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 Moscow-based 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.

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 or monitoring by social workers, and no law that obliges the state to act. «The whole country is one orphan-making factory,» he said in an interview. [Boris Altshuler, head of Child's Right,]

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.

Posted by PR-Inside 08/24/2007 (http://www.pr-inside.com/amid-russia-s-boom-a-dark-secret-r206967.htm )

According to the official statistics in Russia every hundredth child is being raised in the state orphanage system. There are 280,000 children in the state orphanage system. Currently in Russia there are more than 2 thousand orphan shelters, 1,500 social state institutions and 1,400 special internats (boarding schools) where orphans are being raised.

The Federal Treasury of the Russian Federation in 2005 spent two billion Euros to support orphans in the state institutions. Majority of its finance in general is not spent toward the orphan’s support, but to support the institutions (building maintenance, staff salary, etc). The amount spent toward an orphan’s needs is much lower than mentioned above.