The problems of social integration of disabled children in Russia

Protection of children’s rights has always been a serious problem in Russia. According to the Constitution, hundreds of laws, presidential decrees, government resolutions, executive regulations of specific agencies, and legal acts of the constituent components of the Russian Federation are supposed to secure rights of children. It appears from the legal point of view that the basic rights are protected. As a legal successor to the former Soviet Union, Russia became a party to the International Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), which was ratified on August 16, 1990.1 The Federal Law on Basic Guarantees of the Rights of the Child in the Russian Federation of July 21, 1998 repeats all the provisions of the CRC. But regardless of the declaration of children’s rights in Russian legislation, provisions of Russian laws are not implemented and there is no mechanism that would make the existing legal provisions work.

In Russia, there are still many children without protection, but children with disabilities are the most vulnerable. These children are not treated equally to others. For example, they do not have easy access to education and what is available is of poor quality, compared to that for the majority of Russian children. Everyone is aware of how difficult it is to raise a disabled child in modern Russia. As a result, orphanages and boarding schools are full, since there are only very few institutions to care for these children or work on their adoption.

More than 25000 children live in orphanages for intellectually disabled children, often in very poor living conditions and with limited resources for development. Only 1% of these children are eventually integrated into society. Once they reach 18, those children still living in public institutions are deliberately and illegally transferred from the orphanages to psycho-neurological homes for adults where they spend the rest of their lives.

An especially difficult situation exists with the implementation of the health care rights of disabled children and children with special needs. Until 1979, disabled children were not legally recognized in the Soviet Union because disability was defined as an inability to perform professional functions due to a sickness or trauma. People who had no labor experience could not qualify for disability benefits. Following the UN requirements, children under age sixteen could be recognized as disabled, according to the Ministry of Health Care Regulation No. 1265 of December 14, 1979. The regulation contained a very limited list of diseases, mostly genetic and incurable, for which children were allowed to receive social security benefits. In 1991, this list was expanded according to the World Health Organization recommendations, and, consequently, the number of those who were recognized as disabled children increased. Since 2000, this category includes minors under eighteen years of age. The number of such children is about 205 per 10,000 children.

The law is based on the concept of equal civil, social, and cultural rights of the disabled individuals, and provides for medical as well as social rehabilitation, including professional education and employment assistance. It extended the right of mothers of disabled children to receive earlier retirement benefits than the fathers of such children, and made one of the parents eligible to receive the federal retirement benefit at fifty years of age.

Nevertheless, the subsidies do not guarantee constitutional social welfare rights because they are minimal amounts, depend on the woman’s family income, are paid irregularly, and do not meet the cost of living requirements.

In violation of other legal norms, Russian legislation allows social payments to children until sixteen years of age, and only in exceptional circumstances until eighteen, despite the fact that all individuals under eighteen are minors

Beside the Ministry of Education, which runs educational establishments for children with special needs, the social security system contains forty-five (thirty-four primary and eleven secondary) schools of professional education aimed at the rehabilitation of the disabled youth and providing these people with working skills.

The integration of the disabled in the society is complicated by the lack of handicapped access in the majority of Russian buildings. According to expert evaluations, about 4.5 percent of Russian children (about 1.6 million) have different forms of disability and need special education2. Despite the fact that the principle of integrating children with special needs into the society was declared by relevant legal acts, as a rule, children with disabilities do not attend regular educational institutions. This occurs mostly because of a strong bias among the parents of healthy children that presence of children with special needs in a class will disturb teachers and other students. As an experiment, in 2006, several kindergartens in Moscow permitted admittance of disabled children. In the meantime, 450 thousand children with special needs under six years old attended the so called “compensatory kindergarten.” In 2006, Russia had 1,373 boarding schools for 170,000 children with speech, hearing, and language pathology, vision impairment, mental retardation, skeletal diseases, and tuberculosis; and 1,946 day schools for 236,000 disabled students. Most of the children with disabilities are not able to attend schools, which are, as a rule, not accessible, and are subject to home schooling performed by teachers of regular neighboring district public schools. The dropout rate among the disabled is much higher than among students of regular schools and only one percent of people with disabilities continue to study at institutions of higher education.

In order to consider the problems of the control of health, its promotion, and specialized education for handicapped children in Russia let’s have a closer look at the Rehabilitation Center for Handicapped Children in Odessa. It is a specialized (correcting) educational establishment better known as "A House with an Angel" for it has a figure of a golden angel on its top. Here you can see a miracle - after persistent daily training sessions and regular courses of treatment sick children make their first steps. In sensory rooms of the Center the little patients develop their perception, learn to see and feel the beauty of the surrounding world. The experts of the Center actively use art-therapy - treatment with the help of art. The theatre's hall was created especially for that purpose. There are performances in which both children with disorders of movement and healthy children participate at the same time. Some of them learn how to avoid feeling derelicts, others learn sympathy and empathy. Children play with dolls together and their dolls are unusual. Rezo Gabriadze, a famous artist, director, and playwright, presented the puppet theatre. It is a charitable institution provided by the Charity Foundation «Future» and all kinds of care including medication, psychological-pedagogical correction, training in computer center, accommodation and catering are free3.

The adoption of legislation that declares children’s rights, as well as joining international legal instruments, did not improve the implementation of those rights automatically. It is unlikely that adoption of a few additional pieces of legislation will stop a wide-spread and long-term practice of child abuse and mistreatment. In spite of the efforts of the international community and Russia’s non-governmental organizations, there is no machinery yet for making Russia a country with a developed legal system and enforceable legislation aimed at the protection of children with disabilities Implementation of international legal norms in Russia is complicated by the insufficient budget financing and the fact that the norms are rarely publicized and popularized in the country. Educators and social workers involved in child affairs are often ignorant of basic human rights principles and international requirements in regard to the children’s rights, and such issues are not taught in Russian universities.

Of course, recent efforts have been made by Russia in order to better integrate children with difficulties in schools, and certain specialized structures have been established. Despite all that, advances in this area need to be continued so that the situation of these children is comparable to that which is available in most European countries. Russia still needs to make progress in this area and offer more accommodation, as well as infrastructure and personnel fo r disabled children. The perceived general Russian mentality towards the handicapped also needs to change and come to consider that these children as an integral part of society and not exclude them.

Bibliographic list:

• 1 .VEDOMOSTI VERKHOVNOGO SOVETA SSSR (then the official gazette) 1990, No. 26b, Item 497

• 2 .Federation Council of the Russian Federation Federal Assembly. // Analytical materials for parliamentary hearings on Protection of Children’s Health in the Russian Federation, published in ANALITICHESKII VESTNIK [Analytical Bulletin], No. 7(324), Moscow, 2007, p. 39.

• 3 .House with an angel. Odessa’s regional charity Foundation «Future». // The children's rehabilitation centre / [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: URL :http://www.rc.odessa.ua/.

«Экономика и социум» №1(32) 2017