Orphans
According to the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, there were over 103 thousand children in Ukraine who were either orphans or children either abandoned by their parents, or whose parents were deprived of parental custody (the figures used in this article have been picked up from different sources and averaged; there are considerable discrepancies in figures given in different sources).
There are over 11 thousand children of preschool age in the orphanages of Ukraine, 2.7 thousand of whom are physically or mentally handicapped. The number of “social orphans” as they are called in Ukrainian statistics, that is the children whose parents have been deprived of the parental custody of their children, is constantly on the rise with the increase of about one thousand such children a year. Mostly they are the parents who cannot take care of their children because of alcohol or drug abuse. The estimate for the end of the year 2002 was 8,000 “social orphans” in Ukraine.
Ukraine which has slid into the category of poor countries is not unique in the respect. Care of orphans, homeless and runaway children is a problem that many LDC (less-developed countries) have to face and deal with — in most cases inadequately. Even pensioners who get miserably small pensions in Ukraine are better protected than orphans who are too small to demand the state pay more attention to them.
According to an official report, submitted by the Department of Social Adaptation of Minors, many orphanages, asylums and internats (that is the boarding schools where orphans live and study — they are a far cry from the ones, in which rich parents educate their offsprings) fail to provide their wards with adequate food which is deficient in such products as meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, fruit and vegetables. The reason — inadequate financing by the state.
Many of the internats are forced to start growing vegetables and fruit in their gardens in order to provide better nourishment for their wards. Besides, there are all kinds of regulations and bans on what is allowed and what is not allowed for children to have. Ice cream is banned, for example, because it does not fit “sanitary norms.” Clothes and bed sheets are in short supply. Instead of 50 to 70 children as is the norm in most western European countries, Ukrainian internat boarding schools are overcrowded with up to 300 children; almost a hundred internats do not have running water; 104 of them have no gyms; over a hundred are in bad repair and twenty are in a badly dilapidated condition.
The number of children who need to be placed in orphanages and internats is growing and hundreds of the destitute parentless children are kept at various medical centres and hospitals which do not have either facilities or trained personnel to take proper care of such children.
About 70 percent of homeless children are not parentless; about 40 percent of them use drugs; close to 60 percent steal to stay alive; about 80 percent drink alcohol; over 90 percent of them have regular sex, starting from the age of six. Begging in the streets and stealing is a way of life for them, as well as various forms of drug and alcohol addiction; groups of homeless children are structured similarly to criminal hierarchies and have criminal connections. Diseases are rampant and the death rate is very high.
“I have been dealing with the problem of children homelessness for over five years now and can tell you that though these children put on a bold front, they are dead tired of the life they lead and want a decent home to go to. Those who are empowered by the state to do something about the homelessness problem and do very little about it, never forgetting, of course, to provide their own children with everything they need, may soon find themselves — together with the rest of us — living in a society where a considerable number of people — formerly homeless children — are completely asocial, with no education, ready to steal, burglarize and commit other crimes,” says Mr Yatsenko.
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