Geneva – Many disabled children in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are being put in institutions, perpetuating the old Soviet practice of “child abandonment,” according to a UNI CEF report released Wed nes day.
Instead of integrating the children into general schools, these nations employ a policy of “defectology,” a leftover Soviet discipline in which disabled children are put in institutions that keep them from society and their families, said the study by the U.N. Children’s Fund’s Innocenti Research Center in Florence, Italy.
“These children want to be given a chance to grow up in a family,” said Maria Calivis, UNI CEF’s regional director.
Attitudes toward disabled young people are getting better in these formerly communist regions, but improvements in state support are lagging behind, the 64-page study said.
As of 2002, some 317,000 children in these countries lived in such separated institutions, a number largely unchanged since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the report found. By contrast, the rate of institutionalization in Western countries is up to three times lower.
“The prospect for these children is to graduate to an institution for adults and to face a pattern of denial of human rights,” the study said.
The countries studied included eight former communist states that have since become members of the European Union – Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia – and two others scheduled to join soon – Bulgaria and Romania.
The study also included Balkan states Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia and Montenegro, as well as former Soviet republics Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
