GOALS
Our objective is to develop a charity, which caters for the needs of children living in the Urals region Children Homes. There are 81 Children Homes in the region with the total number of 2587 occupants. We cannot change the system but we can make lives of these children more comfortable by providing them with basic material things no child should go without.
STATISTICS
Every year 15,000 young adults go out into the world from
Russian orphanages - the vast majority of the children go
out into the world utterly unprepared to find employment and
with a sharply sub-standard level of education. Thus, the
children very often are drawn into gangs or prostitution,
end up in jail, or worse; some statistics say that 10% are
dead within the first year of 'graduation' from state orphanages.
These children are unprepared to support or to take care of
themselves in a country where, at present, it is difficult
for even the most privileged to find gainful employment. Generation
after generation of down-and-outs coming from Russian orphanages
has led to snowballing prejudice against any child who happens
to have grown up without his parents. With such grim prospects,
there is little wonder that a meager minority of the children
in Russia's orphanage system even look forward to getting
up in the morning or care at all what the next day will bring.
According to compilations published by UNICEF in 1997, some
611, 034 Russian children are "without parental care."
Of these, 337,527 are housed in baby houses, children's homes,
and homes for children with disabilities. According to a Russian
expert in their field, the latter figure includes children
living part-time at home, and the full-time orphan population
in institutions is closer to 200,000. Of these, at least 30,000
are committed to locked psycho neurological internaty for
"in educable" children, run by the Ministry of Labor
and Social Development.
Some of these children are orphans who have lost their parents,
others are from the families, where parents were deprived
of their parental rights for economical and/or legal reasons
and are so-called "social orphans". Their families
are often poor, jobless, ill, and in trouble with the law;
ninety-five percent of abandoned children have a living parent.
60% of children in child care have serious health problems,
mainly problems with their central nervous system. 55% are
behind in their physical development. Only 4.7% are qualified
as healthy.
Children whose parents have lost their rights to look after
them and have been taken into care are more likely to become
victims of crime: sexual assault, children trade. 15% of these
children are drug addicts.
The number of parents loosing their rights is on the increase,
41.4 K in 1998 compare to 37.5 K in 1997.
50% of teenage criminal offenders come from broken homes.
Social Orphanage is on the increase and developed new trends.
There is a lot of hidden social orphanage, which is linked
with the decrease in the standards of living, the low moral
values within the family, the attitude to children within
the family, poor living conditions within families which lead
to children being outcasts and ending up on the streets. The
children homes and other institutions for children are running
to its full capacities.
The social crisis in the country has affected the family.
The most social problems of a modern family are defined by
the following factors:
- the social - economic dividence in the society
- the deficit in the state budget
- high unemployment
- forced migration as a result of ethnic clashes
|
