Lisa Sarfati, Children on the edge, Russia, 1991. Lise Sarfati has over a 10 years period documented the dramatic situation of children in Russia. She has lived with the Yakovlev family and their tragedies: murder , psychiatric hospital, powerty still within the frame of a dramatic but existing family structure. Her access to the institutions handling millions of under aged children is exceptional. This machinery has its own, scary logic: In Russia when children are picked up in the streets they are sent to Centers of Sorting and Placement, which depend on the Ministry of Interior. If they have committed a crime and are over 15 years old, they are sent to prisons where they await judgement, often more than 60 in one cell. If no crime has been committed the agents at the Centre of Placement search for the parents who recuperate their children, mostly to hand them over to the Psychiatric Hospital No 6 For Children in Moscow in order to treat their urge to run away. The treatment consists of various elctrical shocks, often the electrosound which is applied to the eyes. During the investigation, sometimes even after judgement, the judge can send the child to the Serbski Psychiatric Expertise Institute. Submitted to series of tests for days, or months, the doctors will establish if the child is to be considered insane or not. If they declare the child insane he, or she, will be transferred to a closed psychiatric hospital , like the no 5 Tchernovski, a prison. If expertise says the child is sane, he will serve his sentence at a colony of reeducation through labor. There are 63 such colonies in Russia. At Ikcha, one of them, I saw Andrei Yakovlev whom I had not seen in years. He had changed, he had grown. He kept looking me straight in the eyes. He had been sentenced to 5 years for murder. I learned that his roommate had been sentenced to 3 years for stealing apples. On the walls a child had scribbled Tomorrow, May 11th, I will be 18 years old. When watching TV, Andrei is seated in the back of the room; In the prison hierarchy this means he is a paria, because has has been sodomized in prison for a piece of bread or for a cigarette. When arriving an opouchtchenny has to declare his status of paria to the colony authorities who will forward to information to the borzye, gang leaders who have complete power in the camp. If the newly arrived prisoner failed to declare his status , and it was to be found out from another source, he would be killed by the inmates. (via goo.gl/5nCocY)
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:42:24 +0000
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