Adoption

[Douger]

murkin style.

 

[waltky]

Russia's unwanted and forgotten children...

Russia: Are efforts to help thousands of 'abandoned' children being resisted?
2 April 2013 - Ambitious plans to reduce the number of orphans in Russia are running into strong institutional resistance, child welfare campaigners have warned. The Kremlin has launched a programme to move tens of thousands of children out of institutions and into family homes. Most have been abandoned by their parents and receive little or no education.

But the campaigners say there is opposition to reform from institutions that benefit from the state funding orphans attract. "It's huge resistance of a system which wants to keep money, working places and jobs," said Maria Ostrovskaya, head of a St Petersburg charity, Perspectives, that is trying to open orphanages to the outside world. Some experts, including children's rights campaigner Boris Altshuler, believe about 300,000 Russian children live in state institutions, but estimates differ widely. The government says there are 118,000 "orphans" in children's homes. Most have living parents, but have been rejected by them.

Newsnight obtained rare access to the closed institutional world of Russia's orphanages

Fourteen-year-old Sonya, who lives in St Petersburg Children's Home Number Four, tells a typical story: "When I was born I had some problems, and in the hospital they said I was dead, or I wouldn't live long, so my parents refused to take me." Ivan Sharipov was abandoned by his mother when he developed cerebral palsy at the age of eight. He says: "She locked herself in the bathroom so she couldn't see me. I knocked on the glass door, I wept, but it didn't help. I realised it was pointless. Because if someone's abandoned you, it means they didn't need you." Parents have been encouraged by doctors to abandon ill or disabled children on the grounds that the state can care for them better.

Sonya, 14, was abandoned by her parents but remains optimistic about her future

But orphanages often provide only a minimal standard of care, with little attempt to stimulate or educate children with special needs. "It was never written, it was never spoken out, but this place was for children to be kept until they die," says Andrei Dombrovsky, deputy director of the St Petersburg home. He is an outsider brought in from a children's charity to reform the orphanage. Some orphans now attend ordinary schools outside the orphanage - something that was once unthinkable - and volunteers from outside work with children inside the home.

'Profitable system'