"Kanatchikovo" is a social hotel for beggars with children. Each "room" has new furniture, bedside tables, and beds with clean linen. There is also a playroom with a TV and a library. Temporary residents will be provided with hot meals, and children with dairy kitchen products. The only thing that distinguishes "Kanatchikovo" from an ordinary hotel is the barred windows. According to Andrei Pentyukhov, head of the social assistance department for homeless citizens of the Department of Social Protection, this is the first and so far only institution in the capital where children can live with their parents until they are expelled from the country.
According to the juvenile affairs department of the Moscow Metro, in 2005, 520 mothers with children were detained, more than half of them citizens of Moldova and Ukraine. Among beggars with infants in their arms are not only women but also men. Last year, 22 young fathers were brought to police stations. But criminal cases were opened only twice.
Tatyana Kuznetsova, head of the charity project "Territory of Childhood," has been conducting research for several years on protecting children from the "beggar mafia." According to the organization, 90% of women begging with children have no documents for them. Often these are stolen, bought, or rented children. In her words, Moscow has a well-established market for infants. They are brought from regions where alcoholic mothers of large families are ready to give away any child for a bottle of vodka, or they are snatched from strollers left unattended. Several months ago, activists of the "Territory of Childhood" movement managed to detain one such "mommy" with a child and bring her to the nearest police station. While paperwork was being processed, the woman fled, leaving her "own" one-year-old son with strangers. The boy was so heavily sedated with sleeping pills that he was immediately taken to intensive care. The child could not be saved; he died a few months later from an infection caught in the metro. According to Tatyana Kuznetsova, this is a typical situation. Most children die of hunger and poisoning by sleeping pills or alcohol before reaching one year of age.
According to Sergei Kuguk, head of the juvenile affairs police department at the Moscow Metro, the creation of the state institution "Kanatchikovo" will only solve the problem halfway. On the one hand, previously, within three hours, the police could not verify the family relationship between a mother and a child, and therefore could not decide whether to place them in a shelter or a reception-distributor. Now they will have much more time for this. With the help of OVIR employees, police officers will be able to request documents from any country and determine whether the baby really is the woman's child. Otherwise, the failed mother will be sent home, and the child will be placed in an orphanage.
On the other hand, even after this family is sent home, the woman may again appear on the streets of Moscow with a child in her arms. In Sergei Kuguk's opinion, the only way out is to tighten Article 151 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, namely replacing the term "involvement of children" with "use." Currently, for a child to be recognized as a victim and for criminal proceedings to be initiated against the mother, the baby must independently tell about its suffering. Naturally, infants cannot speak, so all that Interior Ministry employees can do is fine the mother five hundred rubles.
"Recently, on the Taganka Line of the metro, we detained a woman with a dead child in her arms," says Sergei Kuguk. "It turned out that the one-year-old had died of hunger more than fourteen hours earlier. But the young woman was not even given a suspended sentence—the court considered that she was in such a dire situation that she simply had nothing to feed the child."
According to Kuguk, the juvenile affairs departments had been seeking amendments to the law on special institutions for two years.