It was one of my most alarming experiences. It was 1990 or 1991, and I was in Moscow. It was cold, damp and grey. My colleagues and I had been wandering along the Arbat. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a throng of children with two or three adults. Suddenly one of the little boys ran up to me and seized me by the leg. Yielding to a reflex acquired in Rome, I immediately checked my pockets. But this urchin didn’t want money. He just shrieked and cried and clung to my leg. Passers-by kept their distance. Through my mind flashed a dim awareness of gangs of exploited children and their unscrupulous “guardians.” If I gave him money, it would get into the wrong hands. Calling the police would only make things worse. The boy howled and screamed and would not let go. I could only wait until someone managed to coax him back to his peers.
Even after 25 years, the memory evokes guilt and frustration. What could I have done? There are, to be sure, organizations that work to curb child abuse. But since the demise of the Soviet Union, the problem has persisted in Russia and the successor republics, not excluding Ukraine. This is not the place to attempt an analysis of its causes, but surely alcoholism, drug abuse, ruptured families, and the general moral and socio-economic disintegration of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods have contributed to the proliferation of homeless and exploited children.
Often these children are born into misery. Some are orphans. Sometimes irresponsible, alcoholic or drug-addicted parents turn them over to the state. And sometimes the child is born with a mental or physical disability, which may or may not be related to the parents’ conduct.
Although many homeless children are adopted by foreigners, Russia recently banned such adoptions. It is strange that a country that is so concerned with preserving its “genetic fund” and reversing the decline in its population – a laudable aim – should devote so few resources to caring for its abandoned children. It is also strange that Western societies, which so eagerly promote sex without consequences, should find it necessary to import children from abroad. That said, those who adopt orphaned or abandoned children from Ukraine are certainly to be commended.
Ukraine maintains a system of homes for these children. On a chilly evening last October, I visited one such regional “Dim Dytyny” with a group of third-year theology undergraduates, both men and women, from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Their social pedagogy program included four regular visits to the facility. The vast, stately pre-war building near the Stryisky Park was about a 15-minute walk from campus. After some haggling with the administrator on duty, who insisted that the rules only allowed nine visitors at a time, we broke up into two groups. One would visit the toddlers on the lower floor; the other would see the older ones.
I joined the first group. We were shown to a large room with about a dozen cribs at one end, where a few weary middle-aged women supervised 11 toddlers, mostly boys. There was a powerful smell of disinfectant that would cling to my clothes for days afterwards. The partly carpeted floor was strewn with colored plastic blocks, toys and a couple of stuffed animals. On one side of the room were high curtained windows; a student told me that the children liked to be held up to look through them. The physician on duty explained to me that most of these children would eventually be adopted. Only a small part of the home was currently occupied, she explained, as a new state program had assigned many abandoned children to foster families. A foster family was handsomely paid: 2,000 hrv per child. In this impoverished society, the opportunities for abuse were obvious.
The students played with the toddlers for about an hour. One of the children, however, stayed in his crib. His big dark eyes and tongue rolled about uncontrollably. Yet he was no less lovable than the others. No amount of philosophical or theological argumentation for the inherent dignity of all human life, regardless of mental or physical condition, beats looking into the smiling, curious face of one of these children.
Children suffering from congenital diseases like Down syndrome or cerebral palsy are especially prone to abandonment. Can anything be done for them? They are not particularly “desirable” for foreign or domestic adoption. Facilities like Dim Dytyny can care for them for a few years. Then other institutions take over.
Even if such a child’s parents are able and willing to assume the burden of care, the family faces an array of problems. One is that people often assume that the parents are alcoholics or drug addicts. In a recent article in the Kyiv Post, Yana Stepaniuk described this and other difficulties experienced by the parents of children with cerebral palsy (“Children with Cerebral Palsy in Ukraine ‘Struggle from the First Day of their Lives,’” Kyiv Post, March 17, 2016).
According to the author, nearly 100,000 children in Ukraine suffer from disabilities related to neurological disorders. There are few state centers that offer free treatment. Caretakers often exhibit a fatalistic attitude. There persists a social prejudice that children with disabilities must be kept out of sight and will never have normal lives. In the world outside the care facilities, the lack of ramps and elevators limits their mobility. Their educational possibilities, too, are restricted, because schools will not, for example, enroll a child with cerebral palsy.
But the plight of a child with a developmental disability who has also been abandoned is immeasurably worse. And even for a healthy child, state facilities – while obviously preferable to criminal gangs – are no substitute for a family. As the physician at the Dim Dytyny remarked to me, “What is really needed is a mother’s love.”