Beruflich Dokumente
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Australian private schools are increasingly taking their senior students to volunteer in orphanages, but theyre doing more
harm than good. Lemuellz/Flickr, CC BY-SA
Australian private schools are increasingly taking their senior students to volunteer in
orphanages in Asia. During these trips students undertake maintenance or building work, but
invariably they also spend time playing with the children in the orphanages. Schools see these
visits as an opportunity for their students to help others and to gain perspective on their
privilege.
Schools and students think theyre being charitable, but children arent tourist attractions made to make you feel warm and
fuzzy. Kim Tyo-Dickerson/Flickr, CC BY
The need to look after many children generally results in a regimented existence, with each
child having many caregivers. Children are cared for as a group rather than as individuals. As
a result children who have been raised in orphanages experience delays across all areas of
development, as well as psychological damage.
Although Australia no longer has orphanages, some other wealthy nations do. Even in these
well-resourced institutions, the same problems exist.
The lack of someone who loves and is committed to a child makes them vulnerable to
exploitation. Rates of physical and sexual abuse (perpetrated by adults and other children) are
high in orphanages, wherever they are located. It is unfortunately not surprising that 30% of
the reports of sexual abuse made to the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional
Responses to Child Sexual Abuse have been made by people who were abused in orphanages.
Knowledge of the harms of orphanage care closed all orphanages in Australia decades ago.
The majority of children living in orphanages have at least one living parent. As recently
reported, orphanage voluntourism is actually removing children from their families.
Unscrupulous individuals are persuading families to give up their children (sometimes with a
cash payment) in order to make money for themselves from donations from wealthy foreign
voluntourists.
They are literally creating orphans, for financial gain.
In some countries this has led to an explosion in the number of orphanages. In Cambodia the
number of orphanages has doubled in the last five years, while the number of orphans has
decreased.
Even when intentions are pure, the building and resourcing of orphanages results in the
removal of children from their families. In the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami in Aceh,
Indonesia, 17 new orphanages were built for tsunami orphans". However, 98% of the
children in these orphanages had families and had been placed in these institutions in order to
gain an education.
Community support for education would have prevented these children from being exposed
to harm in orphanages. Reputable aid organisations will not build orphanages, but instead
work to support families and communities.
This is a much more caring and cost-effective model. Keeping children in orphanages is very
expensive: five to ten times more expensive than supporting them in their families.