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Foundation works to aid ‘de facto orphans’
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JING, from northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, lives in an extremely needy family. She lives with a 70-year-old woman who has two grown-up mentally challenged sons.
The 7-year-old girl was abandoned by her parents soon after she was born, likely because she had a tumor on her right cheek.
Although Jing has a family, they are not taking good care of her. She is a “de facto orphan.” According to a recent report by the Philanthropy Research Institute of Beijing Normal University, there are around 580,000 de facto orphans like Jing in China. About 18,000 live in Shaanxi Province.
Sun Lei, secretary-general of the Shaanxi Women and Children Development Foundation, says a “de facto orphan” is defined as when a child has one parent who died, is missing, in jail or suffers from a mental disease and the other parent hasn’t looked after the kid in more than a year.
It also covers children born out of wedlock, or abandoned and then adopted by unqualified families.
“However you look at it, these children don’t have proper care,” Sun says.
Recently, the foundation made a short movie about de facto orphans starring a 7-year-old girl named Ying.
She once had a happy and complete family, but after her father died, everything changed. Her mother left home, leaving Ying to be raised by her grandparents. They lived off a small plot of farmland and subsidies from the local government.
Ying’s grandfather has been in poor health, but insists on Ying going to school. Every day her grandmother takes her to school, traversing a rugged mountain path by bike. And after school, the little girl chops firewood and helps make supper.
Sun says most de facto orphans live in extreme poverty and experience emotional difficulties, but due to a lack of government support, they don’t draw attention like orphans and leftover children.
In Shaanxi, orphans living in welfare homes get monthly subsidies of 1,000 yuan (US$161). A family that adopts an orphan receives 800 yuan per month, but there is no government aid for de facto orphans because at least one of their parents is still alive.
“There is an increasingly urgent demand to help such children,” Sun says.
The Psychological Counseling Center of Northwestern University in Xi’an, the provincial capital, has conducted a survey in eight counties of Shaanxi. It included a questionnaire with 60 questions and face-to-face talk with 120 children.
Zheng Anyun, director of the center, says the poor living conditions of these children are “astonishing.”
Nearly 80 percent of such children live with their grandparents, and about 45 percent of the interviewed families have a monthly income of less than 500 yuan.
Nearly 20 percent of the children said they were underfed “often” or “occasionally” and only 2 percent have fruit everyday, according to the survey.
Meanwhile, 70 percent of primary school and 40 percent of the middle school students surveyed said they never bought new clothes in the last year or had new clothes only at Chinese New Year.
Education and medical care are also problems. Nearly half of the interviewees said they want to quit school because the family can’t afford it, and most never go to a hospital unless they are seriously ill because they don’t have medical insurance.
“As bad as all this is, the lack of spiritual care is much worse,” says Zheng. “Most de facto children say they miss their parents greatly, but when they are asked about their parents, they remain silent or tear up.”
Meanwhile, about 20 percent of respondents said they felt lonely from time to time, and they would “rather be by themselves rather than hang out with classmates.”
They also hear a plethora of negative comments about their parents from their grandparents and neighbors. For example, in some cases a child’s mother has left home or remarried after the husband died. It’s fairly common that the grandparents take out their struggles on the child, Zheng says.
The survey included the question, “who is the person you dislike the most?” The most common answer was “my mom.”
“Being with parents is so simple with most children, but for them, it’s something they feel pain for,” says Zheng. “During the talks, we found most de facto orphans have a tendency to be self-abasing and introverted.”
Now the Shaanxi Women and Children’s Development Foundation is taking action. Children such as Jing and Ying have been registered in its de facto orphan database along with 1,047 others from seven counties in the province. The number is growing.
The foundation says it has started an experimental program in 10 counties. They are working with local civil affairs authorities and women’s federations to help the children.
Meanwhile, the foundation has started soliciting donations along with the Chengmei Charity Foundation of Hainan Province. They have received 2.24 million yuan as of mid-March.
“Helping such children today is not our sole purpose,” Sun says. “We are also endeavoring to get the government to understand the seriousness of the problem. Only then will these children have their basic needs met on a long-term basis.”
There is already a glimmer of hope, the Shaanxi Women and Children Development Foundation says. Late last year, the Shaanxi civil affairs authorities initiated a program in Xianyang providing a subsidy of no less than 300 yuan per month to de facto orphans.
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