This post is part of the Better Volunteering Better Care Initiative’s month-long spread of articles aimed at raising awareness around the issues of orphanage volunteering, under the hashtag #StopOrphanTrips. The campaign ends on June 1st, International Children’s Day, with a call to volunteer travel organisations to remove orphanage trips from their product offerings. Authors of these blog posts and articles urge people to sign the petition to put an end to orphanage volunteering. You can sign the petition here.
In this post, the author shares four reasons why to categorically discourage all volunteering at ‘orphanages.’ The author says that the volunteer: (1) normalizes unwanted contact with children, (2) disrupts attachment, (3) has insufficient knowledge and skills, and (4) supports a lacking care system.