Posted On: 2021-04-21 10:32:52.
Parental support
Parents play an important role in the development of the child right from birth. Whether it is emotional or financial support, parents are always there for their child and they have their back.
Life becomes easier with the right parenting. It can be said that “Parental support is like a window in a room”. Just like a room without a window makes you claustrophobic and sick, stunts your relationship with the world outside the room, makes the room incomplete, and leaves you in darkness when the sun sets, life without parents feels the same way: suffering, stagnant, incomplete, and dark.
Orphans
Who is an orphan? An orphan is a child who lost his/her parents to death, is abandoned by them, or is unknown about them before these children enter adulthood. According to UNICEF, worldwide at least 140 million children are orphans, ay 10,000 children are orphaned every day. According to a report launched by “Insamer Humanitarian and social research center” in 2020, around 31 million orphans are in India i.e. 4% of the total population out of which only 0.3% whose parents have died, and the rest of them were abandoned. Approximately more than 85 million children have lost both their parents in Asia, Africa Latin America, Eastern, and Central Europe have lost both their parents, due to this it can be said that Asian and African countries have more orphans than the rest of the world. In developing countries, one of the major issues faced while maintaining the orphan data is that most of the births are not registered. In India itself, only 85% of the births that take place are registered.
‘Social Orphans’
The term social orphan refers to children whose one or both the parents are alive but are unable to give the child the care he/she needs. Usually, the parents of these children are alcoholics, drug abusers, or careless of the child. Most of these parents leave their children and prefer them to die instead of being with them. These children are abandoned by their parents when they are young. The babies are generally abandoned in the form of ‘baby dumping’ meaning the parents leave their child at a young age less than 12 months in any public place to never see them again or leave them in orphanages and Child Care Institutions (CCIs). The other reasons for baby dumping can be Poverty or homelessness of parents, teenage or single mothers unable to take care of their infant, and children born with a physical disability or some illness. These children who are still with these abusive parents suffer physical abuse and sometimes sexual abuse. Most of them often run away from their parents or they are the ones taking care of their parents. More than 50% of the total number of orphans are social orphans.
Invisible Orphans
The term ‘Invisible orphans’ refers to the many children across the globe who have not been registered as ‘orphans’ due to various reasons. Some of the reasons are that as the orphans after their parents’ death start living with their relatives without notifying the governing system, they have not been registered due to technical errors and negligence. If the numbers of Invisible orphans are taken into account, the total number of orphans in the world can be estimated at around 400 million.
Death or Abandonment
Among the 140 million registered orphan population in the world, only a small number of them have lost their parents. Many children become orphans due to natural disasters(more than 7,50,000 have died due to natural disasters in the last 20 years), wars like the one going on in Syria (the cruelest humanitarian war after World War 2 and in this war more than 1 million children became orphans and 9 million children lost their homes) and Palestine or epidemics like in Africa 44% under the age of 14 are orphans as their parents died from HIV and thousands of children orphaned due to Covid Pandemic, some of the times during the displacement of the family the baby is lost and in cases of refugees being deported like when 2,00,000 children refugees were migrating to European countries after the ongoing war in Syria, more than 10,000 children went missing in timeOver5 years and till date, there is no information about what happened to them (More than one-tenth of the refugee children are orphans) or the parents of children being incarcerated and often the child is placed under foster care or the child starts living in the streets.
Sex-Selective abandonment
In poor countries and rural areas, girl children are abandoned more often than boys due to the backward mentality of the people. If found by the wrong people, these little girls are used for begging, trafficking and are often molested at a young age. In most of the cases sex-selective abortions are performed but the current laws of not allowed to know a baby’s gender have led to more abandonment of girlchild than abortions. In India, more than 70% of the 13 million orphans are girls.
Infant exposure
In the past, when children were abandoned by their parents on the hillsides, creeks, churches it was known as “Infant Exposure”. The myth of gods adopting the baby after being left in the wild and raising them in superior men was widely promoted in the 1780s. But in reality, these children were often found by families and raised as slaves or sometimes as free members of the family. But, sometimes the babies would be dead due to the cold or be eaten by the hungry wild animals. The pain of this situation was explained by “Tertullian” one of the roman writers in his book “Apology” in a simple quote: "it is certainly the more cruel way to kill... by exposure to cold and hunger and dogs".
