Lack of housing and employment is still the most commonly cited reason for abandoning a child. Nonetheless, Aleksandra Marova says that while solving the problem of abandoned children is complex, it's possible.
The non-profit she runs is dedicated to reducing the number of children abandoned in the hospital, and in the past two years, it has worked with 1, mothers who had already signed the paperwork to abandon their children. In half of the cases, the child was returned to its family of origin. When the author's father died suddenly two years ago in Colombia, the Catholic Church mourning rituals offered little comfort.
In my native country of Colombia, when someone dies, the process of mourning is almost always turned over to the Catholic Church.
It starts with the wake, set in aseptic shiny salons, surrounded by dozens of other identical rooms, each family has to welcome people who come to give their respects for days, amid religious symbols and white flower crowns. The lonely rituals are interrupted only by the occasional unrequested words of advice from friends or clergy about the right way to mourn.
For my first 22 years, I'd observed all of this with mild irritation from a distance at the few wakes and funerals I'd attended. Then, one Easter week, the family crying desperately in the center of the cold room was my own.
I lost my dad, who was a perfectly healthy recently retired physical education teacher, to a cardiorespiratory stroke while he was sleeping. He was just My foggy memory from those horrid days included comments from supposed well-wishers like "Stop crying, God knows what he's doing," "It was God's will" or "maybe God is trying to teach you something. Since I was young, I had no longer considered myself a Catholic; but even more so I wanted desperately for my dad to be the center of his own funeral, and did what I could by placing photos over the cold brown coffin, playing his favorite songs while he was lowered in his grave, and sharing a song my brother and I wrote on his online memorial.
I never imagined grief could feel so lonely when you are a non-religious person in a Catholic country like Colombia. Even the flower crowns and visits from friends were overshadowed by the religious emphasis and obligations, such as praying nine nights in a row and repeatedly being encouraged to cross myself.
They were demands of a religion I didn't want to be part of, with the unspoken message that this was the only possible guidance on how to grieve for my dad. Fast forward two and a half years to the final week of October These "Day of the Dead" festivities are celebrated between October 30 and November 2, in which Mexicans welcome with an altar their deceased loved ones whom they believe come to visit the living on these dates each year.
In this festivity of Aztec origins, Catholic rituals of popular tradition intertwine, a smooth syncretizing of cultures and faiths. Still, this was the first time I'd experienced it myself, and still facing the unresolved grieving for my father. Between Tamarindo Smirnoff's sweetly-spicy burning flavor, young Mexicans started telling the stories of their deceased in front of the host's altar. Candles smoothly twinkled over a small table while yellow petals framed the photographs of loved ones.
A small cross above and a tequila bottle, of the favorite brand of the deceased, lay on the table. One by one, the friends each shared memories of a relative they'd lost including a high school friend that had died in a car accident. The combination of joy and death had always seemed so alien to me, yet at that party I felt it for the very first time.
Mexican journalist and friend Paul Antoine Matos gave me his first book, Embellecedores de Huesos "Beautifiers of Bones" in which he narrates the unique custom of Pomuch town citizens of cleaning their deceased bones year by year to somehow bring them back. One of the locals of Pomuch said to him "The environment during these days is festive and joyful, because you feel that your family is by your side.
It is an intense throat-tightening cocktail of emotions that I can only describe as a national hug. It was so far from the awkward silences I knew back at home when someone asked about my parents, and I had to answer that my papa passed away. Far from the heavy religious judgment when people assumed I was angry at God because my dad had died. Here I was listening to people my age remembering and honoring the memory of those they lost while having some shots to definitively break the taboos I'd been surrounded by since losing my father.
The tall buildings and old houses of the busy metropolis of Mexico City during this time of the year are colored yellow and lilac. The orange-toned flower represents life and the sun, and the purple refers to loss and mourning. The altars are everywhere, from museums to bars. One of the first ones I saw was in The Museum of Memory and Tolerance, where the message "phobias that kill, the colors of grief" was displayed by the Pride flag. Not very long after that event, an year-old Russian boy who was adopted by an American couple was found in a port city in Russia.
The boy said that he fled from his adoptive parents because his mom was verbally abusing him. Another possible reason for the law against foreign adoption is that President Putin and the Parliament are scared that a Russian child adopted into another country might forget about his or her own heritage and culture. Putin and Russian policymakers are scared that these orphans will be forced to learn a new culture and forget about their native culture and about the country they derived it from.
However, these problems can be solved without forbidding foreign adoptions. The Russian parliament said that they would only keep this law until there is an agreement made with all countries that want to adopt Russian orphans. I think that the United States should push for an agreement, and the agreement should include a clause that forbids adopting parents to mistreat or abuse their child in any way. The agreement should also require parents to keep the child permanently and to let the child bring at least two things that remind them of their Russian culture and heritage.
I am sure that there will be more rules and obligations in this agreement, but it could begin with these three simple things. Children described how orphanage staff beat them, used physical restraints to tie them to furniture, or gave them powerful sedatives in efforts to control behavior that staff deemed undesirable. Staff also forcibly isolated children, denied them contact with their relatives, and sometimes forced them to undergo psychiatric hospitalization as punishment.
