You will not see much of it now, but there was a time when our TVs would broadcast videos from the drab interior of institutional orphanages in post-Ceausescu Romania or perhaps from some other benighted spot in eastern Europe. If you cannot recall them, the imagery usually went something like this.
The camera is now panning deathly grey rooms. The walls themselves imbued with the pallor of sickness. If someone told you the very concrete the buildings were constructed from had an allergy to colour you might well have believed them. Now the camera rests on military-style rows of cot-bound children. Their eyes pitiful and pleading, sunk in small bodies of indeterminate age. As often as not, many appear encased in a web of untreated physical and intellectual disabilities.
We looked at these children and through the screen the force of their open-mouthed but silent pain would reach out and we would involuntarily close our eyes or catch our breath. We had become unwilling voyeurs of a mute, tragic drama, that was unfolding and intruding uninvited into the relative comfort of our sitting rooms.
The appeal would come. Send money. Send medicine. Send volunteers. DO something, please. Remember us after Coronation Street, Eastenders or the football returns to the screen.
And help we did. Hundreds of thousands of us. In the pre-euro days, we sent millions of pounds. No small thing. The children did not find us wanting.
Slowly however and as the years have rolled on, a very different perspective has been emerging around orphanages, both state and non-state, and the kind of policies we ought to adopt toward those that are still in existence. Pun intended. The focus now is not about how much we can give the charities behind these non-state orphanages but how quickly can we stop subsidising orphanages of any kind in Romania, Africa, India, eastern Europe. The list of locations goes on.
This focus is not the victory of a miser’s charter, far from it. It flows from an abundance of concern.
This has come about in large part due to the emergence of a number of interconnected issues often captured by the phrase, ‘The Orphan Industrial Complex.’
The term was coined back in 2017 by Kristen Cheney, Professor of Children & Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague.
For Cheney, the core issue was not a question of good versus bad orphanages, nor of good or ill intentions. The core problem, she says, is “the industry that grows up around ‘orphans’, creating not just an environment for trafficking and corruption but for the commodification of orphans and orphanhood more broadly.”
Closer to home the same issues have been central to a campaign being run by Comhlámh, the Irish Association of International Development Workers and Volunteers.
Comhlámh in particular point to the harms of orphanage volunteering.
This is counterintuitive, I know.
Surely the impulse to volunteer in an orphanage is noble and humanitarian. Surely it is a practice that should be encouraged.
While the former is certainly true, at least in the vast majority of cases, the latter is far from being unproblematic.
The difficulties are often analysed within the context of a massive growth of volunteer tourism – or ’voluntourism’ – that has taken place in recent years.
Nigel Cantwell and Emmanuelle Werner Gillioz in their paper, The orphanage industry: Flourishing when it should be dying, have described the conflicts in this way:
“Voluntourism is grounded in the attractive notion of devoting part of one’s vacation to supporting an ostensibly worthy cause.”
“It has become a boom sector of the global travel industry, with as many as 10 million volunteers a year spending up to US$ 2 billion on such opportunities. In sub-Saharan Africa, the travel market targeting young people is one of the largest growing sectors. And not surprisingly projects involving children, including volunteering in ‘orphanages’, are the most popular among young people.”
However, as Cantwell and Gillioz also go on to note, this influx of voluntourists has created a demand for ‘orphans’, with directors of institutions actively recruiting children from rural provinces, convincing families to place their children in exchange for the promise of a good education. These children become commodities, where the profits directly benefit the orphanage directors.
Kristen Cheney shares this view while also identifying yet another dimension of the problem:
“Through various interventions in the past half-century, the term ‘orphan’ has gone from being a pliable social category to a fixed and immovable label. All children in an orphanage are automatically assumed to be ‘orphans’, when in fact 80% worldwide have at least one living, locatable parent. The term therefore obscures the actual circumstances of both orphanhood and institutionalization.”
So, what is the solution? How do we care for these millions of children worldwide without contributing to what in a growing number of instances are merely exploitative financial operations masquerading as orphanages.
Some of the solutions, within the context of an analysis on the harms of voluntourism, have already been identified by Mama Fatima Singhateh, UN Special Rapporteur on the sale and exploitation of children in her report to the General Assembly in 2023.
There Singhateh repeatedly calls on states to develop a dedicated focus on family-orientated supports including:
“Regulate and monitor how funding is sourced and received for orphanages and residential care institutions for children, to ensure that the children, including their families, are not exploited and that their rights are not violated.”
“Support the redirection of private and public funding away from orphanages and alternative care facilities towards prevention of separation services, family-based care and critical aftercare services for young people in exiting care.”
Singhateh also calls on states to ensure funders’ policies, regulations and guidelines to restrict the use of funding and donations for renovation of buildings and institutions, and family- and community-based care, with a view to redirecting it away from ‘childcare institutions.’
Without this kind of approach, and despite our best intentions, we will continue to, as Cheney has observed, “hamper efforts at child protection, family preservation, and community-based care,” while spurring the ‘production’ of ‘orphans’ for ‘consumption’ by Western supporters and volunteers.
In addition to this, and as Comhlámh have succinctly put it, there urgently needs to be a significant shift in how countries including Ireland engage with overseas aid and development to avoid inadvertently fuelling the cycle of children needlessly separated from their families.