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Russia: Homeless Children -- Helpless Victims Of Collapsing Welfare, Family
Systems
By Francesca Mereu
Thousands of children live on the streets of Moscow. Some left homes far
from the capital to escape poverty or violent parents. Experts say the
situation is the result of a ...
Russia: Homeless Children -- Helpless Victims Of Collapsing Welfare, Family
Systems
By Francesca Mereu
Thousands of children live on the streets of Moscow. Some left homes far
from the capital to escape poverty or violent parents. Experts say the
situation is the result of a decade of transition that has stripped the
country of its Soviet-era social- and family-welfare systems. The problem of
homeless children has grown so acute in recent years that Russian President
Vladimir Putin in January called on the government to take action and find a
solution to the growing number of street children. But some observers say
the situation has yet to improve.
Moscow, 19 June 2002 (RFE/RL) -- Fourteen-year-old Erika Ulyamaeva is one of
the thousands of homeless children who are picked up off the streets of
Moscow each year. Some of them have fled from homes far away to escape
poverty or abusive parents. Erika said she left Ukraine six years ago after
her impoverished mother sold her and her younger sister, Anya, to a group of
transients. "We used to live at home [in Ukraine]. I was a child of about 8
or 9 years old when our mother sold me [and my sister] to the gypsies. We
came here to Moscow with the gypsies and they forced us to beg. But I ran
away many times. When we asked for money, we used to work in [the central]
Arbat street," Erika said.
Three years ago, while working on the Arbat, Erika said, she met "nice
people" who helped her and took her to the Way Home shelter for homeless
children. Her sister, she said, now lives in another Moscow center for
abandoned children.
Sapar Kulyanov is the director of the Way Home shelter. He said such centers
are only a temporary solution. Usually, he said, children live in shelters
for about six months and are then reassigned to orphanages. But in Erika's
case, the shelter, which is home to 30 children at any given time, made an
exception. Like other children from the former Soviet republics, she has no
legal status in Russia and cannot be transferred to an orphanage.
"We have children who have been living in our [shelter] for three or four
years. And we don't know what to do with them, since they left their country
and in our country they do not have [legal] status. We have one
[14-year-old] boy [Dmitrii Knyazev, from Tajikistan] whose mother is in
jail. By the time she gets out, he will be 19 years old. There is no place
we can send him, but we also can't keep him, since a shelter is not the
place where you keep children for a long time. But we cannot send him to an
orphanage, since he doesn't have legal status," Kulyanov said.
Kulyanov said there are many children like Erika and Dmitrii without legal
status in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the
economic and political instability that followed, the number of people
flowing into Russia from the former republics has skyrocketed.
Dmitrii, who has been living in the Way Home shelter for four years, fled
Tajikistan with his mother in 1994, two years after the outbreak of civil
war. He said he and his mother made their way to the Russian capital in
hopes of finding better living conditions, but things only grew worse. "I
came here [to Moscow] with my mother. We thought we could find some place to
live, but we didn't. We moved from place to place around Moscow for about a
year. Then we lived in the country [not far from Moscow] with an old woman.
After that, my mother went to prison again," Dmitrii said.
Boris Altshuler heads Russia's Right of the Child humanitarian organization.
He said immigrant children from the former Soviet republics are only a small
part of Russia's growing problem with homeless kids -- most of Moscow's
street children are Russian citizens. Altshuler said there are more homeless
children today than in the wake of the 1918-20 civil war that followed the
Russian Revolution. The majority of today's street children, he added, have
been abandoned by their parents. "After the civil war we had homeless and
neglected children. These children didn't have a house or they didn't have
parents or their parents were killed during the war. Now we don't have
children with those problems. Children are abandoned now. They have parents,
a house, but their parents lack parental responsibility. And this situation
is taking on a catastrophic dimension," Altshuler said.
Asked what is responsible for such a disturbing shift in Russian society,
Altshuler said the economic hardship the country has suffered over the past
decade and the disappearance of family-welfare networks are to blame. "In
Russia there are two reasons why families abandon their children. The first
one is poverty and the socioeconomic crisis [of the past decade]. The second
reason is the lack of a support system for [families with problems]. For
example, there are cases where a child repeatedly asked for protection from
a father who drank and beat him. In one particular case, the child hanged
himself because no one did anything to help him. I'm talking about Petr
Kalenin, from Krasnodar Krai. One-and-a-half years ago, there was the case
of Aleksandr Belikov. His neighbors spent seven years trying to get help
from local authorities -- [his] mother was a drunk. He eventually set fire
to his house and died. No one from the local authorities ever went to that
house to see the way [that child] was living," Altshuler said.
Altshuler said the problem of street children can be fought by rebuilding a
social-support system for families. Until then, he said, the number of
homeless children will continue to rise.
Experts say it is nearly impossible to estimate how many homeless children
are living in Russia nationwide. The Prosecutor-General's Office has stated
the country has as many as 1.5 million "neglected" children, a term that
does not always mean the children are homeless.
In Russia's two largest cities, the problem appears especially acute. The
Russian Education Ministry estimates that in the year 2000, there were some
3,600 children in Moscow living outside of parental custody. In 2001, the
number rose to 4,500. A similar increase was seen in St. Petersburg, where
the number rose from 2,600 to 3,300.
Those estimates may be conservative. The Russian Interior Ministry, working
together with a street-children city center, has said there are 33,000
homeless children living in the capital. The Moscow office of the
International Labor Organization says the number may actually be as high as
50,000.
Kulyanov of the Way Home shelter, said the plight of homeless children is
relatively new in Moscow. As recently as a few years ago, city police were
responsible for taking children off the street and placing them in so-called
TsVINP shelters, Moscow Centers for the Temporary Isolation of Minors. At
such centers, children could receive shelter, food, and medical help for up
to 1 1/2 months while authorities determined their place of residence and
provided a return home to their parents. But a law passed in 1999 prohibited
police from taking nondelinquent children to the TsVINP shelters.
Human-rights activists at first welcomed the new law, saying the police
system appeared to equate child homelessness with criminality. But since
then, Kulyanov saids, people have changed their minds, especially since the
city has failed in its promise to provide an alternative to the TsVINP
shelters, which helped some 6,000 children per year and could house up to
300 children at a time.
The problem of street children has become so acute, and so visible, that in
January, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly demanded the government
take action to find a solution. In March, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov
signed a decree dividing responsibility for the problem between the Labor
and Social Development Ministry and local authorities.
Kulyanov said initially the program saw quick progress in Moscow, with
authorities establishing a complete welfare system within weeks. A number of
hospitals created wards to house street children. But the program's success,
Kulyanov said, was short-lived. Many of the medical personnel staffing the
special wards, with no training in coping with difficult children, were
quick to let street children go once they became unruly. Kulyanov called it
a classic illustration of the Russian principle "no children, no problems."
Irina Osokina, is the president of the Moscow government Committee for
Social Defense of Moscow Citizens. Her group is now working on a city
program to help street children, and Osokina said she has already begun to
see some improvement. "We had this situation at the beginning, after Putin's
speech [about homeless children in January]. We had to take extreme measures
in order to find a solution to that serious problem. At the time, we had
only a few orphanages. But in the last three months the situation has
changed for the better," Osokina said.
Osokina said the Moscow government is now working to build four shelters and
two specialized centers able to house a total of 120 children.
But according to Kulyanov and Altshuler, the long-term solution to Russia's
problem of homeless children involves taking active steps to offer support
to struggling families. Ideally, they say, at-risk children should be
located and guided through rehabilitation together with their families. For
now, however, both men say Russian authorities have failed to understand the
importance of such intervention.
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