There are several activities for tourists in the riverside villages south of Myanamar’s biggest city Yangon. Some take rickshaw rides around the fruit market or visit local pagodas. Others go to a private orphanage and spend the day unsupervised with a child.
“Tourists take the children out, to the zoo or downtown,” said the head of one orphanage of 16 children, a small wooden house built on stilts in flooded fields.
As Myanmar braces for mass arrivals following decades under military rule, Unicef is warning against the spread of “orphanage tourism”, whereby the institutionalised care of minors turns into a business, with children from poor families recruited to pose as orphans and extract money from well-meaning foreigners.
Already firmly established in Cambodia and Indonesia, children separated from their families are exploited as fund-raising tools, and in some cases their living conditions are kept deliberately unsightly to extract donations from visitors.
In its worse form, sexual predators have exploited the unrestricted access to children.
“Myanmar could see an exponential increase in the number of orphanages over the coming decade, especially in tourist destinations,” Aaron Greenberg, Unicef Myanmar’s chief of child protection, told the Guardian.
“Such an increase in orphanage care could violate the rights of tens of thousands of Myanmar children,” he added. “We need to act before orphanages dot the landscape.”
The country already has a culture of children from impoverished backgrounds being placed in government-run facilities, called training schools, where their parents believe they will receive a better education. And many thousands of others go to live in monasteries.
There is no data on how many unregistered private orphanages there are in the country but guides and hotels report that tours are in demand. One five-star hotel in Yangon had an orphanage visit on a stop for its river trip but has since ceased.
Many of Myanmar’s visitors are socially minded backpackers or retirees wanting to help the developing country, donating their dollars or euros to a worthy cause.
But Unicef points to nearly 100 years of research which it says shows that even the best institutionalised care puts children at risk of abuse and makes them vulnerable to psychological and developmental disorders.
It says the levels of violence in orphanages are known to be higher than in families; children raised in orphanages are known to have problems making healthy social attachments in adulthood; are more likely than their peers to have problems with substance abuse or come into conflict with the law; and children’s intellectual and emotional development is negatively impacted by orphanage care.
Even the word orphanage can be a misnomer, as in most cases of institutionalised care around the world the children still have one or both parents alive, Unicef says.
Of the 17,322 children at registered orphanages in Myanmar, only 27% are actual orphans, Unicef found. It fears that the growth of orphanage tourism could separate many more minors from their families.
The children at the facility visited by the Guardian appeared to be in good health, drawing pictures in books on the floor and playing games. The owner, a Christian pastor, said he established the orphanage 18 years ago to help children from all over the country.
However, immediately on entering, he made clear that donations were normally given and lamented the poor conditions of the orphanage — the small kitchen with a wood-fire oven, the single toilet, the one room where all 16 sleep. And he lauded how tourists had donated considerable sums of money. Some had bought bags of rice laid out in the room, he said.
The children had been found from across the country, he said, taken from “aunts, uncles and grandparents” deemed unable to look after them. “Sometimes the father is a drunk,” he said.
Unicef and other aid organisations promote kinship care, whereby children are looked after by living parents or extended families, who are provided with financial support as well as frequent supervision by social workers. The cost, Unicef says, is still much lower than institutionalised care.
But these alternatives do not exist in Myanmar, Greenberg said. “Currently there is no strategy in Myanmar for preventing children growing up in institutions,” he said, although he added the government has shown an interest in getting this issue on the agenda.
Leaflets warning visitors not to visit orphanages are placed in hotels and airports. And to show the government the industry’s damaging impact, Unicef arranged for a delegation of senior officials to visit Cambodia in 2014 where 15 years of orphanage tourism has led to an entrenched crisis.
The damage to the lives of thousands of children in Cambodia is a startling case study for Myanmar.
Unicef says that as the numbers of tourists in Cambodia grew by 75% over the last few years, the number of orphanages also grew by 75%, sprouting up around tourist areas.
Sinet Chan, a 26-year-old Cambodian whose parents died from Aids, was taken to an orphanage by her neighbours when she was nine but was immediately put to work on a nearby farm and was often punished and denied food.
The director of the orphanage raped her, she said.
Foreign tourists would make day trips to the orphanage of around 100 children and leave donations, which the director pocketed. If they gave books, clothes or food, he would sell them back to the market, Chan said.
“The director wanted us to dress up poorly,” she said. “We needed to perform to make the tourists happy, like a dance or a show.”
Some tourists would volunteer for several months and she developed strong attachments. When they left, she felt abandoned.
One volunteer was Tara Winkler, an Australian woman who subsequently rescued Sinet and others and set up a the Cambodian Children’s Trust to help reintegrate children with families from institutions involved in orphanage tourism.
“We realised that these kids weren’t orphans at all. They missed their parents,” she said.
“The important thing to note is that institutions that are corrupted and keeping children in poor conditions, that is the worst of the worst. But even the very best institutions are harmful to children. It kind of doesn’t matter how bad the institution is. It’s causing child-parent separation. The damage lasts generations.”
Myanmar plans to conduct more research into orphanages with Unicef’s support over the coming months and senior officials will meet again with their Cambodian counterparts at a conference on child rights in Malaysia in November.
After the Myanmar delegation returned from its Cambodia trip, the government issued a temporary moratorium on registering new orphanages, although in practice it is still possible to set up an unregistered facility.
Swiss child relief agency Terre Des Hommes is already working to reintegrate children back into their families. Starting with government-run training schools it has moved more than 700 children home, some of whom were picked up by police on the streets and considered to be orphaned.
And Swe Zin Oo, secretary general of the Myanmar Tourist Guides Association, a body of around 4,000 guides, said her group is now trying to stop travel agents from selling orphanage visits.
In one part of Yangon, she said, there was an orphanage run by a Korean man.
“He was working it as a business,” she said. “There were 20 to 30 children trapped in a house.”
But with an emergent tourism industry, she says, many guides work alone and do not know how harmful the tours can be.