Russia's children are at risk from poverty, crime and disease, with some 2.5 million homeless kids, while only 10 percent of school leavers are said to be healthy, experts warned Friday on World Protection of Children Day.
Human rights ombudsman Oleg Mironov warned that unless the government moved swiftly to enact a law protecting children from homelessness, orphanhood and drug addiction, Russia could face a spiralling demographic crisis.
More than 2.5 million children in Russia are living as vagabonds and that figure could soon rise to four million according to independent research, said the writer Albert Likhanov, who heads Russia's children fund.
But even those living in conventional homes were at risk from chronic disease due to post-Soviet social problems and the lack of hospital care, the health ministry said, adding that 90 percent of Russian 17-year-olds suffered from one or severak medical ailments.
Street children, or "bezprizorniki" (the "unsupervised"), have been a part of Russia's social landscape since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Likhanov told the Trud daily.
Their tragic fate has been memorably described in Russian literature, by several writers such as Anton Makarenko and Marek Halter, dating back to the 1920s when the Cheka secret police rounded up street children and sent them to orphanages, he added.
"Why not revive this practice today? President (Vladimir) Putin could deploy the relevant department, the emergencies ministry for example, to help these children who suffer as much as the victims of fires or floods," Likhanov asked.
The children's campaigner said that many vagabond kids were not orphans at all, but had been abandoned by their parents who could not afford to bring them up.
"Ever since 1994, the number of so-called social orphans has increased by 100,000 to 113,000, and yet people call this an age of reforms. One wants to ask who exactly benefits from these reforms."
Aside from the humanitarian issues, the fate of Russia's street children is worrying because the country is currently witnessing a profound demographic crisis, with the 145 million population falling by 750,000 last year and the negative trend predicted to accelerate.
Homelessness also is not the only threat facing Russia's children, according to the health ministry, which said Friday that only one in 10 Russian children were healthy by the time they reached school-leaving age.
The rest acquired a variety of chronic diseases by the age of 17, due to the increase of alcoholism and drug use among teenagers, and the lack of booster immunisations for many illnesses, among other reasons, ITAR-TASS reported.
The report estimated that 760 children out of 100,000 were registered as alcoholics or drug abusers, and the health ministry quoted police statistics that indicated 20 percent of teenagers had committed a crime while in an intoxicated state. |
