Between bombs, exile and exploitation, thousands of orphans in danger

From tragedy to peril. For thousands of Ukrainian orphans, placed in institutions before the start of the war in Ukraine, the situation has gone from precarious to “chaotic”, alert NGOs and experts. Ukraine is already an extraordinary case, with the largest number in Europe of children placed, estimated at least 100,000 by the UNHCR, in a vast closed and often dysfunctional network of orphanages, boarding schools, or institutions for the handicapped. So there were “tens of thousands of children living in these institutions before the war, it’s huge…”, observes Geneviève Colas, coordinator of the collective “Together against human trafficking” for Secours Catholique Caritas France.

So here they are under the bombs, hastily moved, forgotten, left out because of their disability, crammed into overcrowded institutions in the west or forced to flee on their own. “Many institutions have been evacuated in a hazardous way”, testifies Halyna Kurylo, representative in Ukraine of the human rights group “Disability Rights International” (DRI), “in the confusion, children can get lost” .

Fights, escapes and trauma

On February 25, a “baby home” (children aged 0 to 4) welcoming 55 children in Vorzel suffered a Russian bombardment. “Fortunately, the children and the staff were not in the affected building,” says Halyna Postoliuk, director for Ukraine of the NGO “Hope and Homes for Children”. The decision to evacuate was not made that day. Then the intensity of the strikes made it impossible. Finally, on March 9, the 55 children and 26 supervisors were evacuated to the children’s hospital in kyiv, then to the west.

Other institutions hastily organized an odyssey of more than 1,000 km by bus, as the fighting drew closer. For those from Nijine, the sounds of gunfire were “traumatic”, says director Marieta, but thanks to the curtains drawn from the bus they “did not see any houses destroyed, people killed”.

According to the NGO network “Ukrainian Child Rights Network” (UCRN), 2,500 children urgently need to be evacuated from combat zones. “In fact, these evacuations take place when the fighting is most intense; the children are terrified, the older ones try to reassure the younger ones,” says Darya Kasyanova, program director at the NGO SOS Children’s Villages Ukraine. “The supervisors note a setback in the development of these children, who eat little and sleep badly”.

“House versus sex”

Besides the danger of fighting, other perils threaten these children. In Ukraine, these institutions form “a huge disorganized system with little control; in the chaos of this war, children are easy prey for criminal organizations,” warns Eric Rosenthal, founder and executive director of DRI. Ukraine has been a source of concern for years and has been the scene of abuse in some orphanages (forced daily labor in private homes to do housework, sexual exploitation, etc.). And with the war, it is the specter of trafficking, particularly to Romania and Moldova, which resurfaces.

Thomas Hackl, from Caritas Romania, who opened a center at the Siret border point, testifies that his team recently stopped a man who was trying to take two young Ukrainian women to Italy. “We know that traffickers mingle with the population, offering a means of transport. There were many signs that led us not to trust this man: he insisted too much, he wanted to take them to a specific place and not elsewhere… There are many stories like this around here”. From the start of the war, Caritas collected testimonies from people passing through Poland who were offered “shelter from sexual exploitation, ‘house for sex'”.

3,000 children transferred abroad

Even when they don’t fall into such sordid traps, exile can be dangerous for children. According to official figures from the end of March, 3,000 foster children were transferred abroad, mainly to Poland, Germany, Italy, Romania, Austria and the Czech Republic. “No government is prepared for such large-scale evacuations,” admits Colleen Holt Thompson, 55, an American from Kentucky and a regular volunteer in Ukraine since 2006 with orphanages.

She is also alarmed at the number of children evacuated “to other European countries in families they do not know and who have not been checked”. “I tell you, there are children who will never return to Ukraine, others who will be lost, and there are currently thousands of children in hotels, camps, private homes, with people whose we don’t know if they are trained or simply trusted, ”she says.