Numbers. Children. Death

Statistics do not know which country the parents are more cruel, and it does not matter. Repeated publication of the text written in the adoption of anti -Sirot law.

The death of the three-year-old Maxim Kuzmin-Shatto, the adopted son of parents from Texas was declared by some Russian officials the murder before the end of the investigation in the United States. There may be an impression (probably this is the meaning of hasty statements) that American parents relate to adoptive children, especially from Russia, with particular cruelty, killing them almost every day. We re -publish the text written in the adoption of anti -Sirot law on the impossibility of using the statistics to justify the ban on foreign adoption.


Today, the Duma in the third reading adopted a law prohibiting the adoption of Russian children with American citizens. It was difficult for me to imagine that out of 429 people, only 8 were not scoundrels . I thought: did they really want to slap? Maybe statistics prove that the Americans are killing our children, and we will never? And I began to look for statistics. Most of the authors of quotes that mentioned the numbers were inaccessible to comment. Therefore, I relied on open sources.

How many foster children are dying in Russian families "at the hands of parents"?

Children's Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov, who supported the adoption of the law, from time to time mentions different figures about the number of dead adoptive children.

Here is what was published a few days ago, on December 19, 2012, in the newspaper New Izvestia ( article “Child Dispute”, author Marina Kolokolova ): “ In Russia, according to Astakhov, over the same period (the last ten years - approx. Ed.), 14 children out of 502 thousand adopted were killed from the hands of foster parents.” In other publications, this phrase was not quoted. The editor of the article with which I contacted by phone claims that the author wrote these words at a press conference that Astakhov held on the eve of December 18 in RIA Novosti.

And here is another quote from Astakhov. He uttered these words at a press conference in the same RIA Novosti, but in April 2010. “If we compare statistics on dead children in Russia and America, then, of course, the bloody score is not in our favor. On average, from nine to 15 children, they die annually in foster families in the Russian Federation. ”

Here, of course, it is not entirely clear what is meant - from nine to fifteen children, only at the hands of adoptive parents, or this is general statistics, including deaths from accidents, diseases, and so on. These significantly different categories are very often mixed, which confuses the situation even stronger. But, judging by other sources (about them later), 15 tragic cases of the death of adopted children per year from any reason - there are too few, and Astakhov probably knows about this, all the more, he notes that "the score is not in our favor." It remains to assume that he is talking about the "dead." If so, then in the last ten years it is 90-150 dead children.

Another quote. At a press conference held on May 29, 2006, an adviser to the Commissioner for Child Rights Galina, the family claimed that " in Russia over 15 years, starting in 1991, 1220 children adopted by Russian citizens were killed, 12 of them were killed by their adoptive parents ." These words are unlikely to rely on detailed and official statistics, but you can accept them as an assessment.

So, how many children are killed in Russia? Maybe 14 in ten years from 2002 to 2012? Or 12 for fifteen years from 1991 to 2006? Or from nine to fifteen annually? It turns out that Pavel Astakhov answered this question himself. Almost exactly a year ago, on December 19, 2011, within the framework of the coordination council of the regional authorized rights of a child in the Central Federal District, he said: “Unfortunately, we have no federal statistics, how many Russian children died at the hands of adoptive parents. This gap should be made up for us. ” The press service of the Department of State Policy in the Field of Protection of the Rights of Children was explained to me that it is very difficult to conduct such statistics. The very concept of “died at the hands of the parents” is extensible and is used differently in different statistical calculations: the death of a child who fell out at the open window by oversight of the adoptive mother-death due to the fault of parents or an accident?

It seems that there is no official statistics, but the scattered data given by Astakhov and the family indicate that several such cases are happening per year. This is confirmed by another quote: on July 19, 2005, Deputy Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Sergey Fridinsky said: " In Russia, more than a thousand children have been killed in Russia, while only one crime was committed by adoptive parents ."

How many foster children die in Russia?

Andrei Kozenko, in the material of Lenti.ru “Orphan, my native country ” of December 18, claims: “In Russia, according to the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation (they were presented at a meeting of the State Duma Committee on State Building and Constitutional Legislation; the Committee on December 17, 2012 approved the amendments), and a thousand thousand children were killed in foster families”. It was not possible to quickly get comments on the significance of these figures from deputies or the press service of the prosecutor's office. Most likely, this is still not about the “dead” - there would be too many, and such statistics are not conducted - but about “dead” children. Let us recall the words of Galina's family “ over 15 years, starting since 1991, 1220 children adopted by Russian citizens” were killed . ” Data is close: on average from 80 to 150 children annually.

