Written by Althea, Content writer, Citizen Diplomat Blog Tales
In the West, when the State deems the parents unfit to raise their children or when the mothers refuse to keep them without abandoning them (that is to say without signing the discharge which would make these children adoptable), the State, through the foster care center, is responsible for their care until they reach adulthood.
Today, these centers are no longer dilapidated buildings. The children there are no longer hungry or cold and are no longer subject to mistreatment by those who raise them. But why then do most of these children end up badly?
To understand the fundamental constructive importance of love, we went around to meet the most neglected children left in social centers.
Note: Names of victims have been changed.
Mama doesn’t want me
In the corridor, having arrived two hours in advance, well dressed, with her hair done, a woman waits, turns in circles, leaves, comes back, starts turning again, clasping her hands.
“I’m leaving him here so that he can live in the castle,” she said. Indeed, like many of these establishments, the center is a castle in the middle of the forest, with a rose garden, an orchard, and all the comforts. A place that is away from the world.
She has two other kids. But this one… She can’t stand this one for more than a weekend. This one, she was never able to take care of, while being incapable of giving him away forever in an adoption center…
She changed her phone number, address, got put on a red list, and, for many months, her child tried to reach her. Then she called, and today, here she is.
“Mum! I’m going to see mum…,” for several days, the child has only had these words in his mouth. The director, educators, teachers, and psychologists enter the meeting room. The child begs his mother for a look; the mother looks down. The hours that will follow, during which the fate of the young boy must be decided, will only be an illustration of his mother’s defiance.
“You understand, I am a nurse. I work hard, sometimes at night… I don’t have enough time to take care of him.
“But mum, I know how to do it!” The child cuts her short, politely.
“Madam, your son is now 13 years old. He is perfectly capable of taking care of himself!” One of the panelists blurts out.
“Even to help you, Mom. I could even take my little brothers to school…,” the boy hangs on.
“No! Not you!” The woman insists.
The mother bursts into tears. The child begs, bends over his mother, lays his head on her shoulder. Their tears mix. Then the mother pushes him away.
“Why doesn’t mom want me? Why does she reject me?” Both are crying silently. The child will therefore continue to grow in the foster center.
Why are you hitting me?
On a Wednesday, we take the kids to the beach. The small group is immediately spotted and rejected by the other children, the “normal” children. But why are the children from the foster centers excluded?
We then decide to swim as a group. But one “stubborn” child refuses to undress. I talk to him away from the others. His behavior didn’t change but immediately becomes agitated, clings to his T-shirt, and his anger grows. If I insist, he will definitely hit me.
We decide to meet with his parents. Following a series of postponed appointments to canceled appointments, the meeting finally holds. There is shame on the child who is charged guilty by his “executioners”, guilty of doubt, guilty of not understanding, guilty like all of us who allow the intolerable to happen.
After hours of conversation, the mother will finally speak; then the grandmother, and the conclusion comes: mistreatment from generation to generation.
Why? “Why are you hitting me?” To stop the infernal chain, the child will have to be taught to ask this question. Because a child capable of asking this question is a saved child, a child who has learned that beating someone is not normal.
The quest for a first “I love you”
Despite psychological support, placement in foster families, proper care, and schooling conditions, a good number of abandoned adolescents ultimately choose to exist through violence.
Will they end up at court like this one who, at his trial, will demand from the jurors “the death penalty for crimes of blood!” and then do justice himself? Or like this other who, when asked “Why did you kill him?”, will answer after a long silence and with a haggard eye: “I killed… because it was necessary? Because sometimes killing the other or killing yourself is the same thing.”
At 18, these children will go in search of their mother; to know the story of their birth or “to kill her”, to avenge the evil of her absence.
This is the case of Josephine who, at 50, still remembers her long years of wandering. Josephine, a rebellious teenager who, from petty larceny to petty crime, will be released on probation until she comes of age, and will only be saved from tragedy by abandoning her quest – the mourning of her mother’s love.
If most of these children end their lives badly, it is perhaps simply because they never started it. Because this first “I love you”, the one that gives us the reason to exist, has not been said.
My childhood was a succession of placements in foster families
A maternal orphan since 4 and then abandoned by my father, I did not have the chance to grow under parental authority or his judgment.
Unimpeded, I was accountable only to myself. My childhood was a succession of placements in foster families.
I had to blend into a different surrounding each time. I thus acquired great faculties of adaptation and a certain breadth of mind.
At 16, I took my destiny into my own hands and joined the army. I needed to assert myself, to be strong enough to face my life. I came out anti-militarist, lost, alone, without an example to follow, which led me to drugs and delinquency.
It was my sojourn into acting that allowed me to get out of all that. The theater gave me an identity, a social function, a family, a reason to exist.
But learning to adapt as a child has helped me so well. If I had stayed with my alcoholic father, I would have been maladjusted and fragile, I could not have become the happy man and actor that I am today.
Married off at 15
Pinky, a bright and talkative young woman from Jharkhand, a state in eastern India was married off when she was only 15. But her husband left her a few months later, forcing her to attempt a return to her parents who already did not have enough money to feed their two other daughters.
Pinky then met a man who promised to find her a job. He ended up drugging her and taking her to another town: to a brothel.
Two years later, she was spotted by Sanlaap, a man who works for a shelter home around town, and taken to their center.
There she received psychosocial support and followed several professional training courses, before being brought back to her family three months later.
Although her parents were very happy to find her, she had to remarry a year later. The wedding was going well until her in-laws learned of Pinky’s past. And divorced her, while she was expecting a child.
Accompanied by Sanlaap, Pinky and her father finally succeeded in opening a tea shop, which has today become the greatest pride of the young woman. Her father is now committed to an organization fighting against the sexual exploitation of children and helps families in his village to find their missing children or victims of trafficking.
Is there a future for These Children?
In their minds, the family, the cocoon of which they have been deprived, occupies a privileged place. Often, they marry as soon as they come of age, surrounding their spouse and their children with extremely possessive love, with the permanent feeling that the latter may abandon them.
They dream of “a rosy world where love is not lacking”. A way to forget the ugliness they have known. But they do not imagine being able to succeed exceedingly in their lives. This is because they have not been able to forge an “ideal of the self,” the psychic authority that pushes them to act and gives self-confidence.
The foster child knows shame above all things – the shame of not being sufficiently desirable, lovable. The proof that he is not worthy of love, he thinks, is that he has been abandoned.
This self-shame will whisper to his ear at every moment of his life, whispering to him that he is unworthy of succeeding, sometimes resulting in delinquent behavior that will make him an outcast. Or he may simply confine himself to a dull existence.
Asides from growing up with no personal sense of love or familial care, this demography of children is a constant target for organized criminals.Despite psychological support, foster home care, and education, a good number of deserted adolescents choose to exist through violence. Despite psychological support, foster home care, and education, a good number of deserted adolescents choose to exist through violence.
Sixty percent of child trafficking victims in the United States have a history in the children welfare system, according to childrensrights.org. Young people in foster care are more likely to be targeted by traffickers as people with this particular experience have no families, and thus, no emotional relationships and supports.
Children who grow up rejected, shut out by their families, or as orphans bear irreparable psychological damage. They see their lives completely turned upside down. They see no need to compete with the real world and some wish they were never born.
Unless there is the desire to take revenge or to forget the past, they may not be able to live or rise socially. Nevertheless, for not being able to express the feeling of their own value, they remain fragile, quick to collapse in the face of obstacles…
