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UNICEF: Central Asia Must Work To Keep Children Out Of Alternative Care

About 60,000 children across the five Central Asian countries remain in alternative, care despite the known and devastating effects of family separation and child institutionalization, according to a new policy report released by UNICEF. Regina De Dominicis, UNICEF Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia, highlighted the dire and lifelong consequences of institutionalization for children and stressed the need for more investment in family support services. “We have seen progress in recent years in reducing the number of children in alternative care – including the closure of institutions. We must continue this work so that no child is ever placed in alternative care because of poverty, disability or challenging behavior, or because their family lacks access to services they need to care for their child at home,” she said. The report states that 203 children per 100,000 in the region live in care institutions, nearly double the world average of 105 per 100,000. While progress has been made in reducing the overall number of children in institutions, the report notes that children with disabilities are disproportionately represented in these homes. Between 2015 and 2021, the proportion of children with disabilities in residential institutions increased in all Central Asian countries except Kazakhstan, indicating persistent social norms and a lack of social services for these children. UNICEF emphasizes the need to close institutions and support families to prevent unnecessary placement of children in residential care. The organization offers a comprehensive approach to ensure that all children, regardless of their circumstances, grow up in a family environment: 1. Implement effective childcare reforms to keep children with their families where possible, including planning to close large-scale institutions and develop a comprehensive continuum of child and family support and protection services. 2. Investment in a range of child and family support services, including statutory family support services and a strong social service workforce, for the early identification of and intervention in situations when children are at risk of separation. 3. Securing family-based alternative care, including stronger support for extended family members who care for children and strategies to keep siblings together where possible. 4. Protecting children who are already in alternative care against violence, neglect, and abuse through robust safeguarding policies and practices. 5. Investing in more and better data on children who are at risk of family separation, in alternative care, or who have left care. 6. Raising public awareness of the benefits of keeping families together and the urgent need to prioritize family-based care. 7. Ensuring that children have a voice in the decisions that affect them and are consulted when new policies and practices are developed to meet their needs and rights. UNICEF works with governments and partners in Central Asia to keep and support families and community-based care. This also includes implementing deinstitutionalization policies, expanding family support services to prevent separation, а family reunification, and facilitating safe transitions to independent living.

Social Family

Rise in Kyrgyzstan Foster Families

At the beginning of July, records showed that 218 children without parental care were being raised by 110 foster families in Kyrgyzstan; an increase of 29% compared to the previous year. Active in promoting fostering as a far better alternative to orphanages , the Kyrgyz Ministry of Labor reports, "A foster or adoptive family is a trained family that provides upbringing for children in difficult life situations for a certain period of time, based on a contract with the state. Citizens between the ages of 30 to 65 are eligible to apply to become foster parents and to ensure the safety and wellbeing of their charges, receive specialist training as well as monthly checks by social service employees. Contracted by the state, they also receive an allowance of $80 a month until the orphans come of age. According to the Ministry of Social Services, "If applicants have one or two children, they can only foster three. If foster parents have no children of their own, they can raise up to five toddlers or teenagers from three to 16 years of age." Beneficial on many levels, fostering provides children with both a secure base and opportunities to master a trade, work in agriculture or follow a profession, to enable them to lead independent lives as adults.

Security Healthcare Family Children Rights

Taking the Necessary Steps to Curb Child Abuse in Kazakhstan

In Almaty, a young woman threw herself off a Ferris wheel, falling to her death. Before committing suicide, she had strangled her five-year-old daughter. The number of children in Kazakhstan has soared over the past decade, but so have the number of crimes committed against minors. When Mom and Dad are the murderers In 2023, twenty-five children were murdered in Kazakhstan, seven of them by their relatives according to the country’s children's ombudsman, Dinara Zakiyeva. This year, Kazakhstanis were shocked by numerous horrifying cases of child abuse. According to relatives and neighbors, the family of the woman who strangled her daughter lived in the Ile District of Almaty Region and were financially secure and successful. The regional commissioner for children's rights, Aigul Yesimbekova, explained that the woman had confesses her crime to her sister before committing suicide. “The child had Down's syndrome. The mother was most likely in an internal crisis and despair when she decided to do this,"Yesimbekova explained. "She went to her sister and told her that she was going to kill herself. When her sister tried to calm her down, she went to the park (the Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Almaty). Her husband is an IT specialist, and the financial component [of her life] was fine. She was not registered with psychiatrists, her husband makes money, and everything seemed fine, but the child was sick. Probably, her soul was in such a state of crisis; it is hard when a child is sick. Maybe she murdered the child in a rush of emotion, and then, unable to cope with the guilt, she took the step she did.” According to Zakiyeva, such families are in critical need of psychological support, and child protective services should supervise them. However, the situation with psychologists and child social workers in Kazakhstan is poor. At the end of June, a court in the Turkestan Region convicted a mother of killing her two children. Their bodies were found in a rented apartment in February 2024 in the city of Turkistan. The mother was sentenced to 15 years in prison. After killing her children, the woman called her friend and told her what she'd done. Even against the backdrop of Kazakhstan’s high birth rates, the Turkestan Region - as is the entire south of the country - is an outlier. The percentage of people under the age of 18 in Kazakhstan stands at 34.1%, whereas in the Turkestan Region, this figure is 43.3%, followed by the Mangystau Region at 41.9%, and the federal city of Shymkent at 40.6%. Experts say that it is in the regions with the highest birth rates that the highest rates of violence against children are recorded. In September of last year, a pedophile raped and brutally murdered a five-year-old girl who lived next to him in the village of Zhibek Zholy in the Turkestan Region. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and chemical castration. News of the murder almost sparked a riot and deadly reprisals against the rapist;...

