Anorphan is a child whose parents have died, are unknown, or have permanently abandoned them. It can also refer to a child who has lost only one parent, as theHebrew translation, for example, is "fatherless".[1][2] In some languages, such asSwedish, the term is "parentless" and more ambiguous about whether the parents are dead, unknown or absconded, but typically refers to a child or younger adult.[citation needed]
In common usage, only a child who has lost both parents due to death is called an orphan. When referring to animals, only the mother's condition is usually relevant (i.e., if the female parent has gone, the offspring is an orphan, regardless of the father's condition).[3]
Various groups use different definitions to identify orphans. One legal definition used in theUnited States is aminor bereft through "death or disappearance of, abandonment or desertion by, or separation or loss from, both parents".[4]
In everyday use, an orphan does not have any surviving parent to care for them. However, theUnited Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF),Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS), and other groups label any child who has lost one parent as an orphan. In this approach, amaternal orphan is a child whose mother has died, apaternal orphan is a child whose father has died, and adouble orphan is a child who has lost both parents.[5] This contrasts with the older use ofhalf-orphan to describe children who had lost only one parent.[6]
Wars,epidemics (such as AIDS),pandemics, andpoverty[7]have led to many children becoming orphans. TheSecond World War (1939–1945), with its massive numbers of deaths and vast population movements, left large numbers of orphans in many countries—with estimates for Europe ranging from 1,000,000 to 13,000,000. Judt (2006) estimates there were 9,000 orphaned children in Czechoslovakia, 60,000 in the Netherlands, 300,000 in Poland and 200,000 in Yugoslavia, plus many more in the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, China and elsewhere.[8]
Orphans are relatively rare in developed countries because most children can expect both of their parents to survive their childhood. Much higher numbers of orphans exist in war-torn nations such asAfghanistan.
Russia: According to Russian reports from 2002 cited in theNew York Times, 650,000 children are housed in orphanages. They are released at age 16, and 40% become homeless, while 30% become criminals or commitsuicide.[12]
Latin America: Street children have a major presence in Latin America; some estimate that there are as many as 40 million street children in Latin America.[13] Although not all street children are orphans, all street children work and many do not have significant family support.[14]
United States: About 2 million children in the United States (or about 2.7 percent of children) have a deceased mother or father. About 100,000 children have lost both parents.[15]
Orphaned characters are prevalent as literary protagonists, especially inchildren's andfantasy literature.[17] The lack of parents leaves the characters to pursue more exciting and adventurous lives, by freeing them from familial obligations and controls, and depriving them of more prosaic lives. It creates characters that are self-contained and introspective and who strive for affection. Orphans can metaphorically search for self-understanding by attempting to know their roots. Parents can also be allies and sources of aid for children, and removing the parents makes the character's difficulties more severe. Parents, furthermore, can be irrelevant to the theme a writer is trying to develop, and orphaning the character frees the writer from depicting such an irrelevant relationship; if one parent-child relationship is important, removing the other parent prevents complicating the necessary relationship. All these characteristics make orphans attractive characters for authors.
Orphans are common in fairy tales, such as most variants ofCinderella.
More recent authors featuring orphan characters includeA. J. Cronin,Lemony Snicket, A. F. Coniglio,Roald Dahl andJ. K. Rowling. One recurring storyline has been the relationship that the orphan can have with an adult from outside their immediate family, as seen in Lyle Kessler's playOrphans.
Many religious texts, including theBible and theQuran, contain the idea that helping and defending orphans is a fundamental and God-pleasing matter. The religious leadersMoses andMuhammad were orphaned as children. Several scriptural citations describe how orphans should be treated:
Bible
"Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan." (Hebrew Bible,Exodus 22:22)
"Be joyful at your festival—you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns".(Hebrew Bible,Book of Deuteronomy 16:14)[18]
"Leave your orphans; I will protect their lives. Your widows too can trust in me." (Hebrew Bible,Jeremiah 49:11)
"To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress." (Hebrew Bible,Psalms 10:18)
"I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." (New Testament, John 14:18)
"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." (New Testament, James 1:27)
Qu'ran
"And they feed, for the love of God, the indigent, the orphan, and the captive," - (The Quran,The Human: 8)
"Therefore, treat not the orphan with harshness," (The Quran,The Morning Hours: 9)
"Have you not seen those who deny the faith and the Day of Judgment? Those are people who drive orphans away harshly, and do not encourage feeding the indigent. So woe be upon those who do prayer but are neglectful of it or show it off out of vanity, and those who deny even small kindnesses to others." - (The Quran,Small Kindnesses: 1–7)
"(Be good to) orphans and the very poor. And speak good words to people." (The Quran,The Heifer: 83)
"...They will ask you about the property of orphans. Say, 'Managing it in their best interests is best'. If you mix your property with theirs, they are your brothers..." (The Quran, The Heifer: 220)
"Give orphans their property, and do not substitute bad things for good. Do not assimilate their property into your own. Doing that is a serious crime." (The Quran,The Women: 2)
"Keep a close check on orphans until they reach a marriageable age, then if you perceive that they have sound judgement hand over their property to them..." (The Quran, The Women: 6)
^See, for example,this 19th-century news story about The Society for the Relief of Half-Orphan and Destitute Children, orthis one about the Protestant Half-Orphan Asylum.
^Roman, Nicoleta (8 November 2017). "Introduction". In Roman, Nicoleta (ed.).Orphans and Abandoned Children in European History: Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries. Routledge Studies in Modern European History. Abingdon: Routledge (published 2017).ISBN9781351628839. Retrieved25 November 2020.The industrial revolution touched both villages and cities, with migration from one to the other going hand-in-hand with urban overpopulation and severe poverty. Urban population growth also led to an increase in abandonment, the poor swinging between finding work, begging or claiming social assistance from the State as a means of integrating themselves and their family, including their children, into society.
^For a high estimate see I.C.B. Dear and M.R.D. Foot, eds.The Oxford Companion to World War II (1995) p. 208; for lower, see Tony Judt,Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945 (2006) p. 21.
^USAID/UNICEF/UNAIDS (2002) "Children on the brink 2002: a joint report on orphan estimates and program strategies", Washington: USAID/UNICEF/UNAIDS.
Bullen, John. "Orphans, Idiots, Lunatics, and More Idiots: Recent Approaches to the History of Child Welfare in Canada,"Histoire Sociale: Social History, May 1985, Vol. 18 Issue 35, pp 133–145
Harrington, Joel F."The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (2009)
Keating, Janie.A Child for Keeps: The History of Adoption in England, 1918-45 (2009)
Miller, Timothy S.The Orphans of Byzantium: Child Welfare in the Christian Empire (2009)
Safley, Thomas Max.Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience Among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg (2006)
Sen, Satadru. "The orphaned colony: Orphanage, child and authority in British India,"Indian Economic and Social History Review, Oct-Dec 2007, Vol. 44 Issue 4, pp 463-488
Terpstra, Nicholas.Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (2005)
Rezzutti, Paulo (2019).D. Pedro II: a história não contada: O último imperador do Novo Mundo revelado por cartas e documentos inéditos (in Portuguese). Leya.ISBN978-85-7734-677-6.
