Family contact key to avoiding stigma
Government departments and social organizations should provide more psychological aid to inmates’ children to help them integrate into society, the founder of a welfare NGO said.
“We’d better not label this group of children when helping them, as they are sensitive,” said Lin Minming, 46, the founder of Red Apple Public Welfare, an NGO that provides assistance to inmates’ children in Fujian province.
“We’d better not change their original growing or study environment too much.”
Lin’s team sends children to live with close relatives if their parents are imprisoned and their grandparents are incapable of looking after them.
Before the children are moved, social workers in the team talk to the children’s aunts or uncles to offer them tips on how to get along with them.
Lin, who also works for the prison officer training center at Fujian’s Justice Department, said offering children places in residential care facilities, such as those run by Sun Village, another NGO, was a good way to care for them and keep them from harm, “but it also tells the public they are different from others”.
To prevent such children from being stigmatized, “we make more
efforts to contact their jailed parents and keep in touch with the relatives who look after them, instead of looking after them ourselves”, he said.
Lin’s team had covered all the prisons in Fujian by last year, working with officers to offer financial and psychological support.
“The cooperation will contribute to information exchanges,” he said. “This year, our social workers are allowed to go to the prisons regularly to let parents know how their children are faring, and the inmates can also tell us of their concerns about the children to us.”
Lin said the move will be extended to other provinces if it is successful.
He said he was aware of reports that the civil affairs authorities have been ordered to look after inmates’ children, but said the regulation needs specific implementation guidelines, “or else it will be hard to put into practice”.
Red Apple Public Welfare has helped more than 2,000 children since it was established in 2014.