Doomed to a boarding school: disabled people who have reached the age of 18 are deprived of a chance to find a family

Public figure Lida Moniava devoted her next publication to the difficult problems of the domestic system of guardianship and stationary social services, in other words, to boarding schools and orphans living there:

“I am now selecting two more palliative heavy children for an assisted living hospice apartment and I am running into walls:

1. In Russia, there is no family placement program for 18+ disabled people. An example is a severe bedridden palliative child, an orphan. All his life he has been in a children's boarding school. His profile hangs in the database of orphans, they are trying to find a family for him. And this guy is 18 years old. He can weigh 15 kg and look like a child of 6 years old. But it is not important. At the age of 18, his profile disappears from the database of orphans. He is no longer looking for a family. He now has 0 prospects to leave the boarding school.

I think this is wildly weird. I personally don't see any difference between a 17 and 18 year old palliative bedridden person. No cardinal changes are made with a person. Except that before the age of 18 he has a chance thanks to a questionnaire in the database of orphans, but after 18 there is no chance.

We have personal experience - 3 hospice nannies took custody of 18-19-20-year-old palliative children and took them to their family and are completely happy. That is, there are people in the world who, for some reason, may need to give a house and a family to incapacitated 18+ people. This happened because the hospice operates inside several boarding schools, and we know these guys personally. But if you did not go inside the institution, to find out about the incompetent people who are locked up in institutions, and over whom it would be possible to arrange guardianship, there are no opportunities. All these people on the day of majority disappear from the public database.

As a result, I can’t even properly select clients for an assisted living apartment - they are not in the database, I have to go personally to all institutions and look, since I can do it. But potential guardians, like our 3 nannies, can't just walk into institutions.

In short, a stupid idea that in Russia there is no policy on the family arrangement of disabled people over 18. And if you are not adopted before 18, you are gone forever. Even if you weigh 15 kg and look like a 6-year-old child.

2. An even dumber system is “parental” children in 24-hour social service institutions. In order for a child to have a chance to leave the boarding school and get into a family, he must have the status of an orphan, and his profile must be in the open database of orphans.

There is a completely idiotic story in Russia - the country is struggling with orphanhood not only in the actual reduction of children in social institutions. But more on paper. In order for there to be fewer orphans, it is necessary to recognize children as orphans less. Well, the mother of her child was placed in a boarding school, well, he has been living there without getting out for 15 years, well, nothing, we will not deprive the rights of parents, we will not recognize the child as an orphan, but according to statistics, there will not be an increase in the city of orphans, and Putin will praise us.

And in fact, boarding schools are full of children who live for years in social institutions, and who have 0 chance to get into a family. Because according to the documents they have parents (who receive a bunch of benefits for disabled children), these children do not fall into the database of orphans and they cannot be adopted.

When these children approach the age of 18 (having lived for many years or even their entire lives in a boarding school!) the system simply reissues the documents, and the child moves from a children's boarding school to an adult one. Such children have 0 chances to leave the boarding school, they cannot be adopted, and in some boarding schools there may be 50 percent or more of such children. As a result, a lot of children live in orphanages and boarding schools, they have no hope of getting out of there, these doomed children do not fall into any statistics.

According to statistics, there are fewer orphans in the region, the names of institutions change every year, now we no longer have boarding schools, there are no children's homes, but centers for social support and rehabilitation of disabled children have appeared. And the fact that they are secret for society (secretly - because these children are not in the data bank) for many years they keep disabled people in a hospital, and not in a family - no one sees this, and this is not in the statistics on which reports are made available to society .

A good way to solve the problem of orphans is to "hide" children in institutions by changing the names of the institutions and not giving the children, in fact orphans, the status of orphans. So no one can find them. Even we do not find them in the hospice, we do not help them, because the legal representative for these children is the one who receives all the benefits, but the biological parent is absent.

There are a lot of such children in Russia".