Throughout the world an unknown number of children, most likely in the millions, are kept in orphanages and other non-penal institutions. Many of these children are kept in grossly substandard facilities and provided with inhumane care; some are left to die. Ironically, those responsible for nurturing and providing for the children they take into their care often physically and sexually abuse the children, and subject them to other cruel and degrading treatment. Even in institutions that are clean and provide adequate food, staff often neglect children, leaving them to lie alone in cribs or small beds with no stimulation, play, or adult attention. Human Rights Watch has looked into the treatment of children in orphanages in three countries: Romania, China, and Russia. In Ceaucescu's Romania, we found in 1990 that doctors forbidden to acquire medical information from outside the country had carried out a practice of giving small blood transfusions to children to "strengthen" them. Sadly, large numbers of children have contracted HIV as a result. In addition, children suffered from inadequate food, housing, clothing, medical care, lack of stimulation or education, and neglect. Disabled children suffered even grimmer conditions and treatment, with many malnourished and diseased. In China, Human Rights Watch documented in 1996 a secret world of starvation, disease, and unnatural death—a world into which thousands of Chinese orphans and abandoned children disappear each year. The report, Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's State Orphanages, revealed a pattern of cruelty, abuse, and malign neglect that results in staggering mortality rates in state institutions. The Chinese government's own statistics revealed that in 1989 a staggering number of abandoned children admitted to China's orphanages were dying in institutional care. Many institutions appear to be operating as little more than assembly lines for the elimination of unwanted orphans, with an annual turnover of admissions and deaths far exceeding the number of beds available. In Russia, children were abandoned to the state at a rate of more than 100,000 per year. In a 1998 report, Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages, Human Rights Watch documented the brutal treatment of these children, thousands of whom are exposed to appalling levels of cruelty and neglect. They were beaten, locked in freezing rooms for days at a time, and often subjected to degrading treatment by staff. From the moment the state assumes their care, "orphans" in Russia, 95 percent of whom have at least one living parent, are shockingly mistreated. Infants classified as disabled are segregated in "lying-down" rooms, where they are changed and fed, but bereft of stimulation and essential medical care. Those who are officially diagnosed as "imbeciles" or "idiots" at age four are condemned to life in little more than a warehouse, where they may be restrained in cloth sacks, tethered by a limb to furniture, denied stimulation, training, and education. Some lie half-naked in their own filth, and are neglected, sometimes to the point of death. The "normal" children, those deemed to be "educable", are subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by institution staff. These children suffer a lifelong stigma that robs them of fundamental economic, social, civil and political rights guaranteed by international treaties. We hope, through our work on orphanages and other non-penal institutions, to raise international awareness about the plight of children doomed to death or to life stunted by inhumane and degrading conditions, and to make significant changes in the way orphaned and abandoned children are treated throughout the world. Related Reports: In the Shadow of Death: HIV/AIDS and Children's Rights in Kenya June 2001 Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages December 1998 Death by Default: A Policy of Fatal Neglect in China's Orphanages 1996 Romania's Orphans: A Legacy of Repression 1990 HRW Campaign Pages: Promises Broken: Orphans and Abandoned Children Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages Top of Page | |  | |
 Easy Targets: Violence Against Children Worldwide 
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