Children and institutional care in Kazakhstan: a cultural and historical background

Abstract

The institutionalisation of children in Kazakhstan is the inevitable outcome of the political, social and economic changes in the Kazakh steppe. The great famine, political repression, forced migrations and World War II which all featured in the first part of the last century gave rise to a phenomenon unknown to the Kazakh nomadic people prior to their inclusion in the Soviet Union, that of large numbers of street children. This paper explores the cultural and historical background of the care of children in Kazakhstan in three different time periods: prior to, during, and after the Soviet Union. By tracing and comparing the features of each period we can identify the unique reasons which have led to the institutionalisation of children in Kazakhstan, and then their deinstitutionalization