Everyone one pretty much agrees that poverty should never be a reason for children to be separated from their parents. The UN Guidelines for Alternative Care specifically states that no child should be taken away from their parents because of poverty. And very many countries have this stated in their legislation as well.
And yet… in many countries, poverty is known to be one of the main reasons – and often THE main reason – for children ending up institutions. Why this is the case is complicated and multi-faceted.
In some cases, the situation is very clear-cut: parents who have no way of feeding their children, or of keeping them warm through a harsh winter, hand them in at an institution, in the hope of saving the child’s life and of giving the child better prospects. Or one step removed from this: child finders convince poor parents that handing over the child – sometimes in exchange for a sum of money that can help towards feeding the other children – to an ‘orphanage’ will put an end to the child’s hunger and will ensure a bright future.
Poverty can also mean that parents need to work very long hours to have any hope of feeding their children. This is a problem when childcare is not available or affordable. The choice then is between staying at home to look after the children, and starving, or going to work, in order to bring home food, and leaving the children behind unsupervised and extremely vulnerable to a large range of dangers. Either that, or placing them in an ‘orphanage’, where at least there should be someone to look after them at all times.
However, poverty manifests itself in more insidious ways than just simple hunger. These other manifestations can mask the fact that the main problem is poverty. It can even make the state’s child protection services feel that children are not separated from their parents on the grounds of poverty, but rather for their own protection because of other things, which have their roots in poverty.
For example, children may be removed from their parents because no adequate housing is available (because the family cannot afford it) and the place where the family lives is unsafe for the children. Or children are removed from their parents to protect them from abuse, which may be due to alcohol or substance abuse, which may be due to mental health issues in the parents, which may be due to the stress of long-term unemployment or the stress of being unable to provide for the family.
Or children with disabilities may be removed from their parents and placed in institutions because of neglect in the form of not being provided with necessary medical care, when this is only due to the inability to bear the cost of this care.
Poverty has many faces and many consequences. Neither the direct effects, nor the indirect effects of poverty should be allowed to create a situation where children end up growing up away from their families.
After the other three main causes of institutionalisation have been described, I will post a series of blogs addressing how these main causes can be taken away or at least significantly reduced in sustainable ways.
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