C h I l d abuse as a catalyst of juvenile d e l I n quency,

DRUG ABUSE AND HOMELESSNESS

By: Gleg Zykov

All forms of asocial juvenile behavior stem from violence, not necessarily

physical but always psychological. Neglect can also be regarded

as a sort of violence because the child, especially at the tender age,

perceives neglect as abuse and demonstrates his protest which, at a

first glance, may seem inadequate or too brutal. However, this is an

additional sign confirming the gravity of his feelings. Accordingly, an

adult can hardly imagine and assess the storm of emotions a child feels

when subjected to physical abuse.

While there exist varying classifications of violence forms, mine is

based on the child's environment and technical limitations ol possible

response to abuse by the public. The main factor increasing the risk ol

abuse depends on how closed is the micro environment in which a

given child is raised. Accordingly, I distinguish three zones in which

the child may be subjected to violence:

Domestic violence;

• Violence in closed educational institutions (orphanages, cadet

schools, public schools, etc.), including correctional facilities of

the federal penitentiary service;

• Violence using psychological and pedagogical techniques (children's

hobby groups, scout and pioneer organizations, etc.).

While in all the above cases the closed character of the environment

may be defined by both physical factors (restricting the child's

ability to freely communicate with the outward world) and by psychological

factors, only in the latter case we can often observe a special

sect-like type of a closed children's community. A dramatic example of

this type of abuse is an organization called The Path to the Sunny Side

which for many years used the front of a children rights protection and

tourist organization for a pedophilic sect led by its charismatic leader

Yuri Ustinov (now hiding from the police) and was practicing a system

of "secrets" creating pre-conditions for psychological deviations and
manifestations ol mental disorders, basically borderline cases, lor the

children recruited by the sect.

Proliferation ol all forms of violence in our society is the best evidence

of the absence of a children rights protection system, crudity of

methods used to identify and assert maltreatment, virtual absence of

mechanisms for the prevention of child maltreatment (primarily stemming

from today's totally inefficient departmental system of making

decisions relating to minors. This gave rise to the need to formulate a

decision-making theory relative to minors described below.

The first step would be identifying efficient decision criteria.

These are:

Decision's legitimacy;

Specilic locus on the beneficiary;

Decision's qualification.

In any non-totalitarian society there are two basic decision-making

mechanisms:

Departmental mechanism;

• Judicial mechanism.

Let's review these mechanisms from the point of view'of the criteria

proclaimed.

Departmental mechanism

1. Are departmental decisions legitimate? Not entirely because

departmental decisions are primarily based on departmental regulatory

acts rather than on federal legislation. Asa result, decisions

passed by one ministry often contradict to decisions passed by

other ministries which precludes any coordinated decision-making

strategy. This equally relates to the decisions made by bodies of

authority affiliated to different departments which results in negative

effect on the destiny of specific children.

2. Departmental decisions lack a specific focus. Departments deal

with children categories depending on the departmental character

of the child's problem. The Ministry of the Interior deals

71 M< ISO >W 'S RAILWAY STATION CHILDREN

"WORKINO WIT 11 VOI'Til AT RISK" s o u -. Nsiu- 10

with delinquents, the Health ('are Ministry - with teenage

drug addicts, while social protection bodies — with children

neglect and homelessless. Nobody seems to be interested in a

specific child.

3. The quality of departmental decisions is very selective, their basic

goal being justification of financing of the department's operations

(including a subsequent accounting for expenditures and inaintainance

of "an appropriate document flow") rather than resolving

the problems of specific children. These decisions ignore an obvious

fact that all problems stem from the family and micro-environment

conflicts. Assistance will not be possible if these conflicts are

ignored. All forms of asocial behavior emerge after the child has

run away from home following an irrepressible conflict in the family.

Isolated efforts to prevent drug addiction, juvenile delinquency

and homelessness are not gooing to help a given child in resolving

his life collisions.

Judicial Mechanism

1. There's no doubt that all court rulings are based on the federal legislation

and therefore are absolutely legitimate.

2. Court will always consider specific cases and its rulings will always

relate to specific children.

o. What about the quality of court rulings? It's obvious for experts

familiar with legal proceedings relating to minors' cases that in

many cases court rulings are not only unqualified but unintelligent

and ignore the child's psychology and specific social context

causing the delinquency. Court rulings are almost never oriented

to re-socialization. The child is viewed not a subject ol resocialization

but as an object of repression. There's no understanding

that delinquency is normally a manifestation of a

protest, a symptom of a social malady requiring a cure. And

worse of all, no conclusions are made about the reasons causing

delinquent behavior, no efforts are taken to establish ellicient

social policy mechanisms based on consideration of the fact thai

the rights of a given child were violated. Can the situation be changed if efficiency of departmental decisions

is improved? From the above, it's clear that, the scanty departmental

potential will not be enough for ensuring a cardinal change in

the situation.

Can a judicial decision be improved? Obviously yes. The problem

can be resolved if the judges are trained in child psychology and sociology,

if courts have a social service assisting the judge in making a

qualified decision, preparing the hearing and suggesting optimal

forms of the child's rehabilitation, preparing draft court rulings for

bodies of authorities and institutions whose action or inaction contributed

to criminalization of the child's behavior. Another critical element

is a close link between the court ruling and rehabilitation programs

and processes on-going within the court's jurisdiction, a focus

on the development of pretrial and extrajudicial proceedings as well as

conciliation procedures. All this can be defined as juvenile justice.

This has become the focus of considerable efforts taken by the

NAN Foundation. Our objective is obvious — restoration of Russia's

juvenile justice system.

