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Orphanage

Residential institution devoted to the care of orphans

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Former jewish orphanage in Berlin - Pankow , Germany
Doris Antony , Berlin · CC BY-SA 3.0

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A few large international charities continue to fund orphanages, but most are still commonly founded by smaller charities and religious groups. Especially in developing countries, orphanages may prey on vulnerable families at risk of breakdown and actively recruit children to ensure continued funding. Orphanages in developing countries are rarely run by the state. However, not all orphanages that are state-run are less corrupted; the Romanian orphanages, like those in Bucharest, were founded due to the soaring population numbers catalyzed by dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who banned abortion and birth control and incentivized procreation in order to increase the Romanian workforce.

Today's residential institutions for children, also described as congregate care, include group homes, residential child care communities, children's homes, refuges, rehabilitation centers, night shelters, and youth treatment centers.

History

The Romans formed their first orphanages around 400 AD. Jewish law prescribed care for the widow and the orphan, and Athenian law supported all orphans of those killed in military service until the age of eighteen. Similarly, Plato (Laws, 927) says: "Orphans should be placed under the care of public guardians. Men should have a fear of the loneliness of orphans and of the souls of their departed parents. A man should love the unfortunate orphan of whom he is guardian as if he were his own child. He should be as careful and as diligent in the management of the orphan's property as of his own or even more careful still." The care of orphans was referred to bishops and, during the Middle Ages, to monasteries. As soon as they were old enough, children were often given as apprentices to households to ensure their support and to learn an occupation.

In medieval Europe, care for orphans tended to reside with the Church. The Elizabethan Poor Laws were enacted at the time of the Reformation and placed public responsibility on individual parishes to care for the indigent poor.

Foundling Hospitals

The growth of sentimental philanthropy in the 18th century led to the establishment of the first charitable institutions that would cater to orphans. The Foundling Hospital was founded in 1741 by the philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram in London, England, as a children's home for the "education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children." The first children were admitted into a temporary house located in Hatton Garden. At first, no questions were asked about child or parent, but a distinguishing token was put on each child by the parent.

On reception, children were sent to wet nurses in the countryside, where they stayed until they were about four or five years old. At sixteen, girls were generally apprenticed as servants for four years; at fourteen, boys were apprenticed into a variety of occupations, typically for seven years. There was a small benevolent fund for adults.

In 1756, the House of Commons resolved that all children offered should be received, that local receiving places should be appointed all over the country, and that the funds should be publicly guaranteed. A basket was accordingly hung outside the hospital; the maximum age for admission was raised from two months to twelve, and a flood of children poured in from country workhouses. Parliament soon came to the conclusion that the indiscriminate admission should be discontinued. The hospital adopted a system of receiving children only with considerable sums. This practice was finally stopped in 1801, and it henceforth became a fundamental rule that no money was to be received.

Historical Development in the 18th and 19th century

United Kingdom

By the early nineteenth century, the problem of abandoned children in urban areas, especially London, began to reach alarming proportions. The workhouse system, instituted in 1834, although often brutal, was an attempt at the time to house orphans as well as other vulnerable people in society who could not support themselves in exchange for work. Conditions, especially for the women and children, were so bad as to cause an outcry among the social reform–minded middle-class; some of Charles Dickens' most famous novels, including Oliver Twist, highlighted the plight of the vulnerable and the often abusive conditions that were prevalent in the London orphanages.

Clamour for change led to the birth of the orphanage movement. In England, the movement really took off in the mid-19th century although orphanages such as the Orphan Working Home in 1758 and the Bristol Asylum for Poor Orphan Girls in 1795, had been set up earlier. Private orphanages were founded by private benefactors; these often received royal patronage and government oversight. Ragged schools, founded by John Pounds and the Lord Shaftesbury were also set up to provide pauper children with basic education.

