Vodianova gets personal in bid to save disabled children from orphanages
Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova is best known for strutting down catwalks but she is most proud of her behind-the-scenes work such as campaigning to keep disabled children out of orphanages as efforts mount to stop institutionalizing children. Vodianova said she was acutely aware of the issues faced by families with disabled children after growing up with her half-sister Oksana who was born with cerebral palsy and autism in Nizhny Novgorod, 300 miles (500km) east of Moscow.
When Oksana was born, nurses at the hospital suggested her mother put her into an orphanage and have “another healthy child” - while Vodianova said she was bullied by other children at school for having a disabled sister. “The rule has been that for many years children with special needs, with disabilities, are abandoned by their families,” Vodianova, 36, once nicknamed Supernova, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview. “You can’t blame the family. The system has not been adapted for a family to raise a child with special needs.”
The non-government organization Disability Rights International (DRI) said the institutionalization of children with disabilities is a worldwide problem and it has documented abuses against children in 25 countries. Human Rights Watch has estimated that 30 percent of Russian children with disabilities lived in institutional orphanages of which 95 percent had at least one living parent.
The J.K. Rowling charity Lumos is also part of a growing campaign globally to help an estimated eight million children who live in orphanages and other institutions globally. More than 80 percent of these children are not orphans but have been separated from their families because of shame, poverty or discrimination. Vodianova got involved after she set up the Naked Heart Foundation in 2004 to help victims of an Islamist militant siege of a school in Beslan, southern Russia, which ended in a chaotic gun battle killing more than 300 people, including 186 children. —Reuters