Champion of Children

Whether the theme is orphanages or adoptions, juvenile delinquency or drug use, Boris Altshuler's mission is to improve the lot of the nation's 35 million children. On the occasion of Thursday's International Day for the Protection of Children , Altshuler, who heads The Right of the Child program at the Moscow Helsinki Group, met with Kester Klomegah to discuss the fate of children in need.


Q:


What can you say about the fate of Russia's 35 million children?


A:


Unfortunately, our state agencies responsible for children's affairs have not worked effectively to improve our children's welfare. Disease and starvation are common among the 1.5 million street children who roam completely neglected. There has been a drastic growth in the number of orphans. Every year some 110,000 children lose their parents and a lot more are abandoned. The state orphanages cannot handle the influx of children. In the last three years the number of children's homes has increased by 229, but the number of children left to the care of the state has increased by 32 percent. The institutional care of orphans and disabled children is one of the country's most serious social disasters. A child must be brought up in a family environment, or he will have real problems entering the world. Take, for example, the 15,000 orphans who "graduate" from state care upon reaching adulthood every year. Within their first year of life in the outside world 30 percent to 50 percent become homeless or criminals while 10 percent commit suicide. These are the sad facts of children in extreme situations, but there are millions of children living in families who also have problems, the most serious of which is poverty.


Q:


What is the state's response to this growing problem?


A:


First of all, let us agree on semantics. We presently do not have a "state" in the conventional sense of the word. We have a system, which may be described as departmental or regional feudalism. Words pronounced in the Kremlin, government decisions and even federal laws have a rather weak impact on the real life of the citizens of Russia - its children in particular.


On the federal level there was a response to dramatic problems in the form of Deti Rossii - a series of special programs created under the auspices of the presidential administration. However, regardless of the enormous amount of money spent on these programs, the situation is still deteriorating. [Former] President Boris Yeltsin commented on the ineffectiveness of these programs in his annual address to parliament in 1998. "Perhaps the programs are bad, or perhaps the responsible are incapable of doing a good job," he said. But there was never any follow-up to Yeltsin's clever words. I am not even sure that those officials he criticized even noticed. This demonstrates the complete absence of proper accountability.


Q:


Are these problems due exclusively to economic change?


A:


We know of cases when children in school have fainted from hunger. But I do not believe we do not have the financial resources at the local or regional levels to organize free hot meals for school children. This has already been done in the Novgorod region by Governor Mikhail Prusak, and it may be done everywhere. It is only a problem of [political] will. The problem is that the money slated for children is very often misspent. But we must help our children now because in the years to come they will be our leaders. In this way we are building the future of the country.


Q:


Why has there been a rise of drug use and homelessness among children? And why is juvenile delinquency also very high?


A:


Most of the children living on the streets today are not formally homeless. Their names often appear on school lists, but they do not attend for months at a time. They went to live on the street not because they were deprived of their homes or their parents, but because "home" for them may mean drunken parents who beat them and don't give them anything to eat. According to Russian law, parents can only be held accountable for cruel treatment of their children - not for neglect. (And the number of cases of parents being sued for cruel treatment is rather small.) This lack of parental responsibility is one of the main reasons for problems. In the absence of proper care children blindly absorb the worst social values from the outside world, such as drugs and crime.


Also, the country's law on education allows schools to dismiss "difficult" pupils easily, thus decreasing the school's responsibility for its students. This has had a sorry impact on children's welfare and resulted in a rise in criminal activity. Juvenile delinquency is also a result of drastic neglect due to the absence of mechanisms needed to investigate children's complaints and the lack of rehabilitation centers for juvenile offenders.


President Vladimir Putin says we need to "build new family politics," but in order to do this we first must create the tools needed to build them. Present-day guardianship departments at the local level are absolutely incapable of rising to the challenge. They must be reformed. These strengthened departments working in cooperation with public initiatives may prove to be the proper social instrument to help children at risk who suffer from domestic violence or malnutrition.


Q:


Are the numbers of single families emerging as a result of these problems?


A:


The number of single families inevitably increases in crisis situations, but the rise is also due to the fact that there is no political support of the family. Families with disabled children are, in particular, sorely lacking support. Take one positive example in the Samara region, which created family centers for people with disabled children. It is interesting to note that these centers helped restore the family unit.


Q:


What about the Duma's committee on women, youth and family? What legislation have they managed to pass in support of children?


A:


Unfortunately, this committee is controlled by the Communists, who have done more harm than good. Take, for example, the 1999 law they drafted "on the prevention of child homelessness and delinquency." It calls for police to round up street children who have not committed any crime. Indeed, Moscow's detention centers are severely reprimanded by the prosecutor general for neglecting to rid city streets and railway stations of homeless children. As a result, hundreds of street children are routinely rounded up, but left without any care, while desperate appeals by the administration of these centers to set up shelters for noncriminal street children have been ignored. We have the Duma committee to thank for this situation.


Q:


What can you say about international adoptions? Have there been many abuses by foreigners adopting Russian children?


A:


The Prosecutor General's Office has, through the media, made so many accusations of crimes linked to foreign adoption. The prosecutor general's ideological struggle with foreign adoption shows the whole world that Russia remains a totally unpredictable country. This, in turn, undermines Putin's policies aimed to create confidence and lure foreign investment.


As for Putin's decree calling for tighter regulations in the field of adoption, this move could only be welcome had it not resulted in the immediate moratorium on all foreign adoptions [thus leaving many newly formed families in limbo]. We must hope that these new rules will be established as soon as possible so that thousands of Russian orphans will no longer be deprived the possibility of acquiring a family.