Society Family

Uzbekistan Joins ILO Convention on Equal Opportunities for Working Family Members

Uzbekistan has ratified the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 156, ensuring equal opportunities and rights for male and female workers with family responsibilities, Gazeta.uz reports. The country's president Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed a law ratifying this convention, which guarantees equal treatment and opportunities for all workers, regardless of their family obligations. The main objective of ILO Convention No. 156 is to create conditions under which working men and women with family responsibilities can perform paid work without facing discrimination while successfully combining professional and familial obligations. The Senate of the Oliy Majlis of Uzbekistan, the upper house of parliament, when considering the law on ratification, emphasized that all the requirements of the Convention have already been fully implemented in the country's national legislation. To date, 45 out of 187 ILO member states, including Norway, Sweden, Spain, France, Japan, South Korea, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, have ratified the Convention.

Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan Kazakhstan Central Asia Family

Uzbekistan Ranks First in Central Asia in Number of Marriages and Last in Divorces

The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Interstate Statistical Committee has published its compendium for 2022 on its website. Getting acquainted with the statistics of marriages and divorces of the collection, one sees that in 2022, there were 8.4 marriages and 1.4 divorces for every 1,000 people in Uzbekistan. The marriage indicator is 6.5 in Kazakhstan, and there were 2.3 divorces per 1,000; in Kyrgyzstan the data indicates 7.0 marriages and 1.8 divorces. Also of note was data on the intensity of internal migration, with Kazakhstan leading in this category with 41.3 per 1,000 people moving internally in 2022. In Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, the indicator was 6.0, respectively. Tajikistan's data for 2021-2022 is not provided; the country showed 3.7 results per 1,000 people for 2020. At the same time, the State Statistics Committee of Uzbekistan reports that in 2023, there were 283,800 marriages and 49,200 divorces in the nation. In Kazakhstan, 90,300 marriages were registered between January and September of 2023, an 8.1% decrease from the same period in 2022. Based on the data that was submitted, there were 12,400 divorces in the first nine months of last year, and also an 8.1% decrease in divorces year-on-year. In Kyrgyzstan, 12,552 couples filed for divorce in 2023, while 45,495 marriages were registered before the law. Statistics for Tajikistan in 2021 (data for 2022 isn't yet available) showed that there were 7.6 marriages and 1.4 divorces per thousand. In 2023, 76,444 marriages and 10,298 divorces were officially registered. The statistical collection also includes data on these nations' populations, rates of illness and disability, educational attainment and cultural practices, economic activity, the material and housing circumstances of the populace, the environment, and crime.

Uzbekistan Central Asia Legislation Family

Uzbek Children for Sale: What Compels Mothers to Part With Their Young Ones?

In Uzbekistan, yet more cases of children being sold have been uncovered by officers of the State Security Service. Law enforcement officers recently detained women trying to sell their children in four cities in Uzbekistan. A 29-year-old resident of Namangan tried to sell her ten-year-old son for $18,000 and was detained while receiving an advance payment of $4,000. A 31-year-old resident of Termez agreed to sell her newborn daughter for $2,000. She was detained while handing over the baby and receiving the money. A 33-year-old woman from Bukhara region, more recently living in Gulistan, was detained while trying to sell her two-week-old son for $40,000. And in the capital, a 27-year-old woman from Chirchik was detained for trying to sell her six-year-old son for $3,000. Child trafficking has taken on horrific proportions in recent years in Uzbekistan. According to the World Report on Trafficking in Persons, over the timespan from 2014 to 2020, 380 cases of trafficking in newborns were uncovered here. Year after year, these figures continue to increase. Prices for babies range from $200 to $40,000. There are several reasons that drive mothers to such drastic measures. The first is the overall plight of the mother. Often they have no way to make a living, have lost their husbands, or already have several older children. Another child becomes an impossible burden for her -- which can be eased by earning money to feed, clothe, and house herself and the remaining family members. There have been cases when children were offered in exchange for an apartment. The weak state system of support for women in difficult life situations puts these mothers in an impossible situation, having to choose between living in poverty or giving their children and themselves a chance to live in better conditions in the future. Secondly, fear of shame and being publicly ostracized are major factors. Young women and girls who become pregnant for reasons deemed socially unacceptable -- as well as victims of rape -- experience this. In an attempt to hide the pregnancy and the child, such mothers often temporarily move to another city or region. This can culminate in the mother trying to get rid of the child by selling it far away from their home regions after giving birth. Furthermore, Uzbekistan has a very complicated bureaucratic system of adoption, which helps drive the black market for the trafficking of newborns and children. Because of this bureaucracy, only a few people manage to take the desired child home from an orphanage. Therefore, childless couples look for a way to get a child directly from a maternity hospital. The mediator in such transactions is often the medical staff, who negotiate all the terms of sale with the biological mother and adoptive parents in advance. The problem of selling children in Uzbekistan must be addressed comprehensively, experts say. The introduction of sex education lessons in schools is a necessity, as well as the introduction of state programs to support women in need, tougher penalties for...