BALTIMORE — Catholic Relief Services has released an
emotion-filled video as a way of starting a conversation about the world's
orphanages.
Children no longer end up in orphanages in the United States, and
officials at CRS want a world where there is no longer a need for such
institutions.
They are not advocating shutting down orphanages in poor
countries and turning the children out onto the streets. CRS officials said
their vision is to transform orphanages in countries like Haiti and South Sudan
into family resource centers, offering families the support they need to keep
their children at home.
To help people rethink the concept of orphanages, the international Catholic aid organization wrote a script, scouted locations, employed a film crew, hired actors and traveled to Puerto Rico to tell the story of a poverty-stricken mother making the heartbreaking decision to send her daughter to an orphanage, said Sean L. Callahan, president and CEO of CRS.
Though these institutions are called orphanages, Callahan said few of the children raised in them are actually orphans. Most people are unaware that 80-90 percent of children in orphanages have at least one living parent and, in most cases, poverty or disability is the reason why they are there, he said in an August interview.
CRS hopes the video, released Aug. 10, will help drive home this
point, particularly to well-meaning donors who think they are helping children
by supporting orphanages.
"We are battling a false perception that is deeply ingrained
in the public psyche," Callahan said. "If we are to break the orphan
myth and return children to their families, we need to tell the all-too-common
story of how children, sadly and unwillingly, come to live in an orphanage.
That's why we made this important video."
The video is a departure from CRS's tradition visual storytelling
style. Typically, the organization films subjects in areas where it works and
produces videos in short documentary form to show how people are affected.
"For this topic, we wanted to show the emotional response of
a parent and child separating at an orphanage, and we didn't see a way of
authentically capturing that with a real family," said Mark Metzger,
branded content producer for CRS. "We needed to recreate that
ourselves."
Though actors portray the characters in the video, the scenes
were written from first-hand accounts of CRS colleagues who have witnessed such
gut-wrenching events, said Metzger.
Callahan said although donors in countries like the U.S. often
support orphanages for the right reasons, too many of the institutions they
support do little more than raise money, leaving actual child care as an
afterthought.
Children in orphanages are at greater risk of sexual abuse and
violence than those in family care, he said.
CRS, and its partners Lumos — founded by author J.K. Rowling —
and Maestral International are committed to breaking what they call the orphan
myth and working, country by country, to replace orphanages with family care
centers for more than 8 million children now in institutions throughout the
world.
"We want to get the word out," he said. "We want
to educate our audience as best we can so they can understand the struggles and
difficulties that families are living through, day in and day out."
Watch the CRS video