Gracián Svačina went to university with a mission: "I wanted to show them that we are normal people too."

By Shuan Sim

Gracián Svačina is a 21-year old who goes to a Czech university, where he studies mass communications. He has writing internships with the country’s leading daily newspaper, Mladá fronta Dnes, and with the news weekly Respekt. He appears to be ordinary. But behind that that appearance is an exceptional success story: Svačina grew up in a state-run children’s home. Only 0.6% of people like him make it into university.

Svačina recalls how his parents would spend their monthly wages in a week and could not afford to take care of him, his two younger brothers and grandfather. He spoke of no hot water and often no food in the house. He and his siblings were not sent to school sometimes. “Most importantly, my father was beating me and my siblings, my mother and our grandfather,” he said. “The police came one day and took us away.”

And so when Svačina was 10, social workers whisked him and his siblings, one in kindergarten and the other in second grade, into a children’s home.

“It’s always bad in the beginning,” Svačina said. “I really wanted to return [home] even though I knew that things would be bad if I returned.

Like many other institutionalized children, Svačina would likely never be able to return to his biological parents, who received little support or counseling from social workers. And there was no guarantee he would find foster parents.

Statistics show that many children emerge from institutions unprepared for adult life. They are often unable to find work or have a propensity for crime. The Czech Republic has one of the highest rates of institutionalized children among countries in the European Union. There are currently about 20,000 Czech children in institutions, according to 2010 statistics from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. That means that one child out of 99 in the country is institutionalized. By comparison, France has a rate of one out of 287 children are in state care. Hungary has a rate of one in 257 and Poland one in 137.

International children rights organizations UNICEF and Eurochild have criticized the country since it entered the European Union in 2004 for the ease with which the state puts children into institutions. The Czech government has since begun efforts to de-institutionalize these children.

Forced into institutions and left with few alternatives, children are ultimately disadvantaged. It should be noted however that these children homes are not decrepit prisons; Svačina said his children’s home in Jemnice, a town a two-hour bus ride southeast of Prague, was not lacking in facilities. There were computers and study rooms, and the home planned plenty activities. Still, personal attention was hard to come by. There were about 30 other children. “There was only one governess for every eight children, so she didn’t have as much time for me,” Svačina said.

Even with well-equipped facilities, institutionalized care negatively affects children. A 2006 UNICEF report showed that employees in such home are sometime inadequate and poorly remunerated, and that children in their care can experience poor physical health, severe developmental delays and potentially irreversible psychological damage. The negative effects are more severe the longer a child remains in an institution.
Additionally, a 2007 study released by the Czech Interior Ministry suggested a strong correlation between institutionalized children and crime. The ministry survey 17,454 youths who left institutionalized care from 1995 to 2004. Of them, 56 percent committed crimes; 1,682 committed the crimes within a year of leaving the institutions.

Even if children from these homes do not become criminals, Svačina said, many still face problems adjusting after leaving. “They want to live on their own,” he said. “So they usually drop out of school to get jobs to do so. The lack of schooling is what’s limiting them.”

Svačina said he was the first child from his institution in the last 50 years to apply to university. “When the employees [at the children’s home] talked about their super sons and daughters who got into university, I wanted to show them that we are normal people too,” he said.

School was not easy for Svačina. “It was hard because I was trying to appear strong, trying to hide my sadness and be a good example at school,” he said, absent-mindedly pulling at a fray on his sleeve. “I worked very hard at school and used work as a substitute to not think about those feelings.”

Many of his institutionalized peers do not share his goals. They often go to vocational schools instead of grammar schools, the most common route to university. These vocational schools usually do not have the leaving school examinations required to enter university. According to Spolu dětem, a non-governmental organization that works to improve education in institutions, Svačina is one of the 0.6 percent raised in institutions that study at the university level. “They don’t see the need in going to university,” Svačina said.

Svačina said that some of his peers who left institutions returned to their biological families when they did not find jobs. The domestic problems they had left behind were waiting for them upon their return. “I know a friend who left when she was 16 because she got pregnant, and her mother promised to help take care of her and her children,” Svačina said. But the young woman’s husband ended up in prison, and her mother did not keep her promise. “All her four children are in a children’s home now,” he said.

According to Jana Lexová, vice president of the Association of Foster Families in the Czech Republic, social workers institutionalize many children when they are unable to work closely with troubled families. She said foster families are able to provide an aspect of support that social workers cannot.

Foster parenting is not as common in the Czech Republic as it in the United States or the United Kingdom, however. Lexová said that even though foster families provide better solutions for such children, people have to want to be foster parents. “People have to know how damaging institutions are for children,” she said. “There need to be campaigns to create public awareness. People have misconceptions about taking care of foster children and think that all of them have some sort of mental illness or handicap.”

Under the current system, it might take two years before a child finds a willing foster parent. “That’s too long,” Svačina said.

Klára Trubačová, head of the children protection unit at the Czech Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, agrees that change should happen, and quickly. She feels that the old communist mindset is one reason for the over-institutionalization and slowness of change. In response to why so many children end up in institutes, she said, “We simply have the capacity. In fact, during the ‘50s communist times, it was in the legislation that an aim of the government was to increase the number of places in institutions.”

Presently, different ministries control funding. Legislation is fragmented, causing inefficiencies. Trubačová says the government is taking steps to re-allocate resources from institutions to social services to support foster care and thus reduce institution capacity. The state budget currently allocates CZK 3.5 billion a year to such institutes, while CZK 80 million goes to social services.

“Some skeptics think that de-institutionalization is a Western concept, and that we have ‘different children’ from the West,” Trubačová said. “In the Czech Republic, there’s a view that you don’t destroy what is functioning fine.” Other European countries, including the United Kingdom and Italy, focus as much as 75 percent of their efforts on prevention, direct work with families and foster care, rather than institutional care.

As part of its de-institutionalization plan, the Czech government has implemented a five-year plan to find foster families for all institutionalized children. It plans to increase the monthly stipend foster parents receive for each child from CZK 3,126 to about CZK 8,000. Svačina has concerns about the feasibility of such a plan. “I’m afraid foster families will be doing it for the money and not for the child,” he said. “I think we should do it slowly and place these children into families in a natural way.”