STUDY BY UNICEF’S INNOCENTI RESEARCH CENTER
By Bradley S. Klapper

The Associated Press
10/04/05 13:40 EDT

GENEVA (AP) – Many disabled youths in the former communist countries
of Eastern Europe and Central Asia are being institutionalized,
perpetuating the Soviet Union’s practice of “child abandonment,”
according to a report released Wednesday by the U.N. Children’s Fund.

While attitudes toward disabled children are getting better in these
regions, improvements in state support are lagging behind, said the
64-page study undertaken by UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Center in
Florence, Italy.

Instead of searching for ways to integrate children with disabilities
into general schools, these countries still overwhelmingly employ a
policy of “defectology,” a leftover Soviet discipline where disabled
children are put in residential schools and institutions, separated
from society, community and family.

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.

“Although children with disabilities have become more visible since
the beginning of (the post-communist) transition and attitudes towards
them and their families are changing, many of them are simply ‘written
off’ from society,” said Innocenti’s director Marta Santos Pais.

Santos Pais said the “high rates of child abandonment” could be
explained by these countries’ outdated medical approaches and lack
of alternative methods for dealing with disabilities.

UNICEF is calling for an end to the segregation of disabled children,
suggesting instead an increase in social benefits to affected families
and greater participation of parents in decisions affecting their
children.

“The reality is many parents feel they have no choice but to give
up their children,” Santos Pais said. “What these families need is
strong social and economic support.”

Some 1.5 million children in these 27 countries were registered as
disabled in 2000, triple the number in 1990, the report said.

However, the surge was largely the result of better recognition and
registration of disabilities, rather than any actual increase in the
number of children disabled.