Sarah Philips, a longtime orphanage volunteer in Russia
Throughout the world, an unknown number of children, most likely in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are kept in orphanages and non-penal institutions. Many of these children have been condemned to live a grim existence, and are subjected to shocking and at times deadly levels of abuse and neglect.
Many children who end up in orphanages have at least one living parent but have been abandoned because their families are poor, jobless, ill, or in trouble with the law. In countries that have restrictive population control policies, or where cultural traditions value boys more highly than girls, babies – and girls in particular – may frequently be abandoned. In other cases, medical personnel pressure parents at birth to give up children born with disabilities, claiming that parents will be ostracized for raising a disabled child. For this reason, healthy children given up for financial or domestic reasons are often assumed to be “defective.”
In Russia, children have been abandoned to the state at a rate of more than 100,000 per year. Human Rights Watch found in 1998 that children in Russian orphanages are exposed to appalling levels of cruelty and neglect. They may be beaten, locked in freezing rooms for days at a time, or sexually abused, and are often subjected to degrading treatment by staff.
Russian babies who are classified as disabled are segregated into separate rooms where they are changed and fed, but are bereft of stimulation and lacking in medical care, contrary to many protections in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. At age four, these and other children who are labeled retarded or “oligophrenic” (“small-brained”) are sent to locked and isolated “psycho-neurological internats,” which are little better than prisons. Considered “ineducable,” children in these facilities may be restrained in cloth sacks, tethered to furniture, denied stimulation and are sometimes left to lie half-naked in their own filth. Orphans who survive to the age of eighteen move on to an adult internat, removed from public view.
Russian orphans who are not categorized as disabled grow up in institutions where they routinely suffer the infliction of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment at the hands of staff. In the orphanages, children are physically punished not only by school staff, but by older children within the institutions, who are encouraged to beat up, bully, and intimidate younger ones. The use of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment, including corporal punishment, public shaming, and isolation in freezing rooms are not uncommon. Children have no means of redress or complaint, to protest ill-treatment and abuse at the hands of staff and older children.
Shocking abuses have also been documented in Chinese orphanages, where infants have suffered staggering mortality rates. Deprived of adequate food and basic medical care, orphans admitted into welfare institutions in 1989 faced less than a 50 percent chance of surviving for more than one year. Many institutions appeared to operate as little more than assembly lines for the elimination of unwanted orphans (especially girls), with an annual turnover of admissions and deaths far exceeding the number of beds available. At some facilities, the rate of death reached 90 percent.
In Romania, Human Rights Watch found in 1990 that doctors who were forbidden to acquire medical information from outside the country carried out blood transfusions in a misguided attempt to improve the health of institutionalized orphans. Large numbers of children contracted HIV as a result. Children also suffered from inadequate food, housing, clothing, medical care, lack of stimulation or education, and neglect.
As these conditions have come to light, the international community has responded. The European Union has provided more than U.S. $77 million (Euro 75 million) to improve the plight of children in Romania’s orphanages. Funds have been directed not only towards emergency food, clothing and medical care, but also toward creating and implementing policies to prevent child abandonment. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) recently developed a program to channel U.S. $6 million to Russian organizations working to keep families together and further develop foster care and alternatives to institutional care for orphans and abandoned children. In China, staffing and medical care in orphanages have improved, and the government has worked to encourage adoption of abandoned children. Despite these encouraging developments, however, orphans and abandoned children continue to be institutionalized at alarming rates and too often fail to receive adequate care and protection.
Finally, while numerous international standards exist which protect the rights of children confined in penal or correctional institutions and settings, no comparable international standards exist to protect the rights of abandoned or orphaned children. Human Rights Watch advocates the use of alternatives to institutionalization of children wherever possible, including support for families or extended families, foster care, and placement in small residential care facilities as a measure of last resort.
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| Centre for Europe’s Children |
| Human Rights Watch – Russian orphanages report and action sheet |
| National Pediatric & Family HIV Resource Center |
| UNAIDS – global source of HIV/AIDS information |
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| 1) Governments should work with NGOs to develop programs to discourage families from abandoning their children and to develop alternatives to institutionalization, by providing assistance to families with disabled or special needs children and appropriate opportunities for foster care and adoption. 2) Governments should ensure that children in non-penal institutions receive appropriate care, including adequate housing, medical care, stimulation, individual attention, education, food and clothing. Governments should work towards the development and establishment of clear national and international standards on the treatment, care, and protection of the rights of children confined in non-penal institutions. 3) Governments should immediately investigate reports of abuse or neglect of children in orphanages, and prosecute or discipline the individuals responsible. NGOs and professionals should be allowed unlimited access to monitor conditions. 4) Governments should ensure that children in custodial care are not diagnosed as retarded or disabled unless they have been observed and examined adequately over a period of time, and that children with disabilities receive the education and programs necessary to achieve their fullest individual development. |