Orphan children

In 1999, it was reported that 200,000 children were trapped in an "archipelago of grim state institutions, (where) the authorities of the Russian Federation are violating the fundamental rights of tens of thousands of innocent citizens: children abandoned to state orphanages." In Russia there is pressure upon parents of newborns with disabilities to institutionalize them. There is also a tendency to assume that abandoned children automatically inherit physical, mental abnormalities and behavioral patterns such as criminality.