The refusenik effect

Quite recently, I thought about the fact that society continues to strengthen the stigma against orphans, they are not getting better. Society continues to believe that orphans from bad parents are so bad that their designated place is the ghetto. Somewhere, society, with undisguised optimism and pleasure, dumps its generous gifts, which only aggravate the situation, and by doing this, society, often led by NGOs and foundations, realizes something that is not at all what orphans need to develop. All this has not yet been erased from their heads, while the same media are actively discrediting both the system of orphanages and the orphans themselves.

Bloggers are not far behind. So, the other day, the famous blogger Natalya Radulova posted news that a Novosibirsk family sent an orphan back to an orphanage because he killed all the animals upon arrival in their family. Personally, I don’t blame the parents, because, fascinated by the appearance of the child, they could not see the main thing that in order to rehabilitate such a child, who suffered destruction in his family, and then was injured within the walls of the orphanage, “gives back” what he had accumulated in his small body. And the worst thing is that the majority of visitors to the popular blogger suggested that the boy be euthanized. So simply society deals with the child’s problem, and certainly in the New Year this child will receive a New Year’s gift from the same society. Scary.

But the same NGOs also make their contribution; often the organization’s name already contains a stigmatized view of the problem of orphanhood. One word “refusenik” has led to the fact that society often believes that it was drunks or scoundrels who abandoned an orphan. But in fact, there are only a few children who were admitted to the hospital from the maternity hospital, as they are immediately adopted. Behind them there is a queue in local data banks of children who can be adopted. But since everyone hears everywhere that refuseniks need to be saved, it seems to everyone that all orphans in orphanages are like that. And what a convenient word for fundraising, although there is no need to raise money for a problem that society itself is solving by taking newborn children into their families. Children who become social orphans due to abandonment often do not become them because of drunks or scoundrels, it’s just that the mother is really afraid of her future, and there is no place for this child in it. So the new stigma has led to the fact that now, when counseling, it is necessary to explain that there are no abandoned children as such, it is necessary to help those who came to the orphanage because their parents abandoned their responsibilities, while few people helped them fulfill these responsibilities. And even so, it’s not even clear why such a horde hires nannies to protect the sleep of abandoned orphans. Is it easier to assign someone to them who will take them into their family? She will take care of them like a mother. But, apparently, you really want to be around where, in principle, the issue of abandoned children is resolved in this way, because it evokes pity among the population. But there are no older orphans, since few people talk about them and do things so that they are the ones who go to new families.

As long as society has distorted ideas about the lives of children, we will continue to conduct advertising campaigns, convincing everyone and everything that orphans are not so bad, they just feel bad in the orphanage. In the meantime, on all the poles there are plaintive photographs of orphans, in which it is not a pity to give money, only this money does not help them, but those who hung this photo on the pole. Mercilessly. Gentlemen, wake up, this is not ethical. Very.