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When nine-month-old Anna Shkaptsova was reported missing in the western Russian city of Bryansk on 11 March, police and volunteers spent almost the next three weeks in a desperate search for her. However, on Friday, investigators alleged that she had become just one more of the many children murdered every year by adults in Russia… in this case, by her father. Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the SKRF told journalists, “During an argument, the child’s father, Aleksandr Kulagin, first hit his girlfriend, and, then, their small daughter, throwing her from her stroller. For at least the next 24 hours, he refused to allow the mother to approach the child or call an ambulance. The girl died the next day”. Markin also said that the girl’s 19-year-old mother, Svetlana Shkaptsova, helped Kulagin, 31, attempt to cover up the crime.
Police say she left the child’s empty stroller on the street while she went into a shop, after which Kulagin… dressed in women’s clothes, a wig, and glasses to disguise his identity… took it and dumped it in the entranceway of a nearby building. Then, Shkaptsova called police to report the “disappearance” of her daughter, triggering a search involving some 1,000 police and scores of volunteers. Police initially said they suspected internal migrants or gypsies.
However, on Thursday, Shkaptsova confessed to the cover-up after four hours of questioning, a source from the Oblast Procurator’s office told RIA-Novosti. She also revealed that Kulagin had burnt the girl’s body and then buried it in a different part of the city. Unconfirmed media reports on Friday suggested police recovered the remains of the girl’s body and that Kulagin wasn’t the girl’s biological father.
Soul-Searching?
Although the case was just one of many in Russia… on Friday, police said they were searching for a missing seven-year-old boy in the Urals city of Perm… the reported disappearance of Anna Shkaptsova made news headlines all across the country, and state-run Channel One led with investigation footage of her mother’s tearful confession on Friday afternoon. In addition, the death seemed set to usher in an unusual period of national soul-searching in a country where, as RF Ombudsman for Children’s Rights, Pavel Astakhov, said on Friday, “over 1,000 children” are murdered every year … with the child’s parents guilty in a third of the killings.
Anatoly Kucherena, head of the RF Public Chamber Committee on Citizen Safety, told RIA Novosti, “We have to pay attention to why some parents are so aggressive and heartless toward their own children. This is a question for the society in which we live… we need to dampen aggression, which has increased a lot of late”. On Friday, Astakhov said the government “urgently” needed to take steps to help vulnerable children and families, writing in his Twitter micro-blog, “Thousands of families are in a dangerous position”. He also criticised social services after it was revealed that Kulagin had been stripped of his parental rights in a previous relationship.
In an interview with Channel One, psychiatrist Sergei Enikolopov of the Moscow City Psychological-Pedagogical University said, “In recent years we’ve seen a lot of cases where people have killed children simply because they cried or disturbed their sleep or drinking”. Leading Church official Vsevolod Chaplin blamed the media for Anna Shkaptsova’s death, saying at a Moscow news conference, “The media has reported recently on terrible crimes as if they are something ordinary. This played a not-insignificant role in what happened in Bryansk… people start to think of such horrible things as somehow normal and everyday”.
Provincial Desperation
Like most Russian provincial cities, living standards in Bryansk lag behind those in Moscow and St Petersburg. Like almost everywhere in Russia, substance abuse is a real problem, with dozens of online advertisements offering to cure alcoholism and drug addiction. Veteran criminal psychiatrist Mikhail Vinogradov told RIA-Novosti, “The socially vulnerable section of society has psychological problems. In this case, we had a criminal father and a belligerent mother”. Bertrand Bainvel, the head of UNICEF in Russia, told RIA-Novosti that social ills were a major factor in Russia’s depressing statistics on child abuse, saying, “The family’s in crisis. For a number of different reasons… from alcoholism and problems in the relationship between the parents, as well as stress and poverty. However, very often, the system isn’t able to pick up and detect situations where there is a higher risk for children in families. Right now, it’s a very retroactive system”. He welcomed government campaigns to discourage child abuse, saying, “The government’s aware of the problem”.
In Bryansk, Svetlana Shkaptsova looked set to be charged as an accomplice in her daughter’s murder. Leading Moscow lawyer Oksana Mikhalkina told RIA-Novosti, “This was a silent acquiescence to a crime against her child”, adding, “This tragedy reveals deep tendencies in our society, in particular, unmotivated violence towards those who are weaker… children and the elderly”.
30 March 2012
Marc Bennetts
RIA-Novosti
Pseudo-Political Correctness Western-Style and Russian Orphans
Tags: abuse, Associated Press, Child abuse, Child Welfare, children, children's rights, Deep Springs Ranch for Kids, diplomacy, diplomatic relations, Eureka MT, Government of Russia, John Robles, Konstantin Dolgov, legal affairs, Montana, Pavel Astakhov, political commentary, politics, Russia, Russian, Russian diplomacy, United States, USA
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One area where there’s no room for rhetoric or for false attempts at being politically correct is the area of international adoptions and the welfare of the smallest and most defenceless individuals amongst us. We have seen this many times before in case after case of Russian orphans and adoptees suffering abuse, and even death, at the hands of their American adoptive parents. Time and time again, in almost every aspect of Russian-Western relations, we’ve seen anti-Russian hysteria and pseudo-political correctness raise its ugly head. It’s something that many are used to, and something that more and more Westerners are beginning to notice.
