There are many reasons why a child can lose a family, the main of them are deprivation of parental rights and child abandonement.
These events have always taken place in our history, but the fact that scares the most is that there are people interested in placing children into orphanages. Viktoriya Mochalova, "The Happy Child" charity foundation volunteer told our correspondent about this sad tendency.
According to Viktoriya, after the demographic crisis of the 1990s the demand for the services of all children's institutions (including orphanages) decreased rapidly. The officials' response to the situation was typical — they began optimising the branch, reducing the staff. No one expected that the employees of the orphanages in order not to lose their jobs will begin an active “enrolment” campaign.
“They started visiting difficult families and offering the parents to place their child in the orphanage. Sometimes they even openly threatened to take the child away through court action,” - Viktoriya told us.
We managed to talk to the ex-employee of an orphanage, who told us about the intentions of such actions.
“We had no other choice. The superiors head put the question point-blank: either we enrol a certain number of children, or they will cut our time sheets. Of course nobody wanted to lose the salary which was already too low,” - Svetlana Ivanova, former caregiver told us.
According to Svetlana, most of the times the representatives of the children's institutions supported their offers with the promise of reasonably good allowances children receive in the orphanages.
However their actions went beyond just orphancy propaganda. In case the parents did not visit their child in the orphanage for six months, the institutions deprived them of their parental rights through court action.
Psychologists agree that the loss of family is a far greater problem for a child than financial hardships. Having not received a proper “childhood” experience, such child in the future cannot create a healthy family of his own.
