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Eastern Europe reform leaves children behind

Monday, 21 April 1997: Social reform in Central and Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic States has been piecemeal and uncertain in its aims, strategies and funding, says a UNICEF report issued today, which adds that economic reform planners have overlooked the welfare needs of millions of vulnerable children.

Launching the report entitled Children at risk in Central and Eastern Europe: Perils and promises, in Bonn today, John Donohue, Director of the UNICEF Regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe, Commonwealth of Independent States and Baltic States, points in particular to the fate of the one million children in public care, trapped in the gulf between economic progress and social impoverishment.

"At the beginning of the transition to market economies," Mr. Donohue said, "hopes ran high that the sub-human conditions prevailing in some children's homes would soon disappear. But numerous difficulties have stood in the way of major improvements in institutional care or a shift to more humane options for children without parental care. Even more worrying, there has been little change in attitudes and too many children are still being abandoned to state care. In some countries, like Moldova, Georgia and Armenia, the public child protection system has virtually collapsed. In most of the countries in transition -- not only in Romania, which has received most publicity -- the rates of children in public care have increased."

This increase, beyond being a serious problem in its own right, is also an indicator of the higher risks many children have been facing during the transition years. Many families have had to cope with a devastating deterioration in their material conditions. Skills, social values and coping strategies developed in earlier decades have proved vastly inadequate. Poverty and social dislocation have put enormous burdens on families who often have limited capacity or experience in taking responsibility for their children's welfare, traditionally the task of state authorities. Since child monitoring and checking mechanisms, including those normally to be expected in school and health systems, have been eroded and are in need of reform, children are suffering.

The answer, the report says, lies in political will to put the needs of children high on the reform agenda. New and humane social welfare networks would benefit all children in Central and Eastern Europe. Fears that only the poor, marginalised and excluded would be helped are misplaced.

The publication, covering 18 countries in the region, is the fourth in a series of monitoring reports that have grown in coverage and impact. Since the first report was released in November 1993 covering nine countries of the region, the scope of the research has expanded to take in 18 countries: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Slovakia, Slovenia, Poland, Romania, Russia and the Ukraine. The reports are prepared by the UNICEF-funded International Child Development Centre in Florence, Italy, and are intended as a "tool to alert public opinion and public authorities to the problems of children and other vulnerable groups in transitional economies, and to forge international cooperation to improve the situation for children in these countries."

The latest report chronicles the substantial income drops families have experienced, rampant unemployment and family benefit losses in many Central and Eastern European states and, in countries of the former Soviet Union, sky-rocketing wage inequality. It analyses the welfare impact of increasing trends in single-parent households, falling birth rates and growing divorce rates. Additionally, it documents children's exposure to conflict and displacement in the region, and the hardships that result.

Poor nutrition, alcoholism, smoking, stress in the workplace and at home, increasing violence and premature death are also taking their toll. In the former Soviet Union especially, there has been an unprecedented increase in the deaths of working-age men. Across the region as a whole, hundreds of thousands of children have experienced the premature death of parents (mostly fathers but also mothers) in their prime child-rearing ages. The most obvious risk children face from these traumas is orphanhood. The report estimates the increase in the number of children and teenagers who have lost a parent over 1990-1995 at about 700,000, three-quarters of them in Russia.

However, the underlying potential risks are multi-dimensional and go well beyond the numbers of premature parental deaths. The pressures of the transition appear to be splitting families apart and eroding parental responsibility. In addition to higher divorce rates, fewer divorced fathers provide regular support to their family now; the number of criminal cases for non-payment of alimony, for example, is rising in several countries.

Health and education risks have also increased. Today parents can no longer count on universal public health and education systems nor on the same levels of efficiency in these systems to screen and check for risks their children are facing. Parents are having to take greater responsibility for the development of their children at a time when they are less able to do so and when child health and education needs are rising.

Former full enrolment in primary schools has ceased to exist and the growing use of fees means that it is children form poorer households who face problems of access to pre-primary education, extracurricular activities and remedial help. In Russia, for example, some 5 per cent of primary school students -- about 100,000 in each grade -- appear to be out of school. In Romania, secondary school enrolment rates were down 14 per cent in 1995.

Deprived of society-level protection mechanisms, children and adolescents in particular are falling prey to drug abuse, alcohol and tobacco addiction, violence, child prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS, and crime. A rapid assessment survey of drug abuse in the Czech Republic completed in 1996 found that drug abuse is no longer only a problem of homeless and street children, but is gradually becoming "normal" in secondary schools. Among students surveyed, 14 per cent were regular drug users and 37 per cent reported having tried drugs at least once. Teenage suicide is also on the increase in many countries of the region, including all Central European countries (except Hungary), the Baltic and many countries of the CIS.

Finally there are also indications of increasing child morbidity rates. The transition has seen a marked growth in the incidence of infectious diseases such as diphtheria and tuberculosis, particularly in countries of the CIS. The reappearance of these "diseases of poverty" is especially troubling, as they had been nearly eradicated.

"In short," Mr. Donohue warns, summing up the conclusions of the report, "it may prove much more difficult to address adequately the risk situations than was anticipated at the close of the 1980s.

"Traditional family support systems offering cash benefits and in-kind services in many cases do not reach the needy or provide appropriate help. There is an acute need in the whole region to encourage and bolster the development of a full new infrastructure of family support, focusing on providing a flexible range of community-based social services for parents and children in need. These could be provided by local and national governments as well as, with public encouragement, the voluntary and private sector. Health, education and social welfare agencies need to work together to provide such services. All the governments of this region have signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is time to turn the promises of the Convention into reality and put the needs of children first."

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