Poor children

The next time they angrily tell us how our adopted children are being tortured in America, let’s remember Gleb Ageev and the children from the Tomilino boarding school “Our Home”. No, I don’t want to say that all these terrible stories about Russian children who suffered at the hands of American parents are fiction. It’s just that before we stigmatize and prohibit “export abroad,” we need to be sure that we ourselves are blameless, that children adopted in Russia are safe, and orphans in orphanages are under the care of worthy people.

Gleb Ageev, who is not yet four years old, was taken to the hospital with monstrous beatings, burns, and a traumatic brain injury - the complete impression was that the child was tortured. Doctors determined that the child had been beaten, and since old injuries were visible under the fresh injuries, it was obvious that this was not the first time the child had been beaten.

Gleb was lucky. I was lucky because it became known by chance. Moreover, the first to report about it were not human rights and children’s organizations, but rather their “tabloid” colleagues. The mutilated little child could not help but arouse interest. And only then everyone started talking about Gleb - right up to the Public Chamber. They are even ready to change the law on the adoption procedure. What if Gleb had been beaten less severely? Wouldn't they pour boiling water on him, which is what they apparently did with him? If the head hadn't been hit? Well, they would just beat them, like thousands of children are beaten - relatives and adopted ones.

Moreover, the doctors, having noted the beatings and listened to the boy who said that he was “punished by his mother,” came to the surprising conclusion that it was impossible to rely on the words of a four-year-old child. Can you rely on your own observations? The guardianship authorities, which at one time allowed this family to adopt Gleb, supported the adoptive parents, who claimed that the child himself doused himself with boiling water and fell down the stairs! Apparently he did this regularly, right? And I ask again: if the boy had not suffered so badly, wouldn’t they have given him back to his parents? It's a family matter, an everyday matter. But Gleb was lucky that he was beaten half to death. Only in such a blatant situation was it still possible to separate him from his parents, despite the strange position of the doctors and the cowardice of the authorities in charge of adoption. Well, that's right. After all, if the terrible version is confirmed, they will be asked: how could you, to whom did you entrust the child?

This family should have aroused interest in general. They also had a son who died at the age of 11. No crime seemed to have been found then, but the fact that everything was not all right with the mother after such grief was obvious to everyone around her. In fact, several recordings of her testimony are now available on the Internet, and these videos leave a very difficult impression. People are in grief, they probably wanted to help. And they allowed us to adopt two children at once - Gleb and Polina, who is even younger than her brother. The adoptive father is a rich, respected man, so maybe that’s why they didn’t refuse him?

There is still a lot that is unclear in this story. Why was no criminal case initiated for six days, why were the forensic expert and investigators not allowed to see the child? But one thing is obvious: this case would not have received publicity if it were not for the exceptional circumstances that were, pardon the gloomy pun, present. A child can count on public protection only in the most egregious cases - is that right?

Like in Tomilino. The “Our Home” boarding school, where, by the way, there are not only orphans, but also children left without parental care (that is, they have relatives, grandmothers, for example). So there, for bad behavior, students were sent to psychiatric hospitals! To three madhouses! Children were brought regularly, and no one had any questions. Delivery has been arranged. They were injected with drugs prohibited by international conventions, not to mention the fact that punitive psychiatry is itself monstrous. These children, of course, were not angels, many from terrible families, with bad heredity. Plus a difficult age. They bullied, were insolent, ran away from the boarding school. But this is not a crime. But when they were tied to beds, handcuffed, injected with powerful drugs, as if they were violently insane - this is a crime. And the cunning Makarenkas did not disdain to use fake documents to live in apartments allocated for boarding school students.

But articles appeared in the newspapers about how they take care of orphans at Our House, how the leadership of the Lyubertsy district visits them and promises them beautiful toys, how the renovations were done, how “once you find yourself in a boarding school, you even forget that orphans live here.” Everything also became clear quite by chance. And only when it came to a serious prosecutorial audit, only then was the director removed. However, the investigation has not yet been completed, and who knows whether the “teachers” will find intercessors.

But I want to repeat again: it turns out that a child has a chance of protection only if absolutely monstrous things happen to him. What do we know about the rest? We know about all the incidents in America with Russian children. But just last year in Russia, according to official statistics, more than 125 thousand children suffered from domestic violence, and almost 2000 died!

Against this background, a real incident was a story in Karelia, where a father flogged his seven-year-old daughter with a belt. This became known, and this completely everyday incident came to trial. And the father, in order to resolve the issue, agreed to pay his young daughter monetary compensation and transferred 2,000 rubles to her Sberbank account! I re-read the message several times to make sure that this happened in Russia, that this is our Karelia, and not some Karelia, Vermont.

Photos from the site www.kp.ru/1tv.ru