Infant exposure in the form of dumping the baby mainly in dumpsters and public places can be still seen in the 21st century. Most of the children being left in these places are girl children. Though after implication of various laws the dumping has stopped, still in some rural areas Infant exposure is performed.
Struggles of orphans
Around 8 Million orphans are raised in orphanages and institutions across the globe. More than 80% of these orphans have living parents. Though these children are raised in institutional care and provided with essential facilities and love, there is always a void left in the heart of these children. They often grow with low self-esteem and blame themselves for their abandonment. They suffer from anxiety, attachment and abandonment issues, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Depression, drug abuse, eating disorders, social alienation, guilt, clinginess, and nightmares. The issues get worse in orphans with physical disorders and social orphans who are also at a risk of more guilt and kidnapping. These children are often too quiet or too violent. Sometimes, the orphanages in developing countries even opt to traffic children and file them under ‘orphans’ for funds provided to them by various organizations and governments.
The orphans that are not in orphanages end up on the streets. Every kind of orphan whether it is living in the streets, orphanages, or foster care is an easy target for terrorist and human trafficking organizations especially refugee orphans. They are also easily influenced by substance abuse. These children are 10 times more likely to fall into sex work and 500 times more likely to take their own lives than the children raised in a happy household. The rate of being sexually abused quadruples. One child dies due to hunger every 3 seconds which makes 10,000 children mortality every day. Most of these children are orphans that are abandoned.
Education of Orphans
Studies suggest that children raised by both parents have a higher academic success rate than children raised by single or no parents. Though education is given to the orphans in institutional care, most of the time their depression gets the best of them and they are drawn away from studying.
Government policies
To lower the rate of orphaned children especially through abandonment, governments across the world have implemented the concepts of safe sex, contraceptives, and family planning. Though looking at the situation of child abandonment still going on, many jurisdictions put up ‘baby boxes’ a.k.a Baby hatch under ‘safe haven law’ where parents trying to abandon their child can anonymously abandon them in these boxes in designated places and these abandoned children will be taken care of by the government. Depending on the country, the parents can legally claim their child in a given period after abandoning them. These baby boxes can be found in countries like Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea, and the United States of America. Still many mothers in the rural areas wanting to abandon their children commented on this that “they will not travel such distance to baby boxes just to abandon their children.”
Adoption
Childless parents often adopt children from orphanages and give them a new life. Many couples even adopt orphans after having biological children. Single adopters too, who want to adopt a child without a partner are on the rise. With the help of international adoption organizations, many children are being internationally adopted. Most of the children adopted belong to poor and progressing countries of Asia and Africa.
Though the concept of adoption sounds new, it is something going on for ages. One of the cases is when North Vietnam declared war on South Vietnam and the United States of America stepped in by sending 30 planned flights to South Vietnam to evacuate the orphans living there followed by ‘operation new life’ to airlift for the evacuation of South Vietnamese citizens. Various International Child Protective Services helped the USA during the evacuation. More than 3,300 babies were airlifted and this operation was called ‘Operation Babylift’. 2,500 of these children were then adopted and relocated to the USA and the rest of them were relocated to West Germany, Australia, France, and Canada. Though the fact that not only orphans but also children from families that were alive were airlifted and relocated in the same operation was made public after many years.
China’s one-child policy implemented in the 70s meant that if a couple gives birth to more than one child some of their rights, government facilities, and government jobs will be taken away from them. The government stood by this law and people started abandoning their second-born children in the fear of the government. Over three decades, thousands of children were abandoned, shockingly most of these children were girls. To give these abandoned children a better life, many NGOs stepped in re-housing these children. This led to the international adoption of these children and over 120,000 Chinese children were adopted worldwide.
Foster care
In many cases when parents die, deploy, or are in Jail and the child is a minor, he/she is left with the Child protective service agencies who choose a state-certified home/caregiver for the child. This home is known as the foster home for the child which is generally temporary. The parents with whom the child is placed are known as ‘foster parents’ also known as ‘loco parentis’. Though the child is placed in a home, his/her legal decisions are taken by Child Protective Services(CPS) while the foster parents are responsible for the child’s day-to-day care. The child is visited by CPS regularly and shifted to a new home if the child and the parents start having serious issues like frequent arguments, being hit, alcoholic peers, and other issues. Sometimes the relatives of the child prefer to be ‘Loco Parentis’, in such cases the state first verifies the family and all the other rules remain the same for them.