A very influential philanthropist of the era was Thomas John Barnardo, the founder of the charity Barnardos. Becoming aware of the great numbers of homeless and destitute children adrift in the cities of England and encouraged by the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury and the 1st Earl Cairns, he opened the first of the "Dr. Barnardo's Homes" in 1870. By his death in 1905, he had established 112 district homes, which searched for and received waifs and strays, to feed, clothe and educate them. The system under which the institution was carried on is broad as follows: the infants and younger girls and boys were chiefly "boarded out" in rural districts; girls above fourteen years of age were sent to the industrial training homes, to be taught useful domestic occupations; boys above seventeen years of age were first tested in labor homes and then placed in employment at home, sent to sea, or emigrated; boys of between thirteen and seventeen years of age were trained for the various trades for which they might be mentally or physically fitted.

United States

In colonial and early America, orphanages that housed dependent children were rare but became increasingly popular between 1830 and 1860 following challenges associated with immigration, urban poverty, and public health crises like the cholera epidemic.

The earliest orphanages were private, religiously affiliated institutions that formed as a reaction to the harsh living conditions experienced by children in public poorhouses. In 1790, the Charleston Orphan House was institutionalized as the first public orphanage in the country. Other orphanages were also set up across the United States led by private or faith-based organizations that screen the eligibility of children to be taken under its custody based on religious denomination and ethnicity. For example, in 1806, the first private orphanage in New York, then the Orphan Asylum Society, now Graham Windham, was co-founded by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton's widow. In 1836, a group of Quaker women opened the first racially segregated orphanage, the Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans (Colored Orphan Asylum).

In 1836, the New York Catholic Protectory was established catering to a broad class of Catholic children, and a few years later, in 1860, a group of German Jews opened the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. These early historical developments paved the way for the extensive and continuing participation of religious groups in child welfare services in the United States today. The Catholics began in1806 in Philadelphia. There were 75 Catholic orphanages nationwide in 1860 and over 250 in 1900.

After the Civil War, state and local governments became even more involved in regulating and founding orphanages across the country. The primary drivers of this increased involvement was the need to provide for war orphans, the growing opposition to placing children in poorhouses, and the development of new child abuse laws and enforcement machinery. By 1910, more than 1,000 orphanages housed two-thirds of children outside their homes, which translates to roughly 3% of the national children's population based on figures from a 1910 census of minors under the age of fifteen. The remaining percentage were either placed in private homes or were beneficiaries of agreements similar to foster care. Over the next decades, however, placing out children to homes (later known as "foster care") instead of institutions was popularized by Charles Loring Bryce as an alternative to caring for children. Later, the Social Security Act of 1935 further improved conditions by authorizing Aid to Families with Dependent Children as a form of social security.

Deinstitutionalization

Evidence from a variety of studies supports the vital importance of attachment security and later development of children. Deinstitutionalization of orphanages and children's homes program in the United States began in the 1950s, after a series of scandals involving the coercion of birth parents and abuse of orphans (notably at Georgia Tann's Tennessee Children's Home Society). In Romania, a decree was established that aggressively promoted population growth, banning contraception and abortions for women with fewer than four children, despite the wretched poverty of most families. After Ceausescu was overthrown, he left a society unable and unwilling to take care of its children. Researchers conducted a study to see what the implications of this early childhood neglect were on development. Typically reared Romanian children showed high rates of secure attachment. Whereas the institutionally raised children showed huge rates of disorganized attachment. Many countries accepted the need to de-institutionalize the care of vulnerable children—that is, close down orphanages in favor of foster care and accelerated adoption.

Foster care operates by taking in children from their homes, due to the lack of care or abuse from their parents, where orphanages take in children with no parents or children whose parents have dropped them off for a better life, typically due to income. Major charities are increasingly focusing their efforts on the re-integration of orphans in order to keep them with their parents or extended family and communities. Orphanages are no longer common in the European Community, and Romania, in particular, has struggled greatly to reduce the visibility of its children's institutions to meet conditions of its entry into the European Union.

Some have stated it is important to understand the reasons for child abandonment, then set up targeted alternative services to support vulnerable families at risk of separation such as mother and baby units and day care centres.

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