Why we need to see an end to orphanages in our lifetime
08.04.2015
J.K. Rowling, Lumos Founder and Life President in conversation with John Oliver.
The success of the Harry Potter books has taken me to places that I never, in my most optimistic daydreams, visualized myself. If you had told me twenty years ago that I would one day stand in the Oval Office, I would have advised you to change your medication, and my disbelief would have been no less extreme if you had prophesied a trip to Buckingham Palace, or 10 Downing Street, or a fake hillock in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.
Yet I really did go to those places, and I remember them all like cinematic stills, as though they happened to somebody else.
My visit to the foreign orphanage was not supposed to be upsetting, or not as far as the staff was concerned. The woman in charge beamed as the three year olds swarmed around the strange visitor, eager for her attention. Those children neither knew nor cared about Harry Potter. All they craved was affection. We could not speak each other’s language, but that did not deter the little girl with the shaven head. She crawled into my lap and beamed up at me. If you have ever had a totally unfamiliar toddler cling to you in the evident hope that you might simply take them away with you, you will probably understand what it felt like to detach her fingers and leave. As I pretended to listen to the white-coated carer walking beside me, I remembered the horrifying statistics on the numbers of children who are trafficked from such institutions. That three-year old would have clung to absolutely anybody for a smile and a hug.
Another day, another children’s institution and I was shown into a room full of totally silent babies. They had learned that crying brought no comfort and their lack of interest in eye contact was eerie. The photographer wanted me to smile; I wanted to cry. My worst memories, though, are of the vast impersonal children’s home in Eastern Europe where I saw three children with severe cerebral palsy sharing a single bed. They were tube fed, washed and otherwise totally ignored. An English-speaking nurse confided in me that another young disabled girl in her care kept asking for her mother. When the little girl’s pleas became too much, the nurse would leave work and telephone the ward, pretending to be the mother who had been convinced that no contact was in the best interests of a child who was begging for her.
The names ‘orphanage’ and ‘care home’ often conjure up benign images. People donate money willingly and generously, believing that the children living in such institutions have been rescued from a life barely worth living. This, I have learned after ten years of reading research papers and talking to experts in the field, is an idea predicated on lack of knowledge about the reality of what institutionalization does to a child, and about the real reasons that children find themselves in care homes.
80% of the eight million children living in orphanages and institutions worldwide are not orphans. They have at least one living parent, and that parent usually wants to care for them personally. To those of us fortunate enough to grow up in the privileged First World, it might seem inconceivable that a parent would voluntarily give up the care of their child to an institution. We take for granted the medical and welfare systems that support the care of children at home. Institutions spring up where no such systems exist, where there is cultural discrimination against disability, where conflicts and disasters have destroyed livelihoods and – by far the largest driver of institutionalisation – where parents are so poor that they fear the only way to save their child from starvation is to place them in residential care.
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Author: J.K. Rowling, Lumos Founder and Life President
