This chapter appears in Child Maltreatment in Residential Care: History, Research, and Current Practice, a volume of research examining the institutionalization of children, child abuse and neglect in residential care, and interventions preventing and responding to violence against children living in out-of-home care settings around the world.
Abstract
Although for the last two decades Ukraine has been trying to reform institutional care as a child-rearing practice breaching the rights of the child, this type of care is still prevailing and currently houses 104,000 child residents. In order to understand the slow implementation of reforms of institutional care and the failure to break the vicious circle of approaches and attitudes feeding the phenomenon of the institutional placement of children, as well as the high number of children deprived of parental care, it is important to understand the broader context of historical, cultural, and social circumstances that have affected the entire Ukrainian population. In this chapter, the historical background of the present situation, as to underlying beliefs and circumstances with regard to institutional care, is discussed. It is hypothesized that in Ukraine historical trauma along with imposed ideological convictions of the past, promoting institutional care and undermining family systems and values, has caused and continue to sustain the widespread phenomenon of social orphanhood and child institutionalization. The present structure and functioning of institutional care in Ukraine and its impact on the development of children is discussed. A special focus of this chapter is on children with HIV infection, as Ukraine has the second biggest HIV epidemic among the Eastern European and Central Asian countries, which also affects children and increases the risk of their institutionalization. Recommendations as to future intervention efforts are provided.