Defining "Orphans"
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, UNICEF increased efforts to highlight the plight of children affected by AIDS. Since the Convention on the Rights of the Child makes no specific mention - and therefore offers no definition - of orphans, UNICEF defines an orphan as “...a child under 18 years of age whose mother, father, or both parents have died...” (UNICEF 2006, p.
4). They promoted this purposefully broad definition in order to draw development aid's attention to the challenges the AIDS pandemic was posing to child well-being, particularly in Africa. By this definition, they could claim that an estimated 53 million sub-Saharan African children had been orphaned by 2006 - 30% (15.7 million) of them by AIDS (UNICEF 2006, p. iv).Though UNICEF's interpretation of orphanhood has been criticized for emphasizing static, biological definitions of kinship and orphanhood in contexts where, traditionally, orphans are socially defined within a broad and pliable kin care network, their definition has become standard. In efforts to raise their visibility, international NGOs highlighted the plight of AIDS orphans, sometimes focusing on orphanhood at the expense of other children who may have similar or greater needs (Foster et al. 2005, p. 3). Further, by focusing on orphans themselves, aid efforts can easily label them in reifying ways that ignore crucial family and community support. Such reification creates an orphan identity that is both pathologized (Henderson 2006, p. 304) and made a site for benevolent humanitarian intervention (Ferguson and Freidus 2007). But this humanitarianism often comes with adverse consequences, intended or unintended. Such targeting may cause household conflicts over resources and alter community priorities (Foster et al. 2005, p. 3).
Local vernaculars rarely have words that mean what “orphan” does in international development parlance.
For example, many African countries with a strong ethos of caring for children who lose their parents use vernacular terminology to describe orphans by circumstance, historically based on social delineations in which situations of actual care are emphasized. Under traditional kin obligations, children typically have to lose not only their mother and father but also most of their aunts and uncles, and become essentially homeless, to be considered orphans. Most African vernacular translations of “orphan” therefore mean something more like “left behind or abandoned” (Chirwa 2002, p. 96).However, as if to exacerbate the overwhelming statistics generated by the UN definition of “orphan,” the aid industry has also cultivated the terms “orphans and vulnerable children” (OVC) and “children affected by AIDS” (CABA) to emphasize childhood vulnerability generated by the disease. Orphanhood makes children “vulnerable,” but NGO field workers also recognized other HIV/AIDS-related vulnerabilities based on multiple structural factors. NGOs quickly realized that deepening poverty due to HIV/AIDS was often a greater issue than orphanhood itself. The acronym OVC thus evolved within the aid industry to encompass the range of children at risk or in difficult circumstances, above and beyond orphanhood - as well as those made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS even before they are orphaned (Robson and Ansell 2000). In response to the challenges of trying to program specifically for HIV/AIDS-affected orphans, aid organizations began to consider widening the scope of childhood vulnerability due to HIV/AIDS beyond orphanhood. The heightened level of vulnerability is variously attributed to global economic downturn, the ways fostering households are affected by taking in orphans in crisis, more grandparents becoming primary caretakers, and particular dimensions of rural/urban poverty. Employing the term “OVC” also allowed NGOs to consider their work from broader social development, child protection, and children’s rights mandates because it acknowledged that orphans, depending on their circumstances, may not be in as precarious a position as certain other children who still have their parents. Such terms thus help recognize that children other than orphans are in need of assistance. As for CABA, “Children are affected when their close or extended family, their community, and, more broadly, the structures and services that exist for their benefit are strained by the consequences of the HIV/AIDS pandemic” (Gruskin and Tarantola 2005, p. 138). However, by this broad definition, practically every child in sub-Saharan Africa is now a “CABA.” This leads one to wonder what in fact such broad targeting actually achieves - especially as the notion of vulnerability becomes increasingly delinked from HIV/AIDS.
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