How many Russian children die “at the hands of foster parents” in the USA?

According to the results of the Astakhov press conference of December 18, 2012, RIA Novosti reports: “ According to the Commissioner, over the past 10 years, 19 Russian children have been killed, several more children in this country have died as a result of accidents and diseases. According to individual non -profit organizations monitoring the facts of the death of Russian children in the families of American adoptive parents, at least 40 Russian children were killed and mutilated in the United States. ”

Again complete confusion. The figure of 19 killed children is widely replicated (there are others, but close data - 18, 22 and so on). But what does the phrase on "several more children" who died for other reasons mean? Is it necessary to understand the words of the Ombudsman so that in total in American families, only a few dozen Russian children died (for all reasons) in 10 years, at a time when Russian - at least a thousand? This is quite consistent with the words about the bloody score.

How many Russian children adopt families from Russia and the USA?

For the sake of comparison, it is necessary not to compare the absolute number of tragic cases, but a relative to the total number of adopted Russian children in Russia and the USA. And here again a difficult moment: in Russia, adoption is far from the only way to arrange a child from a shelter or orphanage to a family. The vast majority of children in Russia are not adopted, but take care, which imposes much less responsibility on the adoptive parents. For example, in 2011 (according to the website “Adjection in Russia” ), only 14,066 children were adopted, and about 40 thousand were taken under guardianship. Moreover, for foreign citizens, only one option is possible - adoption. What to compare with?

Let's calculate the total number of adopted and arranged in families in a different form of children. The full official statistics are quite full on the website “Adoption in Russia” of the project of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and the Department of State Politics in the field of protection of children's rights. Take the segment from 2002 to 2011.

If you summarize the data, it turns out that in ten years it was only adopted (both Russian and foreign citizens) 136,379 children, and it was arranged in families in other forms (mainly under guardianship) of 837,585 children. Based on the same statistics, it can be calculated that from 2002 to 2011, 79,279 children were adopted by Russian citizens, foreign - 75,100, of which 29,407 children were adopted.

Conclusions?

Here are a few intermediate conclusions.

- There are no clear statistics about the total number of children who died in Russian families. On average, tragedies that occurred with adopted children for a variety of reasons happen about a hundred per year.

- taking into account the “killed”, “dead in the fault of parents”, “who died at the hands of the parents” in Russia was not conducted or conducted. Moreover, this is almost impossible to do - there are no clear legal formulations. Comparing fragmentary data, it can be assumed that such cases annually.

- In both cases, it is completely incomprehensible which families are taken into account: those in which children are under any form of guardianship or adoption, or only those where the children are adopted. Moreover, the number of last families is ten times less than the first.

- Speaking of 19 Russian children who died through the fault of parents in American families, Pavel Astakhov can be not far from the truth, although the source of these data is not called.

- In just 10 years, the Americans adopted 30 thousand children from Russia. The Russians adopted 80 thousand, and if we take into account all the forms of the device, they took almost a million children to the families.

If we proceed from the fact that the authors of all quotes spoke exclusively about the adopted, and not taken under custody of children, it turns out that the relative number of foster Russian children killed by parents in Russia and the United States are comparable, perhaps even close. But the relative number of children who died from other reasons in Russia, it seems, (I recall, Astakhov himself spoke of “several more” dead in the United States, while in Russia it goes on thousands). Both that and the other are completely correlated with common sense, but still these conclusions cannot be considered quite reasonable.

And a reasonable conclusion can be considered this: attempts to use existing statistics both to justify the law and to demonstrate its idiocy - speculation. This is especially clearly seen in the example of the Children's Ombudsman Astakhov, who spoke about the bloody score in 2010, in 2011, he directly stated that there was no reliable statistics, and in 2012, on the basis of statistics that did not, he tried to prove that the Americans kill our children, and we almost never.

The statistics could not be the reason for the state building committee to propose its monstrous law. Accepting it, the deputies could not rely on any objective figures. It was just a slap.