Child abandonment


Child abandonment is the practice of relinquishing interests and claims over one's offspring in an illegal way, with the intent of never resuming or reasserting guardianship. The phrase is typically used to describe the physical abandonment of a child. Still, it can also include severe cases of neglect and emotional abandonment, such as when parents fail to provide financial and emotional support for children over an extended period. An abandoned child is referred to as a foundling. Baby dumping refers to parents leaving a child younger than 12 months in a public or private place with the intent of terminating their care for the child. It is also known as rehoming when adoptive parents use illegal means, such as the internet, to find new homes for their children. In the case where child abandonment is anonymous within the first 12 months, it may be referred to as secret child abandonment.
In the United States and many other countries, child abandonment is usually treated as a subset of the broader category of child abuse. In the United States it is punishable as a class 4 felony, and a second or subsequent offense after a prior conviction is a class 3 felony with different state judicial systems treating it with varying severities and classifications. Child abandonment may lead to the permanent loss of parental rights of the parents. Some states allow for reinstatement of the parental rights, with about half of the states in the US having had laws for this purpose. Perpetrators can also be charged with reckless abandonment if victims die as a result of their actions or neglect.
Official statistics on child abandonment do not exist in most countries. In Denmark, an estimate of child abandonment prevalence was 1.7 infants per 100,000 births, with another source suggesting higher prevalence in Central and Eastern European countries such as Slovakia with data suggesting 4.9 per 1,000 live births.

Causes

  • Poverty and homelessness are often causes of child abandonment. People living in countries with poor social welfare systems who are not financially capable of taking care of a child are more likely to abandon their children because of a lack of resources. In some cases the parents already have a child or children, but are unable to take care of another child at that time.
  • In societies where young women and young men are looked down upon for being teenage or single mothers and single fathers, child abandonment is more common.
  • Children born out of the confines of marriage may be abandoned in a family's attempt to prevent being shamed by their community.
  • Physical disability, mental illness, and substance abuse problems that parents face.
  • Children who are born with congenital disorders or other health complications may be abandoned if their parents feel unequipped to provide them with the level of care that their condition requires.
  • In cultures where the sex of the child is of utmost importance, parents are more likely to abandon a baby of the undesired sex. Similarly, people may choose to pursue the often controversial option of sex-selective abortion.
  • Political conditions, such as war and displacement of a family, also cause parents to abandon their children.
  • Additionally, a parent being incarcerated or deported can result in the involuntary abandonment of a child, even if the parent did not voluntarily relinquish their parental role.
  • Disownment of a child is a form of abandonment that entails ending contact with and support for one's dependent. Disownment tends to occur later in a child's life, generally due to a conflict between the parent and the child, but can also occur when children are still young. Reasons include: divorce of parents, discovering the true paternity of a child, and a child's actions bringing shame to a family; most commonly, breaking the law, teenage pregnancy, major religious or ideological differences, and identifying as LGBT.

    Effects on survivors

  • Possibility of experiencing abuse and neglect in institutionalized care
  • Low self-esteem stemming from feelings of guilt about being at fault for being abandoned
  • Separation anxiety: feelings of anxiety about being separated from parents or caregivers
  • Attachment issues: difficulty becoming emotionally attached to and trusting other people, especially caregivers
  • Abandonment issues, characteristic of abandoned child syndrome, including social alienation, guilt, anxiety, clinginess, insomnia and nightmares, eating disorders, anger issues, depression, substance abuse, and traumatic reenactment through romantic relationships
  • Symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, referred to as posttraumatic stress disorder of abandonment.
  • Depending upon the severity of their symptoms, children who have developed certain maladjusted tendencies in social interaction may be diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder or disinhibited social engagement disorder.
  • For children who are abandoned in dangerous places, such as dumpsters, doorsteps, and other public areas, exposure to the elements and physical injury are distinct possibilities.

    Financial cost

In 2015, the United States' government spent over $9 billion to support 427,910 children who were in foster care.

Child abandonment laws

Child abandonment is illegal in most of the world, and depending upon the facts of the case and laws of the state in which it occurs could be prosecuted as a misdemeanor or felony criminal offense.

Prevention

  • Providing access to sex education and to family planning resources, like contraception, and abortion can help prevent people who cannot take care of, or do not want to raise, children from becoming pregnant in the first place.
  • Evidence has shown that, when bans on abortion are lifted, the number of abandoned, abused, and neglected children goes down in response. However, access is an issue. In the United States, 87% of all counties, and 97% of all rural counties, do not have any access to abortion services.
  • Governmental assistance can be provided in the form of parental counseling, post-natal services, mental health services, and other community support services for parents who are at a higher risk of abandoning their children because of age, support, physical ability, mental illness, or poverty.

    History

Historically, many cultures practiced abandonment of infants, often called "infant exposure." Children were left on hillsides, in the wilderness, near churches, and in other public places. If taken up by others, the children might join another family either as slaves or as free family members. Roman societies, in particular, chose slaves to raise their children rather than family members, who were often indifferent towards their children. Although being found by others would allow children who were abandoned to often survive, exposure is sometimes compared to infanticide—as described by Tertullian in his Apology: "it is certainly the more cruel way to kill... by exposure to cold and hunger and dogs." Despite the comparison, other sources report that infanticide and exposure were viewed as morally different in ancient times.
In the Early Middle Ages, parents who did not want to raise their children gave them to monasteries with a small fee, an act known as oblation, and in times of social stress, monasteries often received large numbers of children. By the high Middle Ages, oblation was less common and more often arranged privately between the monastery and the parents of the child. Sometimes, medieval hospitals cared for abandoned children at the community's expense. Still, some refused to do so because being willing to accept abandoned children would increase abandonment rates. Medieval laws in Europe governing child abandonment, as the Visigothic Code, often prescribed that the person who had taken up the child was entitled to the child's service as a slave. Conscripting or enslaving children into armies and labor pools often occurred as a consequence of war or pestilence when many children were left parentless. Abandoned children then became the wards of the state, military organization, or religious group. When this practice happened en masse, it had the advantage of ensuring the strength and continuity of cultural and religious practices in medieval society.
Early Modern Europe saw the rise of foundling homes and increased abandonment of children to these homes. These numbers continued to rise and peaked when 5% of all births resulted in abandonment in France around 1830. The national reaction to this was to limit the resources provided by foundling homes and switch to foster homes instead such that fewer children would die within overcrowded foundling homes during infancy. As access to contraception increased and economic conditions improved in Europe towards the end of the 19th century, the number of children being abandoned declined.
Abandonment increased towards the end of the 19th century, particularly in the United States. The largest migration of abandoned children in history occurred in the United States between 1853 and 1929. Over one hundred and twenty thousand orphans were shipped west on railroad cars, where families agreed to foster the children in exchange for their use as farmhands, household workers, etc. Orphan trains were highly popular as a source of free labor. The sheer size of the displacement and the complications and exploitation that occurred gave rise to new agencies and a series of laws that promoted adoption rather than indenture. By 1945, adoption was formulated as a legal act with consideration of the child's best interests. The origin of the move toward secrecy and the sealing of all adoption and birth records began when Charles Loring Brace introduced the concept to prevent children from the orphan trains from returning to or being reclaimed by their parents.
Notable contemporary instances of child abandonment include homicidal neglect by confinement of infants or children, such as in the affair of the Osaka child abandonment case or the affair of two abandoned children in Calgary, Alberta, Canada by their mother Rie Fujii.