The number of homeless children
in Russia

There are no reliable data on the problem of homelessness among children and young people in Russia. There are several reasons for this, but a member of the Parliament Committee on Health, Eugeny Balashov, points to one of them in an interview in Radio Echo Moskvy in 2005 1): “The truth is that homeless children and adolescents are many, especially in large cities, and it is difficult to reach them, as they tend to hide themselves from the outer world in an attempt to protect themselves”.

Following are estimates of the extent of the problem: 

• UNICEF 2) writes “Statistics related to ‘street children’ are extremely contradictory with estimates ranging from 40,000 to 3.5 million in the Russian Federation. In 2001, the Ministry of Internal Affair's Research Institute estimated that Moscow alone has 33,000 homeless children, an 18% increase from 1999.”

• The U.S. Department of Labor 3), on August 23, 2006, writes this about the situation in Russia: “Economic downturn, the deterioration of social services, increase in domestic violence ... and the breakdown of family structures have led to an increase in the number of street children in the country ... Estimates of the number of street children range from 100,000 to 150,000, with possibly 4 million additional children at risk of living on the streets”.

• On CNN 4), on June 15, 2005, an insight program about Russian orphans featured  the following comment by the host of the program: “In Russia as a whole, the problem is almost unimaginable. The Interior Minister says the country's children are suffering from neglect so severe, Russia hasn't seen anything like it since the devastation of World War II. Six million children are believed living in what he called socially unfavorable conditions”.

• According to the documentary film “Children of Leningradsky” (2004) by Hanna Polak and Andrej Celinski, there are between 1 and 4 million homeless children in Russia. They quote authorities stating that there are about 30,000 in Moscow.

• The press-service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia announced in 2005 5) that, during the period 2002-2004, 2.2 million homeless children were registered. Among them only 289,100 were referred to specialized institutions.

1) www.echo.msk
2) www.ceecis.org/child_protection/russianfed_com.htm
3) www.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/tda2004/russia.htm
4) http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0506/15/i_ins.01.html
5) http://news.spbland.ru/?i=12741