- Title: Ukraine seeks to trace thousands of 'orphans' scattered by war
- Date: 12th September 2022
- Summary: ODESA, UKRAINE (FILE - JUNE 2022) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF DEPUTY HEAD OF SOCIAL AID, TETYANA PONOMARCHUK, PLAYING WITH AUTISTIC GIRL, TANYA PONOMARCHUK AND TANYA HANDS VARIOUS OF TANYA IN COURTYARD NURSE AND CHILD RUNNING IN COURTYARD AFTER RUSSIAN ATTACK IS ANNOUNCED VARIOUS OF EDUCATORS AND NURSES HELPING DISABLED CHILDREN AND ADULTS TO DESCEND INTO THE BUNKER (SOUNDBITE) (Russian) 57-YEARS-OLD NURSE EKATERINA MASIUK, SAYING: “Children were sleeping. We now know how to handle it (air raid sirens), but it is so sad. I wish we had never learnt how to handle it, though now it is getting better. Children now know where to go and that it is needed in order to save their lives.†VARIOUS OF PEOPLE SITTING IN BUNKER VARIOUS OF CHILDREN LOOKING ON PEOPLE SITTING IN BUNKER CHILD SLEEPING IN BUNKER CHILD HAND VARIOUS OF PEOPLE SITTING IN BUNKER PONOMARCHUK BLOWING SOAP BUBBLES CHILDREN PLAYING IN COURTYARD (SOUNDBITE) (Russian) DEPUTY HEAD OF SOCIAL AID AND TANYA'S EDUCATOR, TETYANA PONOMARCHUK, SAYING: “Taniusha (diminutive for female name Tatiana) has been here - if I am not mistaken - for about seven years. One can only get here after a prescription, and her mother applied for it due to her “diagnosis†reasons. The family had the second baby, and a child (like Tanya) with special needs needed special care, requiring complete dedication. Her mother couldn’t leave her home alone and there were no specialized centers providing special care in the area where they lived.†VARIOUS OF TANYA SLEEPING (SOUNDBITE) (Russian) DEPUTY HEAD OF SOCIAL AID AND TANYA'S EDUCATOR, TETYANA PONOMARCHUK: “She probably does not understand what she is told or asked for. Since there are other people here, she follows the others in the group, even if she is not mindful of her actions.“ NURSE AND TANYA WALKING IN COURTYARD VARIOUS OF NURSE COVERING TANYA WITH A BLANKET TANYA LYING IN BED (SOUNDBITE) (Russian) INNA SHARGORODSKAYA, 43, BEHAVIOURAL SPECIALIST SAYING ABOUT: “She lives in her own world, nothing bothers her. If someone takes her by the hand and leads her, it means she needs to follow. And you do the same with other daily tasks. You need to take her to eat. She will never do anything by herself, she always needs the supervision of an adult.†VARIOUS OF CHILD AND EDUCATORS PLAYING VARIOUS OF CHILD DRAWING CHILD LOOKING ON WORKERS WORKING IN KITCHEN CHILDREN EATING IN THE CANTEEN (SOUNDBITE) (Russian) DEPUTY HEAD OF SOCIAL AID AND TANYA'S EDUCATOR, TETYANA PONOMARCHUK: "It is uncertainty there. Some girls can understand that they will go to a new place which means uncertainty. And the whole trip itself... For two years due to the lockdown and then the war, we haven’t been moving anywhere beyond the territory of the orphanage.'' VARIOUS OF PEOPLE PLAYING IN COURTYARD
- Embargoed: 26th September 2022 08:44
- Keywords: Crisis Orphanage Ukraine
- Location: ODESA, UKRAINE
- City: ODESA, UKRAINE
- Country: Ukraine
- Topics: Conflicts/War/Peace,Europe
- Reuters ID: LVA001396110062022RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Twelve-year-old Ukrainian Tanya, who is autistic and cannot speak, sits in the arms of a carer as they play during a sunny summer’s day in the gardens of an orphanage in Odesa.
It’s a moment of respite between the air raid sirens that became routine for around 80 adults and children at the centre, which cares for disabled Ukrainians.
They’d gotten used to the drill – the alarm sounded from the mobile phones of the adult staff, they made their way down the windy stairs underground to the shelter and waited in one of the four concrete rooms with barely any light and heavy air. It wasn’t easy for those with special needs.
“We now know how to handle it (air raid sirens), but it is so sad. I wish we had never learned how to handle it, though now it is getting better. Children now know where to go and that it is needed in order to save their lives,†said nurse Ekaterina Masiuk, 57.
