BY BAGILA BUKHARBAYEVA THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MOSCOW — The 15-year-old twins sleep among trash and dirt in a nook under a railway platform and spend their days at a Salvation Army shelter in a grim Moscow neighborhood.

But Denis and his sister Olesya prefer being homeless to living with their parents in Elektrostal, 36 miles east of the capital. They say their mother abused them physically and verbally, then kicked them out in July, telling them to find jobs. “It was hard at home, not cozy,” said Denis, who spoke on condition his last name not be used. The twins are among a growing number of Russian children who face abuse and neglect despite an economic boom that has brought unprecedented wealth. A report by Russia’s human rights ombudsman says children’s rights violations remain “systematic” and more parents are victimizing their children. While oil wealth has enriched a minority of Russians, the poverty, social decay and endemic alcoholism that are at the root of the child abuse have deepened since the 1991 Soviet collapse. Public sensitivity to child welfare is growing, however, as Russians face up to the fact that the population has shrunk by about 4 percent a year since 1993, to 142.7 million. President Vladimir Putin sounded the alarm in 2006, saying in his annual state of the nation address that the country was on the verge of a demographic crisis and that Russia’s children needed special care.

SOBERING STATISTICS - Official statistics show the number of children has fallen from 36 million to 29 million over the past eight years, part of an overall fall resulting from low birth rates, an antiquated public health care system, poverty, alcoholism and rampant crime.

Child’s Right, a Moscowbased advocacy group, says that every year about 2,000 of Russia’s 29 million children aged up to 17 are killed by their parents or other relatives — which translates into a rate of about 6.9 per 100,000. By rough comparison, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2005, the overall homicide rate for children 13 and under — regardless of the perpetrator — was 1.4 per 100,000. The overall U.S. rate for children aged 14 to 17 was 4.8 per 100,000. According to a UNICEF report, the suicide rate for Russian youths aged 15 to 19 was 20.2 per 100,000 in 2004. That’s more than double the rate of 8.2 per 100,000 for the same age group in the U.S. in 2004, as reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Child’s Right, citing state statistics, says about 50,000 Russian children — one out of every 580 — run away from home each year. Another 20,000 flee from state-run orphanages and other institutions. Boris Altshuler, head of Child’s Right, tells the story of 11-year-old Vlad Yakovlev from the Siberian city of Kurgan. According to police, Vlad’s alcoholic mother starved her son, and taunted and beat him. He hanged himself with the belt of a dressing gown one evening in November 2005. This year, Vlad’s mother was sentenced to 2 1 /2 years in prison for driving her son to suicide. “Many people see children as their property. There is no concept that they bear some social responsibility for their children,” said Altshuler, a 67-year-old physicist who became a human rights activist in the 1970s alongside prominent dissident Andrei Sakharov.

Authorities can either do nothing or take the child away from parents and place him in an orphanage, Altshuler said, but there is no middle ground such as family counseling. “The whole country is one orphan-making factory,” he said in an interview. He said Putin appears to be trying to reduce the number of children in institutions. But he predicted the bureaucrats who control the $1.5 billion Russia spends each year on orphanages and children’s homes will try to derail the effort. “They need children like firewood to keep this system going,” Altshuler said.

GRIM FIGURES - According to the human rights ombudsman, the number of orphans or children whose parents were stripped of their custody rights has risen by almost 20 percent over the past eight years, to more than 730,000. UNICEF data says 1,384 Russian children out of every 100,000 lived in an institution in 2005, compared with 709 per 100,000 in Poland and 590 out of 100,000 in the former Soviet state of Estonia. In recent years, the Russian government has established a foster home program and created hot lines for child victims. Charities and nongovernment groups have opened shelters and UNICEF is working to create a national network of children’s rights watchdogs. With the Kremlin raising awareness, the Russian media in recent months has paid more attention to cases such as that of a 7-year-old boy in the mining town of Guryevsk, in southwestern Siberia, who was hospitalized with cirrhosis of the liver; he had been driven to alcohol abuse by his father who wanted a drinking buddy. This year, prosecutors investigated medical workers at a hospital in the town of Orekhovo-Zuyevo, east of Moscow, who allegedly tied a 1 1 /2-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy to their beds with sheets so they could be left unsupervised. The toddlers had been abandoned by their parents. Workers at a hospital in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural mountains, were accused of taping infants’ mouths shut to keep them from crying. “It’s a bit shocking when you see such strong violations of children’s rights going on in a country that has accumulated such huge wealth,” said Carel de Rooy, UNICEF representative in Russia.

