A social work fallacy

However, many people appear to be upset because Dil Shova was involved, rather than the incident per se; some are even claiming that people’s trust in social work has been badly shaken. Two things jump to mind in these claims. First is the misinterpretation of the term ‘social work’. Social work is not considered a publicly funded, professional institution for solving problems, as it should be, but as the pious charity work of a few individuals. Rather than looking at the rampant existence of abuse in our society as a failure stemming from the lack of public social workers in our country, we have placed the work of a few celebrity individuals at the centre of our understanding. Why we don’t have publicly funded social workers is what we should be discussing now, not our personal feelings over Dil Shova.

Second is the ignorance regarding the nature of social work itself, which, due to its closeness with the vulnerable, always has potential for abuse, especially if it is unregulated. That is why we need processes to ensure that the vulnerable are not further harmed by those who claim to work for their protection. Dilshova, if found guilty, would not be a sole aberration.

The focus at present should hence be on an analysis of the system as such. Who are these children who end up in orphanages (that is, who are the institutionalised)? Why are they there?

Who is an orphan?

Many institutionalised children are not orphans while many needy orphans are not in institutions. The irony is that the term ‘orphan’ itself has been redefined to match this disjoint. In an enlightening conversation that was part of my research, the owner of an unregistered orphanage proudly announced that her son lived in another orphanage. What do you mean? I asked. He is an orphan she replied. He can’t be, you are his mother and you are alive, I argued. She explained that since she was too poor to look after him, he was an orphan. I could not fathom why she could look after seven children in her orphanage but not her son until she clarified that he got better facilities in the other orphanage, including boarding school education, and oh yes, she also got to see him every weekend.

This may not be what happens in every institution but it shows a culture where institutionalisation is being promoted for the wrong reasons and is serving as a pull factor due to better material provisions. Well-organised institutionalised care may be necessary at times but it should be promoted as a last resort for alternative care. Poverty alone is not a valid reason to put a child in an orphanage and definitely not when a person is not even poor.

Moreover, the poverty factor is exaggerated. While poor people are more likely to be in orphanages, I found that the determining factor in the abandonment of children to be the behaviour of their family. For example, abandonment stems primarily from a change in the relationship status of the parents (death, separation, remarriage) and the ensuing discrimination. Stepparents, in the majority of cases, are key factors in discrimination. Most forms of abuse start at home and occur with impunity because the state has no mechanism to intervene at the family level. Some families abandon children out of desperation. The state neither supports struggling families materially nor through counselling, nor puts sanctions against families abusing children, which lead children to orphanages despite having a parent.

Informal responses

Neither abuse nor abandonment is new to human civilisation. What differs is how it is dealt with in the 21st century. After going through a period of charity-led social work, all major welfare states have now established rigorous Child Protection Systems (CPS) which include identification, referral and case management for vulnerable children so that they can be managed primarily by public social workers (not NGOs or individuals). A combination of the lack of political will to create this system and societal misinterpretation of social work is preventing the establishment of an effective CPS in Nepal, including the recruitment of paid, professional social workers.

The Nepali state hence not only fails to support vulnerable children, it does not even know who needs its support. There is no coordinated registration for children in alternative care. For example, a woman told me how after the death of her sister, her brother-in-law remarried and his children become orphans and left for Kathmandu to work as child labourers. She did not even know where they were. While macro and generalised statistics on the overall number of abused abound, we do not know the basics required for the purpose of case management—where are they and who are they with? A child simply moves from one form of care to another (or no care) without ever being spotted by the state and when they are abandoned by families, they become de-facto citizenship-less, informal citizens. Children fall through the cracks, vanish and are exploited again, leading to the abandonment of abandoned children.

A sad part of the CPS debate is that there is little to look forward to in the future, not only because even a rudimentary system does not exist but because the limited responses that exist are dominated by the informal sector (the UN, I/NGOs and community organisations such as Aama ko Ghar). There are thousands of social workers in Nepal and they all belong to NGOs. Trying to address child protection issues without social workers is like trying to teach children without teachers and schools.

Where is the state?

Of the more than 600 institutions in Nepal, only four are run by the state. The majority of the Central Child Welfare Board’s (CCWB) staff and activities are funded through foreign aid (CCWB received about Rs 4 million from the government but about Rs 70 million from development partners in 2010). Overall, the child protection sector receives 0.01 percent of the government budget (about $400,000) compared to the child protection budget of UNICEF alone, which in 2010 was $3.6 million. Despite their contribution, the disproportionate funding and influence of the informal sector is inadvertently preventing accountable state mechanisms from emerging. But breaking this dependency requires more sophisticated discussion than the ‘dollar kheti’ blame tag that the UN and NGOs get.

Benign individual efforts are praiseworthy but they cannot address the root of the problems and the impunity with which abuse and abandonment is allowed in our country, customarily and legally. When a family fails to provide the best care for children, the state must intervene to support or rescue. Otherwise, in a replay of 19th century workhouses in Britain, when charity-run orphanages played a significant role in alternative forms of care, ‘orphanages’ will only grow, endangering the institution of the family itself. Orphanages may be needed sometimes but they do not offer long-term solutions. One ex-street child, now in an institution, told me that his brother had left home (which was abusive) to live on the streets, hoping that he would be picked up by a NGO. He is still waiting.

Khadka’s current PhD research focuses on a critical analysis of the Child Welfare Regime in Nepal