On June 15, Tanya was moved from the institution, her home of four years, following an order from the local government in March to evacuate. Tanya, like most children in Ukraine’s vast orphanage system, has parents but they were unable to care for her properly so the state took over, the orphanage director said.
Tanya and the orphanage’s remaining four disabled children traveled some 800 km (500 miles) by rail to a different state institution far from the fighting, along with others from local homes.
The 11-hour train journey succeeded in bringing Tanya to safety, but for 40 days she and 16 other children whom Reuters followed from Odesa institutions did not appear in Ukraine’s national database. Not until July 25 did national authorities say their location was registered.
It was one example of the difficulties Ukraine has faced tracing children scattered by war. Tanya and the others she traveled with are now fully accounted for, but UNICEF says it has yet to track some 26,000 other children who - rather than being moved within the orphanage system - were returned to families or legal guardians after Russia invaded.
Reuters spoke to more than a dozen children’s rights specialists, child protection organizations and government officials in Ukraine and beyond to recount the country’s effort to trace the children dismissed from orphanages. Tanya’s family could not be reached for comment.
Any attempt to track people fleeing an invasion is fraught. But child protection workers and international organizations including the United Nations told Reuters they were concerned about the lack of information or record-keeping by Ukrainian ministries on where the children are. U.N. officials warned that some might be exposed to violence or human trafficking, though they haven’t presented specific evidence and Reuters hasn’t independently established that.
Ukraine’s National Social Service (NSS), tasked with overseeing children’s rights, said it had done “everything possible to preserve the lives and health of children and prevent them from being left in the epicenter of hostilities.†It said that support for families is provided by specialized social services, and that it was working to resolve problems.
Before the war, Ukraine reported its internats housed about 1% of its child population, either full-time or part-time – this is the highest rate of institutionalization in Europe, according to data from the European Union and UNICEF.
Those children are among its most vulnerable: Around half the children in Ukraine’s orphanages were disabled, according to UNICEF.
When Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February there were more than 105,000 children in Ukraine’s network of more than 700 institutions, according to Ukraine’s National Social Service.
Ukraine’s state record-keeping system, known as UIAS "Children," was not capable of tracking or tracing children sent home from institutions, according to the Government Reform Support project in Ukraine (SURGe), a Canadian government-funded agency contracted by the NSS to help support it.
Instead, the database held general information about children such as whether they had siblings or disabilities, or were eligible for adoption. The team at SURGe began to collect data on the status of children from orphanages manually, using Google forms and Google sheets. It also started to build a data-collection module to add to the database, which began operations in May.
The task was complicated by the fact that the internats come under three different ministries, with responsibility spread across 24 regions, a SURGe spokesperson said.
By late June, SURGe said it had received data from 750 out of 751 orphanages in Ukraine on the numbers of children sent home, evacuated, and remaining.
A month later, more than 96,000 children had been dismissed – sent back to parents or guardians – SURGe’s data, which have not been previously reported, showed. A further 1,900 children – with parents, like Tanya – had been evacuated to other orphanages within Ukraine.
Of 48,000 children who were full-time residents, some 38,800 were returned to parents or guardians, according to NSS and UNICEF statistics. The government and UNICEF are now working to visit those children.
By the end of July, UNICEF and its partners had prioritized 13,047 of the children returned to families from 24-hour care as the most vulnerable and in need of support. They said they would continue to monitor those children and were working to reach others.
Tanya was one of only five children who remained at the Odesa centre. Before there were 30 but most were taken by family members fleeing the country after the war started.
On Aug. 11, the UN Human Rights Commission expressed alarm about the wellbeing of children with disabilities from Ukraine’s internats. The Commission’s experts said, “there is now a lack of information regarding the children’s whereabouts.â€
Daria Herasymchuk, who works in President Volodomyr Zelenskiy’s office as Ukraine’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, told Reuters the government had asked ministries with children under their care to monitor their wellbeing and their parents’ capacity to provide them with care at home. But asked about children from institutions who were not tracked, she said coordination needed to be improved.
Specifically, she said there were issues with children evacuated by foster families or guardians and those who left Ukraine in the first 10 days of fighting. But she added that not all the children need intense oversight.
Herasymchuk’s office also said it has no information on the condition of 4,777 children sent home from orphanages under Russian occupation in Luhansk, Donetsk and Kherson since the war began. A government website launched in August said Ukraine has collected reports that more than 7,000 children had been taken to Russia. Reuters could not confirm that.
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