Children of the Streets and Shadow Communities of the City

Over the span of the 1990s, street children have become a noticeable phenomenon in many cities of Russia. Deprived of parental supervision and wandering around the streets in search of sustenance and amusement, they are cause for worry in society. Newspaper articles and popular science publications print disturbing data about the numbers of such children (from 1 to 5 million; the total number of children in Russia is about 37 million). In actuality, however, there are no reliable data on the numbers of street children in Russia, especially since there is no unified consensus as to just who are to be considered children of the streets. Indirect data give evidence of a substantial increase in the numbers of neglected children who come to the attention of state bodies and law enforcement agencies, compared with the late 1980s. For example, by the late 1990s the number of children being brought into the Centers for the Temporary Detention of Juvenile Offenders of the MVD Ministry of Internal Affairs] (these centers, with the acronym TsVINP, are often referred to by their former name of reception and disposition centers) had risen by about two times compared with 1988. There was also an increase in the number of children's homes orphanages] in the country (the number almost doubled in the past three years); now there are more than a thousand of them. Children's homes, boarding schools, and municipal and charitable shelters are not able to accommodate everyone who needs them. As before, a major role in the system of monitoring and managing children's homelessness is being played by police agencies that pick up suspicious-looking children in the streets. Children from other towns are placed in the reception and disposition centers to determine what the facts are, while youngsters from Moscow are sent back to their homes. The children may spend up to a month in the reception and disposition centers while personnel determine their place of residence and whether they have any record of criminal doings or have run away from juvenile educational and correctional institutions. They are then either taken back home or placed in children's homes. Many wind up in the streets again, are picked up again, and so on. Of the 6,000 children brought into Moscow's TsVINP in 1998, 1,400 had already spent time there that same year.