Sadly, our country still has 130,000 children deprived of parental care. They have neither parents, nor guardians; they are denied of the most important thing – family warmth. We still have a long way to go to get rid of the ‘abandoned children’ notion. Child protection services (opeka) must be directly focused on placing those children in families and helping foster families. There should be no ‘un-adopted’ children in our country.
Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation (Medvedev 2010)
When it comes to the number of children deprived of parental care, Russia ranks among the top scorers across the world (2% of the total child population) (Kulmala et al. forthcoming). About 80% of these children have the Russian status of ‘social orphan’: children whose parents are alive but, for whatever reason, are not able to care for them. Approximately 20% are ‘true’ orphans in the English-speaking world’s understanding: children whose parents have died.1 In Russia, residential care has been the dominant form of alternative care.2 Residential institutions have traditionally been large and segregated in the country (Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010). For these reasons, among others, the Russian child protection system has been criticised for its inability to support families at risk and, as a result, has attempted to provide alternative care in large residential institutions (Kulmala et al. forthcoming). In the 2010s, President Medvedev’s aforementioned annual address to the Federal Assembly in 2010 can be taken as a starting point, after which Russia began to fundamentally reform its child protection system and alternative care systems, mainly through dismantling the old system of children’s homes inherited from the Soviet era and developing foster care, domestic adoptions, as well as community-based support services for birth families.
These reforms are based on the idea that every child has a right to grow up in a family. In the early 2010s, the Russian government set itself a target: nine out of ten children currently living in alternative care will move to live in families. This goal was to be achieved by promoting adoptions, increasing the number of foster families, and creating community-based family support services to prevent children from entering the alternative care system. In addition, the remaining residential institutions are to be drastically restructured into home-like environments, which would mean smaller apartment-like premises, less children in each of the units, and practices that resemble more family life than life in an institution.
These moves are all key elements of a global trend for deinstitutionalisation (DI), thus bringing Russia in line with global norms (An, Kulmala 2020). DI is a global policy which seeks to relocate residents in institutional care, including persons with disabilities and with mental illness, the elderly, and children deprived of parental care, the homeless, and criminal offenders to community-based housing, accompanied by the development of services that support participation in the community (Segal, Jacobs 2008). DI refers to the principle underlying the shift in the provision of care to various groups of people in need of support from institutional care to the ‘living in the community’ model. Integral to DI is the replacement of the paternalistic ethic with the interactive ethic and the recognition that human rights, as well as the dignity and autonomy of an individual, take precedence over their needs (An, Kulmala 2020). In the sphere of child welfare, this means the reduction of residential institutions for children deprived of parental care and the development of foster care and community-based support services for families at risk.
DI is internationally affirmed by several binding treaties, including the UN Conventions on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC 1989) and of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD 2006), both ratified by Russia. In their article on DI reforms in wider post-socialist space, Sofiya An and Meri Kulmala (2020) described how global deinstitutionalisation policy towards children’s residential institutions finds its roots in the world wars and concerns about orphaned children who had survived these wars. The first attempts to set up a global legal framework resulted in the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child (1924), which later became the non-binding UN Declaration adopted in 1948 and 1959. A binding global policy was only institutionalised when the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted in 1989. Although the UN convention does not specifically call for the dismantling of residential institutions, the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (adopted in 2010) set clear expectations for DI in child welfare and obligations for member states to implement relevant national policies. The UN CRC was ratified by most newly independent post-Soviet states, including Russia as early as in 1990. The more recent UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) explicitly recognises the right of disabled children to family life and requires that states provide services to prevent the segregation of people with disabilities. Russia ratified the CRPD in 2012.
The UN CRC has been integral to human rights and democratisation discourses involving global policy actors in post-socialist reforms (An, Kulmala 2020). Western child welfare experts’ long-term consideration of the disadvantages of residential care was reaffirmed by the discovery of the terrible situation of children in institutions in the region, and reliance on institutional care was identified as the main challenge in the region (UNICEF 2003).
The dominance of institutional care dates back to the Soviet ideology of collective care and upbringing and the idea of the paternalist state as the primary caregiver. The Soviet child welfare model prioritised care in state residential facilities, which were seen to be a favourable environment for children to be brought up as good Soviet citizens (Stryker 2012). Apart from child welfare, other collective forms of education, such as work colonies and pioneer houses, also included living in an institutional setting (Kulmala et al. forthcoming). Moreover, Soviet child psychology focused on physical and cognitive functioning in contrast to the attachment and socialisation theories that led to the emphasis on family-type care in the West (Disney 2015). However, in reality, Soviet institutions provided children with only basic education and care and failed to meet children’s developmental, health, and social needs (Kulmala et al. 2017). Institutionalisation led to very poor outcomes for graduates in their social adaptation who faced societal stigma (Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010.)
Soviet-type residential care continued to serve as the dominant form until the 2010s – although DI had been somewhat on the policy agenda, thanks to new transnational collaborations of NGOs in the 1990s (Bindman et al. 2019; Kulmala et al. 2017). A few years after the ratification of the UN CRC, the first Russian Constitution from 1993 brought the national legislation in line with international child’s rights commitments. The Constitution was followed by the new Family Code (in 1995), which, in principle, prioritised family forms of alternative care. In practice, residential care remained dominant still for more than a decade (Kulmala et al. forthcoming). The UN has repeatedly reminded Russia about the large number of children in institutions and its insufficient efforts to change the situation (An, Kulmala 2020).
