Social workers prefer to put kids in institutional care

Prague, Jan 17 (CTK) - Czech social workers do not pay sufficient attention to families from which children could be taken away and prefer to place the children from theses families in institutional care, Petr Bittner from the Human Rights League said Thursday.

It is more advantageous for municipalities for financial reasons to take children away and place them in institutions thus transferring the responsibility for these children on to the state, Bittner said at a seminar on the family that was held in the Chamber of Deputies.

Last year, some 1500 children lived in institutions for infants and very small children and half of them were placed there due to their parents' social problems, Bittner said.

To help the families who are threatened with their children being taken away from them and put in institutional care is an expensive solution for municipalities. The Human Rights League thus recommends that municipalities financially participate in the operational costs of children's institutional care which would better motivate them to look for different solutions, Bittner said.

Hana Zurovcova from the Mutual Coexistence organisation said that such system functions in Austria, for instance.

The Czech Republic has been criticised for a high number of children in institutional care for a long time. According to experts, the main problem of the social and legal protection of children in the Czech Republic is that powers in this field are split among municipalities, regions and several ministers.

Bittner described the situation as the "powerless triple rule."

According to the statistics, about 20,000 children live in institutions in the Czech Republic, including almost 5000 children who live in children's homes.

Zurovcova said that courts do not take children away from their families because the children are harassed or abused but most often because the family is unable to ensure decent housing for their children, do not send them to school or do not attend child doctors.

She said in many cases it would be enough to help such families handle fundamental household chores that the parents are unable to cope with because their parents had not taught them how to do so, and the situation would stabilise.

Specialists expect the National Office for Employment and Social Policy that is to be established in 2009 to bring partial changes. The Labour and Social Affairs Ministry wants to concentrate certain powers at the new institution which it wants to transfer from regions and municipalities.

This would facilitate, for instance, the social workers' methodical work.

The Labour and Social Affairs Ministry wants in the future to obtain more money for social and legal protection of children, Deputy Labour Minister Marian Hosek said.

The money should be invested in an increase in the number of social workers and in the support of the non-profit sector, he said.

The ministry has recently launched regular inter-ministerial meetings the goal of which is to partly overcome the problem of the split powers in this field that has been criticised by many experts, Hosek said.