Are orphanages more dangerous during conflict?

In conflict and humanitarian crises, orphanages become acutely dangerous and the children inside them are specifically vulnerable to abduction, trafficking and forced recruitment.

When war breaks out, families can move. Orphanages cannot.

Orphanages are fixed, visible targets. Evacuation is complex. Staff flee or are conscripted. Oversight collapses. Children, particularly those with disabilities, can be abandoned entirely. The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities made a formal legal determination in 2022 that children with disabilities in Ukrainian orphanages face a disproportionate mortality risk, grounded in documented evidence of systematic exclusion from evacuation.

Research by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab (Yale HRL, 2023) found that the majority of the estimated 20,500 Ukrainian children forcibly transferred to Russia since February 2022 had been taken from orphanages and residential facilities in occupied regions. These children had no named adult to refuse, resist or search for them. The family bond that might have protected them had already been severed by the orphanage.

This pattern repeats across conflicts.

Across Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, research found that the presence of intact family relationships was the single strongest protection against forced recruitment and its absence the single strongest vulnerability (IRC, PLOS ONE, 2023). Children without family bonds are not simply more vulnerable – they are the profile that abduction and forced recruitment is specifically designed to reach.

Anticipatory deinstitutionalisation, moving children out of orphanages and into family care before conflict, is a pre-emptive protection measure. And it saves lives.