Russian orphans caught in adoption crossfire

Russian orphans caught in adoption crossfire

Published Date: 09 May 2010

By Clifford Levy

in Moscow

RUSSIAN officials have given the go-ahead for more children to be adopted by American parents despite controversy which has thrown a spotlight on Russia's massive orphan problem and how it deals with it.

The Russian government had insisted on new adoption rules in response to the case of Artyom Savelyev, who was sent back to Moscow on his own last month, just before his eighth birthday, by his adoptive mother in Tennessee.

The mother said Artyom ADVERTISEMENT

had severe behavioural difficulties and that the Russian orphanage had lied to her about his condition when she adopted him last year. Russian officials said there was nothing wrong with him and his plight caused an outcry in his native country.

Russia was the third leading source of adoptive children in the US in 2009, with 1,586, after China and Ethiopia. More than 50,000 Russian children have been adopted by US citizens since 1991. The adoption rate peaked at 6,000 in 2003, and then declined as bureaucratic and legal hurdles mounted.

While most adoptions turn out well, cases where adoptive Russian children have been harmed or killed in the US have drawn widespread attention in Russia. Russian officials said that of the 18 Russian adoptees who have been killed abroad since the Soviet collapse in 1991, 17 were in the US.

Meanwhile, Russian orphanages are having to face the fact that few Russians want to adopt. Moscow's Orphanage No 11 is an example of that crisis. Few of its children will ever be adopted by Russians or foreigners. When they reach the age of seven and are too old for this institution they will be shuttled to the next one, reflecting an entrenched system that is much better at warehousing children, and profiting from them, than finding them families.

Artyom's case, which has focused intense attention on the pitfalls of international adoption, has also highlighted domestic difficulties and again raised fundamental questions about why Russia has so many orphans and orphanages in the first place.

In recent days, senior Russian officials have begun to acknowledge how troubled their system is. The chairwoman of the parliamentary committee on family and children, Yelena Mizulina, spotlighted what she said was a shocking statistic: Russia has more orphans now, 700,000, than at the end of the Second World War, when an estimated 25 million Soviet citizens were killed.

Mizulina noted that for all the complaints about Artyom's case and his adoptive mother in Tennessee, Russia itself has plenty of experience with failed placements. She said 30,000 children in the last three years inside Russia were sent back to institutions by their adoptive, foster or guardianship families. "Specialists call such a boom in returns a humanitarian catastrophe," she said.

She reeled off more figures. The percentage of children who are designated orphans is four to five times higher in Russia than in Europe or the US. Of those, 30 per cent live in orphanages. Most of them are children who have been either given up by their parents or removed from dysfunctional homes by the authorities.

Her comments offered a sense of the frustration over the state of Russia's orphanage system, which has long been resistant to reform. Over the years, proposals to reduce the system's size – the deinstitutionalisation that occurred decades ago in the US and elsewhere – have gone nowhere.

Despite the horror stories recounted about Russian orphanages, social welfare experts say that conditions in many are not terrible and some are excellent. The more pressing issue is the warehousing of young children in large-scale facilities, which experts say can hold back their social and intellectual development.

But the system's defenders say that until the government figures out how to cut down on social problems such as drug and alcohol abuse to improve Russian family life, there is no alternative.

"It would be a lot better if there were no orphanages, and every child were happy in the family that he or she has," said the director of Orphanage No 11, Lidiya Slusareva. "But if there are bad families then it is better that the children are here."

In recent years, the Russian government has repeatedly pledged to bolster efforts to help families stay together, to increase the number of children who are adopted and to expand foster care. But it has not had notable success. Indeed, while Russia has its share of social problems, the large number of orphans stems in part from a policy that does not place a high value on keeping families together.

The Russian government spends roughly $3 billion annually on orphanages and similar facilities, creating a system that is an important source of jobs and money on the regional level – and a target for corruption. As a result, it is in the interests of regional officials to maintain the flow of children to orphanages and then not to let them leave, child welfare experts said. When adoptions are permitted, families, especially foreign families, have to pay large fees and navigate a complex bureaucracy.

"The system has one goal, which is to preserve itself," said Boris Altshuler, chairman of Right of the Child, an advocacy group in Moscow, and a member of a Kremlin advisory group. "That is why the process of adoption in Russia is like going through the circles of hell," he said. "The system wants these children to remain orphans."

The case of Artyom at first spurred a strong reaction, with some Russians saying that a country whose population is shrinking should never send its children abroad.

But Slusareva did not agree. The primary goal, she said, should be to find good homes for these children; preferably in Russia, but if not there, then elsewhere.

"The hardest thing is when a child asks: 'When will a mama come for me?'" she said. "So the best moment for me is when a child leaves the orphanage with a family."