The most daramatic form of child maltreatment is domestic violence.

The closed family environment leaves no chance for the child

to change the situation, inevitably and irrevocably crippling the

child's psyche and hindering his personality development. Society

has to devise a mechanism of intervention into family affairs at the

first signs of such tragic phenomenon as chuld abuse. The NAN

Foundation is currently working on a special manual on child abuse

to help formulate the principles of an integrated approach to addressing

this issue, including a description of signs evidencing the fact of

abuse, detection mechanisms and technologies for the prevention of

child abuse. At the same time, we perfectly understand that arbitrary,

non-legal, out-of-court interference into familiy affairs is unacceptable.

This collision can only be resolved via the juvenile justice system.

Juvenile court can pass optimal rulings on interference into

familiy affairs with the purpose of its preservation, doing it within a

legal framework approved by the public.

In context of the above, I would like to suggest a classification of

forms of interference into familiy affairs:

7(1 M()S(i.)WS RAILWAY STATU)N CHILDREN

"VVORKINf i VV1111 V ч

1. Unacceptable interference, or repressive-mechanistic control.

This kind of interference takes no account of the family situation,

involves no analysis ol the lamil's problems, and is not oriented to

correction of these problems.

2. Necessary' (correctional non-repressive) interference, its conditions

being the presence of dysfunctions (of which the family

member are conscious), active willingness of the family to overcome

such dysfunctions or their readiness to accept assistance in

developing parenting skills, bidding a constructive dialog with the

child. This interference may come in the form of individual or

group psychotherapy and psycho-correction, correction follow-up

aimed at developing self-control skills (including attendance of

mutual help groups, etc.).

3. Inevitable (correctional-repressive) interference, its conditions

being obvious symptoms of violation of the child's rights denied by

the family, the presence of psychological and especially physical

abuse (including sexual abuse): unwillingness of the family to

accept assistance, the absence of internal potential for overcoming

the dysfunction on their own. The main symptom of child abuse

would be running away from home. In a situation like this, the child

could be temporarily or permanently removed from the family.

hi any scenario, it's in I porta nt to understand that depriving the biological

parents of their rights and the child's removal from the family

primarily affects the child and is acceptable only where it becomes obvious

that the family no longer has any resources for its own preservation.

The child's removal from the biological family will require resolution

of the child's further destiny. It's pretty obvious that exiting system

of boarding schools has become a gross anachromism. The boarding

school system has to be phased out.

Accordingly, I would like to present my view of existing forms of

child-rearing practice from the standpoint of the responsibility concept.

At present, there exist the following forms of child-rearing practice:

Rearing by biological parents;

• Foster care (when foster parents are legally no different from biological

parents);
state and bear full responsibility for child care, while the state has

a minimal interference into the rearing" process);

Rearing in a foster family (when foster parentis sign a contract

with local authorities setting forth a system of relations between

the foster family and such authorities in the child care process,

which initially creates better conditions for interference into family

affairs and the child care process);

Rearing in a foster family (when the conditions of the child's living

in the foster family are regulated by a special contract). In this

case, foster parents act as custodians and don't bear full legal

responsibility for rearing the child. The functions of a custodian are

carried out by a care institution;

Rearing in family groups (with a group of children formed at a custody

institution and one or two adults acting as surrogate parents).

The scope of their activities is specified by job descriptions

endorsed by the administration of a given custody institution;

• Rearing in orphanage-type institutions (involving no family relationship)

where the child care process is based on a children's collective.

In this case, personal relationship of the family type

between the members of the staff and the ibnmates is virtually

absent. The child care process is supervised by the government via

the system of orphanage administration.

After reviewing the above, one can easily come to the conelusison

that the state's responsibility for rearing the child is growing proportinatley

to the diminishing of the parents' responsibility. These two

alternative systems of responsibility do not complement each other. As

an adult who made a child custody commitment transfers responsibility

for this custody to the state, his responsibility to the child decreases

and this inevitably affects legal, social and psychological aspects of

the process. This, in turn, directly affects the quality of the rearing

process and the adult's capacity to influence the formation of a socially

and psychologically sound personality.

This argument should not be interpreted as an appeal to reject any

of alternative forms of child care. The basic goals of the responsibility

concept would be as follows:

78 MOSCl)\\ s RAILWAY STATION (llll.l Ж1-Л

"WORKING WITH V O l l II AT RISK" series. Issue 1(1

Defining priorities in the process of developing diverse tonus ol

child care, reflecting a balance between the readiness of the state

to differentiate the child's problems and family problems from

excessive monitoring of family affairs (i.e. a paternalistic solution)

and the family's willingness and capacity, as a basic public institution,

to get involved into an active an responsible process of selfrealization:

Providing a certain logical basis to be used for making conclusions

on comparative efficiency of the above forms of child care to ensure

the conditions for formation of a multifaceted personality.

Such goal setting allows to understand the current contradiction

between the need to reform the system of children rights protection

and existing paternalistic tandem between the government institutions

and the public resulting in a disadvantage for the child.

We have to remember that in any case, violation of chidren's rights

is possible within any form of child care. The process of family development

will bring about specific procedures and mechanisms which,

in turn, will influence the development and improvement of alternative

forms of child rearing, while their efficiency will be determnined by the

destiny of specific children coining in sight of the juvenile justice system

rather than abstract reasonings and concepts.

Bearing in mind that this brochure is primarily dedicated to organizing

the work with Youth at Risk, and trying to bring our proposals

nearer to formal standards, this material is concluded by a diagram ol

inter-departmental interaction aimed at optimizing the activities of the

city's social serv ices.