Another Splendid Victory for Capitalism

["Jay Moore" <research@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Children pay heavy toll for Russian market reforms
RYBINSK, Russia, April 19 (AFP) -

Children have been in the front line of Russia's decade-long effort to
create a market economy and have paid a heavy toll in blighted lives.

The position of children in Russian society reached "crisis proportions"
very early in the 1990s and has continued to worsen as a result of
widespread poverty and the slump in government welfare provision, Rosemary
McCreery, UNICEF representative for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus said.

Hundreds of thousands of children are living in orphanages and institutions
of various kinds, according to Russian and UNICEF officials.

A significant proportion of Russian children are now victims of "social
orphanhood" -- a child losing his parents not through death but through
abandonment or neglect -- which specialists say is directly related to the
economic collapse of the past 10 years.

Unemployment and the alcoholism that often follows in its wake are among the
factors that have led to family dislocation, according to child welfare
specialists in Rybinsk where the number of orphanages has risen from one to
eight in just six years.

Rybinsk, only 300 kilometres (180 miles) north of Moscow but already another
world, is typical of many Russian cities.

Its port and aircraft-engine factories have seen massive layoffs, and there
are now around 1,000 children living either in orphanages or foster homes
and an undetermined number of "undetected" orphans -- suffering severe
neglect or unofficially adopted by relatives, welfare officer Valentina
Naumova said.

A government report published last month said the number of children
officially orphaned was increasing at a rate of around 100,000 a year and
stood at nearly 640,000 as of December 1999.

McCreery believes these figures are much too high but that nevertheless an
estimate of more than half a million orphans, most of them victims of the
"tremendous social upheavals" of the past decade, is not far wide of the
mark.

Outside the relative havens of the orphanages children face other perils for
which they have been ill-prepared, last month's report showed.

Drink, drugs and AIDS have made major inroads among the nation's young
people, and the years 1993 to 1999 saw the number of child alcoholics almost
double.

Over the same period the number of children registered as taking drugs
increased by a factor of 17.5, with the lower age limit for drug addicts
falling ever lower.

Naumova noted that the cocooned environment of the children's homes provided
little or no preparation for independent living once the residents were sent
out into the wider world.

"There is no formal system of social integration, and they are easy prey for
criminals and other bad influences," she said.

According to McCreery, the "loss of structured life patterns" among the
young has contributed to stacking the odds against today's adolescents.

Where previously Communist party youth groups or educational bodies had
eased the path of the young into society, there is now little provision for
young people "and they simply have nowhere to go."

"Unemployment among the young is very much higher than among other groups,"
she noted. "Many drift to the cities and into a life of petty crime and drug
abuse."

The widely noted crisis in Russian families -- a phenomenon that is hard to
quantify, McCreery stressed -- is "worrying because we don't know why it is
happening."

Last month human rights campaigner Ella Pamfilova denounced the "decline in
the sense of responsibility in the family and in society" and said the
plight of Russian children was "a blight on society."

Boris Alchuler of the Children's Rights Association noted there were 13,140
children living on the streets in Moscow, and an interior ministry official
said there were 736 children living rough in the city's nine railway
stations.

However there are grounds for optimism amid the gloom, McCreery concluded.

Paradoxical as it may seem, she said, "the traditional Russian view of
children as the nation's most precious asset remains unchanged."

Russia's school system is "still functioning pretty well," and if the
picture sometimes appears grim, "we can't say no one is taking notice."

And McCreery paid tribute to the untold number of people toiling to overcome
the crisis for Russia's children "in impossible conditions where people in
the West wouldn't last three days."