Graduation Day

Denmark will eliminate a rule that forces Greenlanders to take parenting competency tests in order to raise children, a move that comes amid long-running tensions between Copenhagen and Greenland over the requirement following a push by US President Donald Trump to acquire the self-governing territory, Euronews reported this week.

Danish Minister of Social Affairs Sophie Hæstorp Andersen announced this week that Denmark plans to scrap the controversial policy which has been used in child protection cases and investigations, and inspired protests last year.

For years, Danish authorities have employed these psychometric parenting tests – known as “forældrekompetenceundersøgelse” or FKU – to assess the competency of parents and whether the child should be removed by social services.

Danish officials have previously defended the tests by illustrating the wide range of tools used to make the decision, but critics countered that it has been routinely used on people with Inuit backgrounds and often resulted in the separation of children from their parents.

Greenland is an autonomous territory of Denmark. Almost 90 percent of its 56,000 people are Inuit.

Human rights bodies have long been arguing that these tests discriminate against Greenlanders as they don’t account for their language and culture, according to the Guardian.

A 2022 report published by the Danish Institute for Human Rights showed that 5.6 percent of children with a Greenlandic background were removed from their families, compared with only one percent of children with a Danish background.

The policy came under increased scrutiny in November 2024, when a 38-year-old Greenlandic mother who took the test was separated from her child only hours after the delivery, sparking protests in the Greenland capital of Nuuk and in Copenhagen.

At the time, Andersen said she would invite municipalities to stop using the tests, but she did not ban them completely.

But earlier this week, she said the government found “a good and common solution, where we replace the use of standardized psychological tests with a special unit that has expertise in the Greenlandic language and culture.”

The Danish government is now drafting a new bill regarding the tests to take effect in May.

Human rights groups and Greenlandic figures welcomed the policy reversal, which also came amid weeks of tensions over Trump’s claims to acquire Greenland from Denmark.

Greenland became a self-governing territory in 2009 but Denmark still controls its foreign and security policy. Greenlanders say they want independence from Denmark – and the US.

Many Greenlanders believe that Trump’s push to acquire their territory may have led Denmark to resolve long-standing issues with Greenland, including these tests.