances, to think that these groups can entirely pre- serve their original culture. It was also taboo in this period to write about the relatively high crime rates among adolescents from immi- grant groups. This ideology does not, however, help to solve the prob- lems but only veils their existence. Fortunately, the current policy Correspondence should be addressed to Erik J. Knorth, Section on Special Education and Child and Youth Care, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Leiden Univer- sity, P.O. Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands; e-mail: <knorth@rulfsw. LeidenUniv.nl>. Child & Youth Care Forum, 27(4), August 1998 © 1998 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 263