Russia Dumps Its Children On The Streets

Russia Dumps Its Children
On The Streets
Poverty Forces Families To Abandon Record Numbers Of
'Social Orphans' To A Hopeless Life Of Drugs & Begging
By Nick Paton Walsh
The Observer - UK
4-18-4

MOSCOW -- Natalia, 15, leans against the window of a kiosk selling pies, brings her coat collar up to cover her mouth and inhales deeply. Her nose is permanently blocked and her shrill voice punctuated by girlish giggles and sniffing.

The fumes from the glue beneath her coat are all that keep her going during her third year as a resident of Moscow's filthy Kazanskaya Metro station.

At 11, Natalia fled from Ukraine and her parents' drinking, begging for the train fare to Moscow. Here she joined Russia's epidemic of 'social orphans', children whose parents may not be dead but are jailed, drunk or incapable of providing a home.

New government figures show that, while the Second World War left 600,000 parentless children across the Soviet Union, a social crisis has now left 700,000 'social orphans' in Russia, and the number is rising by 20,000 each year. Sociologists said the first wave of orphans last century was caused by the 1917 revolution and civil war, the second by the Second World War. Yet the third is different, said Svetlana Pronina, from the group Right of the Child, and 'has come from social problems and poverty'.

They fall into an abyss between broken parents and an indifferent state, and are left to eke out a life in Metro underpasses. 'You don't really exist here, you just live,' Natalia sniffed. At 4pm on Friday, most of her friends were still sleeping, catching a break from police harassment.

On 17 February, Moscow's anarchic police swept into the three Metro stations around which the city's estimated 33,000 orphans intermittently swarm and packed many of them off to hospital and the groaning, brutal welfare system. Days later, they were back, unwelcome in or afraid of state homes, yet police intimidation persists.

'The police on the Metro, in the station, and on the street all come from different patrols,' said Natalia. 'So one lot throw you out into the path of another. They bounce us between each other.'

Natalia, who dreams of being a doctor, keeps one hand in her jacket's upper pocket, holding the plastic glue bag tightly. 'It makes you feel drunk,' said her friend Anya.

Orkhan Nasibov, who works for a MÈdecins Sans FrontiËres aid programme for Moscow's street children, which is due to open tomorrow, said he had met children as young as 10 with drug problems. 'Some kids are even born on the street,' he said. 'There is no younger age limit.'

Government figures show there were 500,000 social orphans in 1994. By 2001 there were 685,000. Despite the purported economic miracle of President Vladimir Putin's first term, the number has kept on rising. Officials blame poverty.

Nina Shakhina, from the family department in the Ministry of Labour, said: 'For millions of families, the birth of a new child means an immediate worsening of their situation, leading to the reduction of income per capita and putting them on the edge of poverty. We have many families who have to send their children to orphanages temporarily in order to survive.' She added that the biggest category of poor in the country were families with children.

One stop away, at Kurskaya station, is Sasha. He insists he is 17, despite a grin putting him at least four years younger. He fled his home in the Moscow region three-and-a-half years ago after his brother killed himself. 'My parents said I was no longer needed,' he said. Today, as sharp as any 17-year-old, he makes occasional cash from his dexterity with a deck of cards. 'I won £20 once gambling,' he said. He also landed himself a job at the Metro by picking up a stray ID card there and pretending to be its wearer, he said.

Svetlana Pronina said: 'The number is rising not only because of the bad economic situation and social decay, but also because of state politics. Instead of working with families in risk groups, the state has a repressive mentality, depriving every year about 20,000 families of parental rights and sending their children to orphanages.'

The crisis in Russia's youth is self-perpetuating. By 2015, analysts fear, the falling number of young people of working age per pensioner, and the high youth mortality rate, will put Russia on the edge of a demographic abyss. There are already 200,000 children in orphanages, and statistics show that 30 per cent of them will end up in criminal gangs and in jail. A further 14 per cent commit suicide.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3988759,00.html

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