Process of adoption for Russian citizens is pretty complicated and long. It is necessary to gather a lot of paper work and wait, wait, and wait. Is it that bad? Long wait provides first test and gives time to think about one of the most important steps in our lives is to adopt a child.

Every person in such situation has various motivates for adopting: some want to become a parent, some cannot physically have a child, some want to get another one due to the loss of its own, some want to make its life different. Unfortunately, there is another category those who adopt in order to improve their materialist status or solve their housing issue. Finally, a category simply wants to help unfortunate children who have no parental love and care. As a rule, the last category is the lowest one, but unfortunately, you will not find many parents who have adopted and due to some reason return the child back to the orphanage.

No matter what motivate you have it is necessary to seriously process it. Small children are not toys with whom you may play for a while and if you did not like it then you simply return it. Such children end up betrayed and abandoned twice and it is a tremendous psychological trauma, which will be difficult to deal with in the future. In addition, a child is not just a big responsibility, but there are expenses involved as well. Potential parents should be ready for it. Moreover, there are families who have almost fallen apart, but are trying to reunite by having a child. Practice shows that such motivate is inappropriate and will fail. Frequently such families are not able to handle the pressure and end up in divorce and child goes back to the orphanage. In such instance, children are the one who suffer the most.

Prior to adopting, it is crucial to evaluate your financial ability, health condition, and what support you can get from your relatives. It is important that if you adopt a baby then some illnesses have not been diagnosed yet. Are you ready to raise this child if he/she happens to be sick? What reaction will you have in such case? You cannot ignore the reality of what other people might think about your adopted child and how will you reveal the truth that your child is adopted.

If you look at pros and cons and you have made a decision adopting then you have to decide what age you want to adopt. Cons of adopting baby have been mentioned earlier. Pros of adopting baby you are able to form the personality and character of your child practically from the beginning. In this case, it all depends on you what character and intellectual development your child will have.

If you decide to adopt a toddler or older child then you must be aware of possible existing diagnoses known as mental learning disability. The diagnoses itself is not fearful and the reason of such diagnoses because the child was raised in limited space and surrounded by two-three rooms where he/she spent most of his/her time. The orphanage staff is not able to provide quality individual time for every orphan due to many orphans. At first, your child might be behind compare to non-orphan child, but your love, care, and training will help him/her to catch up with others and be the same as everyone else. In general, successful adaptation of adopted child greatly depends if you are willing to accept him/her the way he/she is with his/her issues, character, and intellect. It is not worth working only on negative issues and focus on changing your child’s behavior and attitude. It is better to help your child develop something good that was given to him/her by nature.

If the family already has a child then it is important to have his/her support in adopting another one. This helps to prevent your jealousy and hear his/her opinion concerning adoption. It is important to build a contact between two children and treat them equally.

A serious step in your life such as adoption should be done only after every aspect has been evaluated, mother and father who already have children have made a mutual agreement adopting another one, and most important of all that you realize the level of responsibility by adopting a child.

Source:
Written by: Natalia Biatova (http://www.womenclub.ru/children/1391.htm), July 30, 2007

Article was hosted by:

Adoption in Russia in affiliation with the Department of Youth Politics and Social Protection:(http://www.usynovite.ru/massmedia/2007/28A561w868.html)