Stigma is an important roadblock in the way of moving children from institutions to families. As well as to ensure that children are not separated from their families unnecessarily in the first place. There are a lot of children who are affected by stigma, including but not limited to children with disabilities, children affected by HIV, children of unwed mothers, children belonging to marginalised minorities, children on the move, children living in the street, former child soldiers, survivors of child trafficking, survivors of sexual abuse, and children who have lived in ‘orphanages’. In discussions around moving children who are stigmatised in some way from institutions to families, there is often a perception that this cannot be done, it is just not safe for the children to be moved into a community that does not accept them.
To a certain extent, this is true. It IS not safe for children to move into a community that is hostile towards them. However, to stop the conversation there is like saying ‘I can’t eat because I do not have food in front of me’, ignoring the fact that you could go to the kitchen where there is plenty of food waiting to be prepared for eating.
The reality of the stigma existing means that efforts need to be made to raise awareness to break down the stigma. In part, this needs to be done through education and public messaging. However, the most potent way to break down stigma is to facilitate (safe) encounters between the community and the people who are stigmatised. This is because prejudices underlying the stigma tend to come from fear and lack of knowledge. It is much easier to hold on to the prejudice and stigma if you have never met people from the group that you have such strong opinions about. As long as you do not meet them, it is easy to think of them as being less than human or as being fundamentally different. While real encounters make the reality that actually, they are just human beings with their strengths and flaws, they are just children who are cute and awkward, very hard to deny.
I believe that my personal experiences from a very young age with children with disabilities and children of different ethnic backgrounds have played a role in my fundamental feeling that there is no us and them and that diversity is enriching. From age 2 to 11, our next-door neighbours had a daughter who was two or three years older than me, she had a significant intellectual disability. I only realised this later, at the time she was just Anita from next door. In primary school, there was a boy with leg braces, in secondary school a girl in a wheelchair and another girl with a repaired cleft lip. They were just fellow schoolmates. Similarly, my primary school had a population of more than 50% of non-caucasian backgrounds. We were classmates, friends, and part of the ‘in-group’ together.
When it comes to alternative care, this has also been proven to be effective. It is always a very difficult start to convince the first families to accept a child from a stigmatised background into their home. But when this is accomplished and the family and the child are properly supported, and the community educated, stigma melts away astonishingly quickly. Often not only is that child accepted into the community, but other families start to volunteer to take in children too.
This has even been accomplished for children with severe disabilities in Cambodia, where the stigma is big. Once people cannot avoid discovering that children are simply children and when support is proven to be available and effective, leading to the child thriving and becoming a real part of the community, stigma almost never survives.
So, work on helping people overcome the stigma they carry, by exposing them to the human reality of the groups they stigmatise. And do not let stigma stand in the way of ensuring that children grow up in families.
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