UN CAMPAIGNERS have called on central and eastern European governments to stop the practice of placing infants in state-run homes after new research showed as many 623,000 children were living in public institutions.
Unicef official Jean-Claude Legrand said only a tiny minority of such children were orphans and that most were placed in homes due to disability, poverty, their ethnic background or a perceived lack of parenting skills. They include some 30,000 infants aged under three.
More children were becoming separated from their families and the placement rate of children in formal care was increasing as the birth rate declined, he said.
“The legacy of the Soviet system of institutional care continues to dominate. The heart of the system has not been dismantled and it has not been done in a systematic manner.”
Mr Legrand, who is senior child protection adviser at Unicef, said he was concerned about the situation in Bulgaria, Romania, Belarus, Russia and the Ukraine. However, the situation in Georgia, Moldova and Serbia was changing rapidly.
At a meeting in the European Parliament, he told how incubators for infants were frequently placed in institutional homes instead of maternity hospitals.
The meeting was organised by Fine Gael MEP Mairéad McGuinness to mark the publication of two UN reports on children in public institutions. Ms McGuinness, who is seeking her party’s nomination to contest the presidential election, called for rapid change.
“I would like to think that we shouldn’t wait for generational change. It’s too easy to say it’ll take a lot of time.”
The reports were written by Unicef and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which wants EU member states to stop using structural funds “to reinforce their childcare systems in their current form”.
The Unicef report, At Home or in a Home?, said the number of children in residential care in central and eastern Europe was the highest in the world. It said institutions could never replicate the love of a family. “The institutionalisation of infants is a serious concern because of the damaging effect is has on the young child’s health and development.”
The report said the loaded term “abandonment” was often used to describe the reason these babies are in residential care. “However, hidden behind many of the cases or ‘abandonment’ are stories of mothers or parents whose decision to hand over their children was taken because they lacked support or advice.”