ATHENS — First came the rising rates of homelessness. Then, the explosive growth of suicides. Now, four years into a devastating financial crisis, Greece’s youngest citizens are falling through the cracks of the country’s disheveled society.
Either deserted at maternity wards days after their birth, bundled inside pillowcases, or packed in cardboard boxes dumped on the doorsteps of churches, clinics and charity centers, abandoned babies are turning up all over the country. Hard statistics are difficult to come by. But in a telling tale of the trend and an admission of the devastating effects of austerity on young children, Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis told parliament recently that the number of abandoned infants had soared by 336 percent alone in the state’s flagship pediatrics hospital since the start of the financial crisis.
“It is the most tragic human consequence of the [financial] crisis,” says Stelios Sifnos, Director of Social Work and Research at the SOS Children’s Villages charity. “There is urgent need for action.”
“We’re talking about children here, not cars,” he adds.
Social care has never been a forte of the Greek state. In fact, whatever semblance of it that did exist ahead of the financial crisis, now stands hollow, leaving the country’s family-first society to mitigate social plagues like abandonment and neglect.
“The question,” says Kostas Yannopoulos, founder of the Smile of the Child charity, “is how much more the Greek family can endure — if at all.”
“Just the other day I had a mother with nine children — from infants to teenagers — begging me to take them all in because she no longer had the means to cope.”
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