Paul Astakhov urged officials and public community to make children’s homes open

Staying on a work visit in Bashkiria the ombudsman for children’s rights under the President RF Paul Astakhov suggested that the experience of foreign countries should become more exploitable: the children’s homes and orphanages there aren’t separated from the public life. At the meeting with the heads of the Republican ministries, departments and law-enforcement bodies the ombudsman offered to look at the problem of orphans’ socialization from a new angle:

“For example every student in the Great Britain has to work at either a children’s home or at a correctional school two hours per week, otherwise he won’t pass a single test. The doors of the Russian children’s homes are closed and youth doesn’t appear there. At the same time the orphans need communication with the young and cheerful people, since they enter the world, being five years behind the coevals in their mental development. The state will provide them with flats but these kids have no idea how to pay for housing and communal services, how to buy foods and cook. I offer you the innovational approach – open the doors of your orphanages and let the students do their practical work there, there is no need to wait for some special laws; you just have to sign the contracts between education institutions and the children’s homes”.

The ombudsman has added he is going to introduce the bill “The public control over children’s institutions” to the State Duma soon.

At the same time in spite of real attractiveness of the foreign experience some of its achievements would hardly settle down on the Russian land.

“I think that the situations, when father and father or mother and mother bring up a child, are unacceptable in our society” – the ombudsman said, referring to the opinion of the Patriarch Cyril concerning the inadmissibility of adoption by the unisexual couples.