At the same time, the turbulent transition of the 1990s led to an increasing need for care for children deprived of parental care. One cannot overestimate the social crisis in the 1990s that emerged as a result of this transition into a market economy. Increases in poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, and unemployment were dramatic indicators. They all contributed to the growing number of children deprived of parental care for socioeconomic reasons (Kulmala et al. forthcoming). Until now, a common risk factor for a child entering the alternative care system is their parents living in poverty and lacking proper housing, as many of the chapters of this volume indicate.
As of now, according to the Family Code of Russia, there are three main forms of family-based alternative care available: (1) ‘adoption’ (usynovleniye); (2) ‘foster families’ (priemnye sem’i); and (3) ‘guardianship care’ (opeka i popechitel’stvo) (Family code 1995). During the last decade, there has been a clear shift from institutional care to family forms of care, as Biryukova and Makarentseva show in Chapter 2 of this volume. In the current period, domestic adoption inside the Russian Federation is prioritised over international. In practice, the term ‘foster family’ (priemnaya sem’ya) is used as an umbrella term for all forms of family-based alternative care. Strictly speaking, however, foster care is differentiated into paid and non-paid form. The term ‘foster family’ (priemnaya sem’ya) describes paid foster care, while non-repayable custody is referred to as ‘guardianship care’ (opeka i popechitel’stvo) and is the most common form of foster care in the country.3 Additionally, in some regions there are ‘patronage families’ (patronat).4
Thus, the emergence of trained foster families, who receive financial compensation for fostering children, has been an important change. To facilitate the professionalisation of family-based alternative care, candidates must complete a mandatory training course, with exceptions made only for the child’s relatives. There is no unified teaching programme for the classes; however, normally they last for at least three months and are required to be focused on psychological, medical, and legal aspects of adoption and guardianship and include group training for candidates (Decree 2009). The need for this training is often explained by child welfare professionals as a matter of preventing situations where children are returned to an institution or replaced in another foster family. The courses do not provide special training targeted to different forms of family care, and prospective adopters and foster caregivers attend same classes following the same study programme. Foster families usually live on their own in separate accommodation, with the exception of the so-called ‘children villages’ (detskaya derevnya) in which several foster families often live together with many children (Chernova, Kulmala 2018).5
When none of the aforementioned family forms of care is possible, a child is placed in an institutional care. The existing institutions can be divided into three types. Firstly, there are former children’s homes (detskii dom), which are now called ‘family support centres’ (tsentr sodeystviya semeynomu vospitaniyu). Their main function is to accommodate children temporarily, but they also provide services to birth and foster families and support those leaving care. Most of these are administered by the Ministry of Social Protection and Labour, though some keep an affiliation with the Ministry of Education and Science. Secondly, there are baby homes for children under the age of 3 (dom rebenka) that are part of the health care system. These two types of institutional care treat relatively healthy children and most of the analysis of this collective volume focuses on them. Thirdly, there are also additional forms of institutional care arranged for children with various disabilities.6
Thus, the global DI ideology with its emphasis on the family environment – either in birth, adoptive, or foster families or in family-like residential settings – and community-based preventive and supportive services is in conflict with the Soviet child welfare ideology that viewed residential institutions as the embodiment of an omnipotent and benevolent state taking care of its children (An, Kulmala 2020). The DI thus required a paradigm shift in the understanding of good care and in the institutional design of child welfare (Kulmala et al. 2017).
Russian economic growth in the 2000s led to wide investments in social policy, namely family policy (Kulmala et al. 2014), which laid the ground for the later DI reform. Since the early 2000s, the severe decline in population, the so-called demographic crisis, started to dominate the political agenda as the most severe threat to the Russian nation (Cook 2011), which created ‘moral panic’ surrounding family values and childhood (Kulmala et al. 2017). Since 2005, a strong family-centred ideology started to characterise policy programmes and a new conservative protection of the family became a key priority for the Russian government. Since the annual address to the 2006 Federal Assembly of President Vladimir Putin, numerous pronatalist measures were introduced, including increases in family and maternity benefits (Chernova 2013; Cook 2011; Kulmala et al. 2014; Rivkin-Fish 2010; Rotkirch et al. 2007). Finally, in the 2010s, the increasing attention towards Russian families also encompassed children deprived of parental care and rather rapidly led to a paradigm shift in Russian child welfare policy (Kulmala et al. 2017). Thus, the Russian DI reform discursively grew from the demographic crisis constructed as a threat to the nation and intertwined with President Putin’s wider ideological project to revitalise the nation (Bindman et al. 2019; An, Kulmala 2020).
As often with paradigm changes (Khmelnitskaya 2015: 16–17), the Russian reform was triggered by an exogenous crisis. In 2008, a child adopted from a Russian orphanage to the United States died as a result of negligence by his American parents. The ‘Dima Yakolev’ case prompted a ban on the adoption of Russian children by US citizens in 2012, and importantly, drew attention to children living in institutions (Bindman et al, 2020). A number of abuse scandals in Russian children’s homes furthered media and public interest in the topic, opening a ‘window of opportunity’ for Russian child welfare NGOs to put forward their proposals at an official level (Bindman et al. 2019; Kulmala et al. 2017).
The issue of children living in institutions was addressed as the government’s top priority by President Medvedev in 2010 and was followed by several policy programmes designed with the involvement of Russian child welfare NGOs. A National Strategy (2012) was adopted which recommended that children’s homes should be reorganised into ‘family support centres’ whose primary task was to return children to their biological families or place them in foster families. This important document articulated key alternatives to residential institutions and contained frequent references to international treaties. It took, however, several years to develop implementation mechanisms for these proposals, starting with ...
