Scandal of the returned orphans

Figures regarding the situation of minors in Russia are alarming.

In the last two years alone, around 30,000 adopted children were brought back to the orphanages they came from.

The astonsihing figures were reported to Duma by Elena Mizulina, the Russian President of the Parliamentary Commission for family, women and children.

“This situation was created because nobody takes care of adoptive parents, nobody offers them any kind of suitable assistance”, she says.

Besides, according to her, “many people adopt children to obtain material goods which do not materialise, so that adoptive parents feel motivated to bring children back, without worrying about psychological damages that they are inflicting on them.”

The situation is also true for international adopting parents.

“I am against limiting adoption, but I don’t think that international adoption must be enhanced any further,” says Mizulina.

“Rather there is the need for a law which recognises adoption to mixed parents, as cases of international marriages are always more frequent”.

Officially recognised orphans in the Russian Federation are 697,000, four to five times the European and US average figure. Shockingly, numbers are higher than they were during World War II.

Two thirds of them are referred to as social orphans, a phrase used to say that their parents are still alive but they do not take care of them, either for reasons connected to their economic hardship or social frailty, or because they have been dismissed from their parental authority.

Two years ago the Russian parliament approved a law on assistance to orphans, and since then the number of orphans who have been brought back from adoptive families to orphanages has doubled.

“Experts,” says Mizulina, “think that this is a humanitarian slap in the face for children: first they are rejected by their biological parents, and then they are rejected by their adoptive parents too.”

Besides the reported figures on adoptions, the Ekho Moskvy radio also reported in the past few days that, according to Pavel Astakhov, the local Commissioner for Infancy Rights, last year 100,000 children were victims of violence by adults, 2,000 children were killed and 600 disappeared.

 

Original article from Vita.it, translated by Cristina Barbetta.