Recently, the RF Children’s Rights Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov and Russian Human Rights Envoy Konstantin Dolgov attempted to visit a “ranch” for adopted children located in Eureka in remote north-western Montana {it’s a tiny hamlet of only about a thousand people near the Canadian border: editor}. The purpose of the visit was to check on the welfare of the ten Russian adoptees that reportedly were at the ranch, who were removed shortly before Mr Astakhov’s visit, according to RIA-Novosti. On his official website, Mr Astakhov, who’s diligently fought for the rights of Russian children worldwide, stated the following, “The very fact of the children being there is shocking. What is it, a pre-trial detention facility? A penal colony? Or, is it a dustbin for unwanted children? These children are completely isolated from the outside world, which is a violation of their rights. It hasn’t been made clear to us whether the children receive the help and care they need, which is why the condition of the Russian kids at the ranch causes concerns”.
Were the children from any other country, the Americans would grant these concerns the level of respect they deserve, especially when the safety and welfare of children are at their core, and they would’ve done everything to ensure that a proper investigation of the queries ensued. Sadly, this didn’t occur. Instead, the pseudo-politically correct American mass media machine began an onslaught, not on the ranch’s owner, one Joyce Sterkel, but on Mr Astakhov and the group of Russian government officials that travelled with him. The AP published a huge piece of more than three pages in length full of anti-Russian quotes by Sterkel, which aren’t worth repeating here, with almost nothing about the children or Mr Astakhov’s concerns, even referring to the ombudsman as “one of them”. Six days later, the AP published a mere seven sentences regarding the illegality of Ms Sterkel’s ranch, which hasn’t had a license to operate since 2010, was ordered closed, and where inspectors aren’t allowed. Other problems at the ranch include a failure to show the structures on the ranch meet the building code, no disaster plan, and no background checks on employees.
Again, nowhere do you find stories about the children in question or their welfare. For the American media… they aren’t even a side issue. It’s as if they don’t exist. Sterkel hasn’t only denied Russian inspectors entry onto her so-called ranch, but also denied the Montana state board any information about the children at the ranch, according to board attorney Mary Tapper. Statements in the American press regarding sovereignty, intrusion, and privacy rights have no place in a dialogue involving the safety and welfare of children, whatever their origin. However, the USA is a country where, in many cases, pseudo-political correctness comes first and the rights and safety of children come second. Rev Peter Mullen in his blog on the Mail Online put it well when describing the influence of political correctness on adoptions in the Western system, “The scandal is that our Mephistophelian ‘caring institutions’ would rather a child be aborted than that the mother should give birth and so present them with all these tiresome pseudo-problems derived entirely from political correctness”.
Having lived in both Russia and the USA for decades, I can honestly say that any Russian travelling to the USA would be shocked at the number of stories and cases of child abuse and atrocities against children that exist in the USA and that no one hears about in the filtered international American media. The American culture of death, sex, violence, hypocrisy, and perversion is often reflected in the horrors that children become the victims of. The record shows, with regard to Russian orphans, that the controls that exist for other orphans are just not there and that many adoptive parents feel that because they somehow “rescued” the children from some “terrible” faraway place they can do whatever they want to the children with impunity. As for Russia, and I can say this honestly, with the insight of an educator, the respect for children is much higher than in the USA, and the level of crimes and cases of inhumane acts against children are so much lower as to almost be non-existent, if one compares them to the USA. In the better part of two decades here, there have been fewer than a dozen high profile cases of crimes against children. Once again, I can’t help but compare the almost daily onslaught in the American media of cases of child abuse, kidnappings, child murders, and paedophilia.
Joyce Sterkel didn’t allow the Russian delegation to inspect the facility in question, nor did she provide the Board of Private Alternative Adolescent Residential and Outdoor Programs any information about the children. She also removed the children from the premises before Mr Astakhov arrived. What was she so afraid might be discovered? Moreover, what’s really going on at the isolated and remote Deep Springs Ranch for Kids? The pseudo-politically correct American establishment might have a problem asking those questions, but I don’t, and for the sake of the children, we must answer them.
John Robles
Voice of Russia World Service
http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_07_20/Pseudo-political-correctness-Western-style-and-Russian-orphans/
Editor’s Note:
In connection with child abuse, I’d like to compliment Mel and Cappy at Pokrov.org… they’ve done a hell of lot of truth-telling, and they’ve got the scars from the goodthinkers to prove it. Some of the Monomorons are ranting that the Holy Synod’s statement that JP was sheltering a rapist are false. Well… put up or shut up, guys. If you have “proof” that the Holy Synod’s lying… take it to court. That’s defamation and libel in anyone’s book, if what you say is true. I’ll confide something, though… the allegation’s specious, but the Synod can’t move against the perps because they’re all cowards hiding behind usernames. I’ll say this… agree with me or not, I’ve got the moxie to put my name (or my initials) to my posts and comments. The Monomorons don’t… that tells you that nothing on that site is worth attending to.
Only trust those who sign their names to their posts… otherwise, shitcan anything coming from an “anonymous” source. They won’t stand up and be counted… so, you don’t have to believe a word that they say. That’s what I believe…
BMD