Many children also experienced poor nutrition and lack of medical care and rehabilitation, resulting in some cases in severely stunted growth and lack of normal physical development. Human Rights Watch determined that the combination of these practices can constitute inhuman and degrading treatment. Children with disabilities living in orphanages also had little or no access to education, recreation, and play.
The practice of keeping children with certain types of disabilities in such conditions is discriminatory, inhumane and degrading, and it should be abolished. While Russia lacks comprehensive and clear statistics on children in state institutions or foster care, experts estimate that the overwhelming majority of these children have at least one living parent. In addition, many parents face pressure from healthcare workers to relinquish children with disabilities to state care, including at birth.
Human Rights Watch documented a number of cases in which medical staff claimed, falsely, that children with certain types of disabilities had no potential to develop intellectually or emotionally and would pose a burden with which parents will be unable to cope.
In all of these cases, the children raised in their families had far exceeded any expectations. Children with disabilities who enter institutions at a young age are unlikely to return to their birth families as a result of the practice of local-level state commissions to recommend continued institutionalization of children. The Russian government has failed to adequately support and facilitate adoption and fostering of children with disabilities, although these types of programs formally exist.
As a result, when children with disabilities turn 18 and age out of orphanages, they are overwhelmingly placed in state institutions for adults with disabilities. Staff in many orphanages also fail to provide training and practical knowledge that would give children the skills they need to live independently once they become adults. While in orphanages, children with disabilities may be subject to serious violence, neglect, and threats. They make a list of diagnoses, but are simply describing "risk factors," to let other doctors know: maternal risk factors, infant risk factors.
But Dr. Repeatedly Dr. Doctors and the other experts in child development whom we interviewed for this report frequently criticized this diagnostic tradition. The experts reported that Russian psychological norms are based on very strict criteria. Apart from these norms, however, factors that in the West are considered as being simple medical risks, will, in Russia, be labeled as illnesses:.
Human Rights Watch also found that these early diagnostic practices interfere with a child's right to full development and in certain cases, to life, itself. Moreover, abundant information gathered in Russia indicated several crucial incentives behind "over-diagnosing" that suggest violations of basic medical ethics. According to a former charity worker who distributed assistance to impoverished baby houses and has travelled widely in Russia since , one legacy of the Soviet medical bureaucracy encourages hospital staff to avoid any risk of sanctions for errors detected under their care.
For example, she recalled the case of a child she knew well who had a medical chart with a catalogue of conditions including oligophrenia and encephalopathy. A doctor told me that they have to cover their butt. They could lose their job, so they write many diagnoses.
And you know the penal system here. A second factor that encourages exaggerated diagnoses, is the Russian law which until recently, prohibited international adoption of "healthy" children. The entitlement to these subsidies was confirmed by children's rights activists as well as by staff of state institutions. Once, in a rare honest moment with the acting director, she told me, 'We are considered as a medical facility because more than half our children are considered to have medical defects.
Another baby house director told Human Rights Watch, however, that the subsidy does represent the greater burden shouldered by the staff in dealing with disabled children, even though the salary levels remain very low and do not attract specially trained personnel:. A pedagogue in a baby house who works here, for the Ministry of Health, will get a 20 percent higher salary than from another ministry.
Of course, all these places with "problematic kids" get higher pay because we have to deal with all the kids, including the problematic ones. Rybchonok, who has examined avast number of children from Russian institutions, described the broader impact of deprivation:. I see children who've been institutionalized after parents lost their parental rights. If the kids lived with their parents even two years, they are very different.
They don't look like institutionalized children. They've been loved. Even in an alcoholic family, the child could be smaller than normal and could be abused. But the child still looks different. Those children who have lived all their time in an institution are really special.
Because of being exposed to sensory deprivation after two years, they have no social skills, they don't grow that well, some are off the growth chart. That's the big impact. That's the negative side of the institutions. If someone's trying to find that situation, look at the last century. There's a high risk of disability, attachment disorders. That's just through sensory deprivation. Recent research on the developmental challenges of children adopted from orphanages in Eastern Europe and the former USSR shows promising evidence that children can make remarkable recoveries from the deprivation of institutional life.
The majority of Russia's orphans will be stuck for all their formative years within the tunnel of state institutions, only to emerge when they reach the age of eighteen. Moreover, those who have been wrongly diagnosed as "ineducable" will lose any opportunity to catch up. Human Rights Watch asked a long-time director of a baby house to compare specifically the developmental opportunities for orphans reared in Russian institutions with those of children raised in families. She replied:.
There's a big difference. First of all, the deprivation of a mother is the lack of personal love. If you talk about a baby in his mother's hands, touching him, it's been scientifically proved that this influences his development.
Everything is always done altogether in line, never in private, to sit at a table to eat. It affects the development of their nervous system. They become aggressive. It's natural, if someone has to struggle to survive. They have no attachment. They don't even have personal clothes.
0コメント