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this page Newsletters - Abandoned Children
Papua New Guinea
Children are gifts from God, they deserve the right to be loved and nurtured by parents or guardians. However, circumstances such as death, separation, and divorce sometimes mean that one parent, foster parents or relatives have to bring up children.
The question is what happens if a child is born as a result of rape, out of wedlock, or to single teenage girls. In cases like this, children are sometimes abandoned in the hospitals, left with relatives, given away to other people to adopt or worse still thrown away in the nearby bushes or garbage bins.
The National (PNG) Newspaper of Thursday, 21 August 2003 reported that a body of a baby girl wrapped in a laplap (piece of material) and put in a plastic bag was found in a dormitory at a technical college in Lae. Metropolitan Superintendent Simon Kauba said the mother delivered the baby on her own in the early hours of Saturday morning without the knowledge of anyone in the dormitory. “After delivering the baby the mother wrapped the infant in a laplap and placed her in a plastic bag and placed the bag under her bed,” Mr Kauba said. He said after placing the plastic bag away under the bed, the mother complained of stomach pains and was taken to the Angau hospital where she was admitted to the emergency ward. When she was at the hospital, one of her girlfriends cleaned the room and found the dead infant among the clothes. The baby’s body is now at the morgue.
I asked people working in the children’s ward of city hospitals if it is true that some mothers deliver and abandon their children. They told me that it was true that some women do that. The main reasons for doing this are rape, birth out of wedlock (while husband was away for work/studies), teenage girls who do not want to bring shame to the family or cannot afford to bring the child up, husbands not paying bride price, broken marriages, polygamy and HIV/AIDs. Some babies are given away for adoption by other people who are not relatives.
In the case of those babies that are abandoned in the hospital, the health department has ways and means of identifying the relatives. If they are willing to adopt the babies, this is arranged. There is also a foster parents program that helps some children with their basic needs.
In the case of babies abandoned because they were conceived as a result of rape, most women even after counselling may still reject the baby because seeing the baby will remind them of the trauma they experienced. It is best given away for adoption by parents who do not have children of their own.
Much effort is needed to bring up these abandoned children because there is an increased number of children walking the streets and begging for a living mainly in urban centres. They are deprived of the basic necessities of life, often become involved in drugs and are used by adults to steal and rob.
Such children can be regarded as "abandoned children” because the parents don’t seem to care about them walking the streets and living on what they can lay their hands on.
Of course those women who are found guilty of abandoning and killing babies are brought to justice. But what of the men? Nothing much seems to be done about them. But organisations such as the Social Welfare department, the Churches, Non- Governmental Organisations and individuals have their own programs to address this situation.
Generally, in the Melanesian culture, the extended family unit enables children to be brought up even if they are born in one of these ways shared. In most cases children in rural areas are not abandoned, it is in the urban centres that such circumstances occur.
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