Child Soldiers
War devastates not just the country and its people but disturbs the peace of the world. It highly contributes to the waste of non-renewable resources and pollution. But the major devastating consequence of the war is the use of child soldiers. Most of the ‘war soldiers’ are orphans. Since 2012 at least 300,000 children have been fighting wars in more than 30 countries. The number of children involved in global conflicts has increased by 159%. They are used as couriers, human shields, eye on checkpoints, and spies.
Covid Pandemic Orphans
The Covid pandemic took a toll on the life of children as some children who had both the parents alive and well before the pandemic are only left with one parent or none. According to the survey done by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights(NCPCR) and submitted to the Supreme Court of India, in the time span of 1 year i.e. from April 1st, 2020 to June 5th, 2020 30,071 children have been orphaned out of which 26,176 have lost a single parent, 3,621 have lost both their parents and 274 have been abandoned during Covid Pandemic. Maharashtra has been hit the worse as 7,084 children have been orphaned. As one parent dies, the child becomes a maternal or paternal orphan and the responsibility falls on the shoulder of only one parent. The parent left with so many responsibilities isn’t available to spend much time with the child. The child suffers from depression and anxiety from the pain of losing his/her parents. The child suffers academically, emotionally as well as physically. The smile on the face of the child fades away. This situation worsens when the bread earner of the family(usually the father) dies. The other parent (usually the mother) has to struggle to feed him/herself and the children and has to go out and look for work to survive.
One of the painful pandemic stories is of a family in Mumbai consisting of the husband, In-laws, and the newly pregnant wife. Before the pandemic the husband was a successful drama artist and had his group of artists working under him, the group was blooming and the husband shifted his family from a chawl to a nice rented flat. The wife was a working woman but as they both decided to have a baby, she left her job. When Covid hit they had a feeling that they would get through. They got safely through the first wave but as the second wave hit the whole family got tested positive. The woman was 3 months pregnant at that time and was sick and worried about the baby growing inside her womb, but only after a few weeks the whole family was tested again and everyone’s report was negative except for the husband. In a week the husband lost his life to intense pneumonia due to Covid. This took a toll on the family and the wife was devastated. Though the relatives helped them through still she tried to manage things on her own by reaching out to NGOs. The baby got ‘paternally orphaned’ even before he/she came into the world, the parents lost their happy-going son and the wife lost her loving and supportive husband.
Orphans in comics
The comic world is filled with inspiring stories of orphans, whether superheroes like Captain America, Batman, Shazam, Spiderman, Deadpool, Captain Marvel, Superman or Wolverine or the witch Harry Potter the villain Lord Voldemort. Whether the kids left in the jungles and created stories of Mowgli and Tarzan or the girl left for the world to prey on like Jane Eyre, Snow White, Cinderella, Daenerys Targaryen. The orphan anime characters like Naruto Uzumaki or Sasuke Uchiha or the mythical father of Christmas Santa Claus or the adventures of Bambi, James bond, and Oliver Twist. Though these stories might be too dark and vengeful for kids to read, each of these stories has a message that is ‘fighting for a purpose’ whether it is revenge or whether it is finding their true self.
Successful orphans breaking stereotypes
People think that orphans are of no use to the world, just parentless failures but often forget that there were orphans who broke the stereotypes and left a mark in the history of the world. Leaders like Mosses(religious leader of Judaism), Akbar(Mughal Emperor), Genghis Khan(Moghoul Leader), Abraham Lincoln([President of the USA), George Washington(President of the USA), Nelson Mandela(President of South Africa). Performers like Marilyn Monore, Charlie Chaplin, Rajesh Khanna, Preity Zinta, Alfred Hitchcock, Julia Micheals. Scientists like Aristotle, Issac Newton, and naturalist Charles Darwin. Writers like Dante, Thomas Bernhard, Hugh Leonard, William Wordsworth. Founders like Karl Benz(Benz), Steve Jobs(Apple), Henry Ford(Ford), Tom Monaghan(Dominos), Colonel (KFC)Sanders, Dave Thomas(Wendy’s). Athletes like Milkha Singh, Babe Ruth, Scott Hamilton. The names mentioned above are the figures whose names we often hear of and take their name with respect. They prove that having parents or not having them does not change what one can achieve in life.
“Orphans need the same love and respect given to a child with family”
Author : Hritika Singh
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