North Ossetia: Lost Street Children

Thursday, 5 May, 2005

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Yana Voitova

Fifteen-year-old Diana looks like a child, but before she arrived at the Vladikavkaz centre for young offenders, she was making a living from prostitution. The street girl’s services were extremely cheap: just one dollar for oral sex.

The centre, in the capital of the North Ossetian republic, will not provide a permanent home to Diana and other street children like her. After a month, unless she is sent on to a unit for more serious offenders, she will be sent back home – or back onto the street.

“We are a correction centre, not a children’s shelter,” said Marina Murashko, head of the young offenders centre. “Children are sent to us as a punishment.”

One hundred and twenty six teenagers passed through the centre in 2004. The young people are under constant supervision. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are at set times. They are allowed out for a walk in the yard under the watchful eye of security guards. The centre has small rooms with bars on the windows, bedrooms, a canteen, a sports hall and table tennis in one of the corridors.

“There are limits on their freedom here, but very often that is exactly what they need,” said Murashko.

The North Ossetian government allocated the modest sum of 150,000 roubles, around 5,500 US dollars, to maintain the centre last year.

The three Basulin brothers have spent a lot of their childhood in and out of the centre, which has offered them some kind of refuge from an alcoholic mother, hunger and cold, and the stench of the rubbish dump they lived on.

Children stay at the centre for a maximum of one month, after which they must either return to the homes they have fled, or are referred to a special vocational college designed to take more serious offenders on a longer-term basis.

That leaves a gap for an institution that can cater for the needs of troubled children without stigmatising them as criminals. Experts say the republic badly needs more resources to look after its stray children.

“We are probably the only region where there is no fully-fledged shelter for homeless teenagers,” said Murashko. “There is our organisation, and there are the orphanages. But there is nowhere street children can simply go to stay the night and get away from parents who drink.”

After much discussion, Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian prime minister who is now general director of Russia’s Chamber of Commerce, has allocated two million roubles for the first children’s shelter in North Ossetia. It is scheduled to open this month, although the start-up has been postponed several times.

The new shelter will provide a haven for children who have nowhere to live but have not committed any offence.

“The aim of our organisation is to save children from the streets,” says Taisia Pechenkina, director of the Dobroye Serdtse (Kind Heart) charity, which will run the new shelter once it opens.

“During the reign of Catherine the Second [the Great; 18th century], there were shelters like ours all over Russia. But we aren’t yet able to stay open 24 hours a day. As soon as we open, we will have 42 teenagers living here, plus 30 children who will attend during the day.”

Orphans are an especially vulnerable category. Irma, who grew up in an orphanage in North Ossetia, ended up in prostitution and petty crime. She could not be sent to a special college in North Ossetia, because the only one that exists just takes boys.

Thirteen-year-old Lena came from neighbouring Stavropol after running away from an orphanage there. In Vladikavkaz, she was drawn into prostitution until the police found her.

The problem of homelessness is compounded by social taboos and strong Ossetian family traditions which make people ashamed to acknowledge even the existence of abandoned children.

According to the republican government’s juvenile affairs department, in 2004, there were 362 children registered as abandoned and 16 as orphans.

“No one knows what the real number of street children is,” said an official who preferred to remain anonymous. “But judging by the fact that you see street urchins roaming the streets asking for money at markets, outside schools and colleges, and at stations, we can safely assume there are at least twice as many as the official figures suggest.”

Zalina, who has worked with orphans but declined to be identified further, told IWPR that she had come to realise how many of the lost teenagers came from respectable Ossetian families.

“It is awful to see someone who bears your family name but has been abandoned, and to realise that no one cares,” said Zalina. “What traditions and culture can we speak of when our children are thieves and prostitutes? Perhaps it would be better to stop ignoring the problem and start looking for solutions.”

The technical college for young offenders, located on the outskirts of Vladikavkaz, is home to 70 teenage boys who have committed crimes but are too young to be put in prison.

“We get teenagers who have been ordered to come here by a court and are not allowed to stay longer than three years,” said college director Marat Bitsiev. “Our job is to do all we can to make sure that no one ends up in prison after being in here.”

Bitsiev, who has been director for many years, said a large proportion of those in his care are boys who have been abandoned by their parents. Many come from broken homes.

He accepts that some of those sent out into the world will not do well. “After being with us, these teenagers go back to their own environment. And it is a great pity when all our work goes to pot and the child goes on to become a criminal in adult life,” he said.

Diana is one of those stuck in the current limbo between institutions. She does not want to go back where she came from, “No one wanted me at home. Nobody could care less where I went or why.”

At the moment she is still in the detention centre, awaiting a transfer to a special special school outside North Ossetia.

Yana Voitova is a correspondent in North Ossetia for the Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations.