Text and photographs by Onnik James Krikorian

YEREVAN, Armenia — A mother waits patiently to enroll her son at an Auxiliary Boarding School for children with learning disabilities somewhere in the heart of the Armenian capital. It doesn’t seem to matter to the staff that the twelve-year old isn’t disabled, all the school requires, the Director says, is a medical certificate.

But, with salaries low in the medical sector, many doctors are all too willing to provide fake diagnosis to parents wishing to enroll their children into residential institutions. In fact, Dennis Loze, Project Coordinator for Mission East’s Mosaic Program in Armenia says that 85% of children already residing in Auxiliary Boarding Schools are falsely diagnosed.

Suspicions that this was not the case were later confirmed by the Ministry of Education and Science. However, so serious is the problem that the Armenian Government has decided to address the issue in a national program of actions targeted towards the protection of children’s rights, including reform of the admission system.

“With the declining level of services in residential institutions, the current trend is creating an underclass of children marked by poverty, stigmatization and a lack of proper care and education who are likely to lack opportunity as adults,” writes Aleksandra Posarac and Jjalte Sederlof in the World Bank’s Armenian Child Welfare Note for June 2002.

“To the extent that such children end up in institutions for the mentally disabled, which offer only a special education syllabus for children with mental disability,” they continue, “their development will be seriously hampered by lack of educational opportunities.”

But, with a sizeable proportion of the population living below the poverty line, many families are increasingly looking to residential institutions to provide what the First Deputy Minister of Social Security, Ashot Yesayan, calls in a report to be published by Family Support America next year, “the primary ‘social safety-net’ for their children.

Official statistics report that 55% of Armenians live below the national poverty level — 23% of which live in extreme poverty — but according to the ARKA Financial and Economic News Agency in Yerevan, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) puts the figure at over 80% if the international measure for social vulnerability is used.

“Children are removed from their families as the only alternative to remaining hungry,” says Nicholas McCoy, the author of the report. “Even if that means committing them to a residential institution or sending them out onto the streets to work, research shows that vulnerable children are not necessarily the victims of earthquake and war but come primarily from economically deprived families.”

As a result, 12,000 children now live in residential care in Armenia according to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank. However, because many schools compensate for shortfalls in funding from the State Budget by inflating figures for the number of children enrolled, official statistics should perhaps be treated with some caution. 

Boarding School, Sisian, Armenia © Onnik James Krikorian

Vulnerable Families

“The main reason for this phenomenon is poverty,” says Loze. “As a result, children that should be enrolled into Auxiliary Boarding Schools remain outside the educational system.” And, because salaries are low, there are few incentives for specially trained teachers to take up positions in schools that are meant to cater for children with special needs.

Many Boarding Schools instead teach a curriculum designed for children with learning disabilities to those with no handicap at all. Yet, despite this, the Armenian Prime Minister, Andranik Markarian, reported to the recent United Nations Earth Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg that there had been a 32% rise in the number of children admitted into Boarding Schools since 1991.

“One mother visiting her son at a Boarding School in Yerevan described her frustration when she couldn’t find work after the death of her husband during the [Karabagh] war and the anger she felt when her son had to be enrolled into a school designated for mentally handicapped children,” says McCoy. “She wasn’t happy with the “watered-down” education he was receiving and said that if she had the means she would have taken him back years ago.”

“During the Soviet era,” he continues, “children enrolled into residential institutions were looked upon as second-class citizens. This discouraged families from placing their children into Boarding Schools and Children’s Homes but in today’s Armenia this mentality has changed. Many directors now report that there is actually a waiting list for children to be admitted because of the present-day economic uncertainty.”

However, while Children’s Homes in Armenia have received substantial support from the large Armenian Diaspora, conditions in over fifty Boarding Schools have deteriorated considerably since independence. One Director, for example, is believed to keep conditions as bad as possible in order to attract extra finance from international organizations working in the republic — money that the children will never see.

Mission East has stopped dealing with this Director completely because we understand that there is a greater incentive for him to keep conditions as they are,” says Loze. “Whatever resources directed to him will simply disappear.”

But Naira Avetisyan, UNICEF’s Child Protection Officer, is quick to point out that the staff at most boarding schools and children’s homes in Armenia are genuinely concerned with the well-being of those entrusted into their care. “However,” she adds, “the importance of strengthening vulnerable families by providing them with job opportunities has to be empathized rather than supporting the institutions.

But, with few exceptions, conditions in Armenia’s Boarding Schools are poor, with international organizations having to operate feeding programs in some schools so that the children can at least receive their basic nutrition. The Armenian Relief Society (ARS), for example, operates three such feeding programs in Yerevan alone, but for the most part, children are undernourished.

This can easily be observed in the faces and stature of most of these children,” says McCoy. “They are noticeably thin, have drawn faces and many are stunted in growth and small for their age. At the majority of boarding schools, the diet consists mainly of carbohydrates such as pasta, potatoes and bread while few can afford to serve fruit, vegetables or meat.”

Children’s Home, Yerevan © Onnik James Krikorian

And, despite the common misconception that most children placed into residential care in Armenia are orphans, few are abandoned or available for adoption. According to Avetisyan, even in Children’s Homes (commonly referred to as orphanages in the Diaspora) at least seventy percent have families they could return to if the socio-economic situation improved.

Many children instead come from single-parent households where the mother is divorced, widowed or separated from a husband working abroad or in prison. A Demographic and Health Survey (ADHS) held in 2000 estimates that 110,000 children in Armenia come from single-parent families out of approximately 500,000 children believed to be living in poverty.

“There are many reasons why children with parents are deprived of parental care in Armenia,” explains Avetisyan. “First of all there is poverty, then centralization of special education within the boarding school system and finally, the absence of alternatives and community-based support services for vulnerable families at risk.”

But, while some organizations conclude that Armenia’s Boarding Schools should be closed, such plans could create additional problems unless the root cause of the problem is addressed. UNICEF and the Armenian Ministry of the Interior estimate that there are as many as 400 children street children in Yerevan and numbers could increase if others are removed from care and effectively thrown out onto the streets.

Susanna Hayrapetyan, Social Sector Operations Offer for the World Bank’s Office in Yerevan, says that the international financial organization favors a phased approach as part of the Armenian Government’s overall Poverty Reduction Strategy. “It can’t happen overnight,” she explains. “It needs special consideration and a transition phase of at least a year and a half.”

As a result, in a wide-ranging ten-year National Program for the Protection of Children’s Rights in Armenia, the Armenian Government and NGOs working in this area propose introducing measures that will include steps taken to prevent the enrolment of children into boarding schools and the return of those already in residential institutions to their families.

“It is extremely difficult to measure the impact that removing a child from their home environment has,” says McCoy. “And, although it is too early to substantiate claims that the well-being of children placed in residential care will be affected, it may very well take an entire generation before we fully understand the social and psychological ramifications of this phenomenon.”

“However,” he concludes, “institutionalizing children only perpetuates the problem of social vulnerability in Armenia by seriously undermining the development of programs that could support the family and keep children out of institutions.”

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First published 2003