Article
Обзор семейных форм устройства детей-сирот в странах Северной, Континентальной и Южной Европы
This article overviews various approaches to the work with children placed out of parental care in the countries of Northern, Western and Southern Europe. Authors study carefully three main issues. Firstly, we review mechanisms of dealing with biological families in crisis situations. Secondly, we consider order of placing children out of biological families into foster care. Finally, we examine practices of reuniting families if they are supported. Cross-country comparisons show that no universal solutions can be found in this sphere. Within every region a conceptually unified system of work with children and families has different priorities on each level. Nevertheless some foster care practices of the developed countries can be adopted in Russian framework
The article contains a detailed overview of the legislation and regulation of the sphere of revealing, placement and care for orphans in Russia. It provides the analysis of the dynamics of the main indicators of child abandonment / orphanhood as well as of the indicators of the efficiency of prevention of child abandonment. Finally, it describes the system of public support for orphans and their host families.
This chapter analyses the various ways Russian print media present the deinstitutionalisation of child welfare. The authors argue that media coverage of childcare policies legitimates the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ agents and practices. By doing so, the media construct a social problem and demarcate symbolic boundaries along several sociopolitical divides, thereby attempting to achieve control through the promotion of an ‘us vs. them’ discourse in Russian public discussions. The authors find that the search for ‘who is to blame’ begins with foreign adoptive parents, and then shifts towards domestic actors in the field of patronat and juvenile justice. It was revealed that many children are on the margins; as the metaphor of ‘last-minute’ children, raised in one article, shows, they are only adopted unexpectedly and, in many cases, not at all. Some themes are missing or very rarely mentioned in the newspapers examined in this study, including professionalisation of care that relates to children’s rights. Children are generally treated as an object than a subject of social relations, victims of circumstances, the living outcome of deficiencies of state institutional upbringing, or a result of poor decisions made by birth parents
This book provides new and empirically grounded research-based knowledge and insights into the current transformation of the Russian child welfare system. It focuses on the major shift in Russia’s child welfare policy: deinstitutionalisation of the system of children’s homes inherited from the Soviet era and an increase in fostering and adoption.
Divided into four sections, this book details both the changing role and function of residential institutions within the Russian child welfare system as well as the rapidly developing form of alternative care in foster families, and work undertaken with birth families. By analysing the consequences of deinstitutionalisation and its effects on children and young people as well as their foster and birth parents, it provides a model for understanding this process across the whole of the post-Soviet space.
It will be of interest to academics and students of social work, sociology, child welfare, social policy, political science, and Russian and East European politics more generally.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.
This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.