Talks aim at promoting children’s right to family care

Aphisara Saeli grew up in an orphanage and has spoken up about it. Looking back, she recalled how “volunteers come and go repeatedly as if passing through a revolving door,” she said. “We experience repeated abandonment and grow numb as a result. We learn that there’s no use building a bond with anybody.”

Now in her 20s and works as an academic researcher, Aphisara has turned her experience living at a residential care institution, an official terminology for an orphanage, into a life lesson.

“There is not enough love and care because there’s not enough carers for every child. Every child is different but we never have a chance to show anybody who we are. We never know love so we look for love in the wrong places and without necessary life skills once we live on our own,” she said.

Aphisara’s moving account set the tone of the discussion at the start of the two-day virtual conference titled “Alternative Care National Conference: All Children Belong in Safe and Nurturing Families” on 19-20 November.

The event was held as part of the commemoration of the annual World Children’s Day and the anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child on 20 November, and was hosted by UNICEF, in coordination with Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, CRC Coalition Thailand and CRC Alternative Care Thailand.

The conference, which saw extensive participation from the government, civil society, experts and academia, as well as international delegates, provided a platform to discuss the reform of the alternative care system to make sure that every child fulfills the right to grow up in a safe and nurturing family environment and be cared for by their families wherever possible.

Experts spoke about how families- especially vulnerable ones- should be supported so they can provide appropriate care for their children.  If parents are not able to do this, children should be cared for in a family environment- that is safe, loving and protective.

Kanthamanee Ladapongpattana, from CRC Coalition Thailand, said separation of a child from family should be the last or briefest resort. A more preferred option would be for the children to stay with their relatives, which is in line with the strong sense of kinship in Thai society.

She said that some 700 child care institutions are on the record around Thailand, but the real figure could be twice that when considering hundreds of undocumented child care homes – in which children could be exploited for benefits such as donations. She cited a UNICEF 2021 research on childcare homes in Kanchanaburi, Thailand’s province in the west, which found that 9 in 10 children said either one of their parents were still alive and that over 60 per cent of them said they were still in contact with their parents or relatives or that they entered the care home due to poverty.

Discussions at the conference centred on reforming national laws and policies to support families and prevent family separation wherever possible. Participants shared challenges facing the alternative care system, and ideas on how to improve family strengthening, gatekeeping mechanism at community level, standard of care, and alternative care transformation. The roles of family as the foundation were highlighted as the first step to prevent a child having to be abandoned or separated from parents.

Participants including policy makers, government frontline workers, experts, NGOs and those working in the local administrative bodies outlined the different challenges they faced when having to evaluate whether a separation is absolutely necessary or what kind of care is best suited to the child.

The United Nations Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children- based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child to which Thailand is a signatory, put forward two principles when considering alternative care: the necessity and the suitability. However, to make such crucial decisions guided by these two criteria, social workers and other related workforces on the ground require adequate experience, training and supervision.

One local social worker reflected there was a lack of coordinated effort between government and private social workforce and many suggested that residential care institutions in Thailand should be barred from receiving donations or any fund-collection rallying effort because they usually keep as many children with them for as long as possible for the fund to keep coming.

Participants also learned of alternative care reforms in other countries from Delia Pop, director of Tanya’s Dream Fund and alternative care reform advocate who shared accounts of efforts in Romania, her home country, and Rwanda.

In Romania, where there were over 100,000 children in more than 640 institutions in 2000, these institutions became outlawed in 2021 and the de-institutionalization of thousands of children has started (or removing children from institutions and placing them in family-based alternative care arrangements). In Rwanda, the alternative care reform has seen an increase of community-level volunteers and accredited foster families, a national roll-out of social assistance packages to families and an increase of trained social workers and psychologists.

Pop pointed out that the key to the success of alternative care reform in these two countries was how funds were redirected to family-based care instead of being concentrated in residential care institutions which were often the most expensive form of care while children had to face trauma, abuse and neglect which affected their development.

Kanthamanee, from CRC Coalition Thailand, quoted a saying “There is no orphan, until there’s an orphanage.” to emphasize the importance of the roles family, kinship and community play in raising a child. To reduce poverty and internal migration that lead to family separation, local job creation and cash incentives for families or relatives to take care of and be able to live with a child should also be prioritized, as proposed by Somchai Jitsuchon, a research director of inclusive development at the Thailand Development Research Institute.

On the second day of the conference, Prince Michael of Kent, a patron of a charity Care for Children, congratulated Thailand for its determined efforts to develop professional family placement services and recounted how, since 2008, he has supported Care for Children’s work in the northern province of Chiang Mai that includes a pilot project to place children from a care institution into local Thai foster families and the training of local social workers.

Kyungsun Kim, UNICEF Representative for Thailand, lauded Thailand’s strong commitment to strengthening its alternative care policy. The Ministry of Social Development and Human Security and UNICEF are working together to develop a National Alternative Care Roadmap to improve family support services and promote family-based alternative care. Juti Krairerk, Minister of Social Development and Human Security, said at the conclusion of the conference that “I always advised the ministry’s social workers to see the child as our own, so we would be able to ask ourselves the questions to ensure they receive the best possible treatment.”

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