Orphan

Orphans by Thomas Kennington, oil on canvas, 1885

An orphan (from the Greek: ορφανός orphanós)[1] is a child whose parents are dead or have permanently abandoned the child.[2][3] In common usage, only a child who has lost both parents due to death is called an orphan. When referring to animals, only the mother's condition is usually relevant. If she has gone, the offspring is an orphan, regardless of the father's condition.[4]

Those who have reached adulthood before their parents died are not called orphans; the term is generally reserved for children whose parents have died while they are too young to support themselves.

Definitions

Various groups use different definitions to identify orphans. One legal definition used in the United States is a minor bereft through "death or disappearance of, abandonment or desertion by, or separation or loss from, both parents".[5]

In the common use, an orphan does not have any surviving parent to care for him or her. However, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS), and other groups label any child that has lost one parent as an orphan. In this approach, a maternal orphan is a child whose mother has died, a paternal orphan is a child whose father has died, and a double orphan is a child who has lost both parents.[6] This contrasts with the older use of half-orphan to describe children that had lost only one parent.[7]

Populations

A young Afghan girl at a Kabul, Afghanistan orphanage in January 2002.

Orphans are relatively rare in developed countries, because most children can expect both of their parents to survive their childhood. Much higher numbers of orphans exist in war-torn nations such as Afghanistan.

Continent Number of
orphans (1000s)		 Orphans as percentage
of all children
Africa 34,294 11.9%
Asia 65,504 6.5%
Latin America & Caribbean 8,166 7.4%
Total 107,964 7.6%
Country Orphans as % of all Children AIDS Orphans as % of Orphans Total Orphans (Total) Total Orphans (AIDS Related) Maternal (Total) Maternal (AIDS Related) Paternal (Total) Paternal (AIDS Related) Double (Total) Double (AIDS Related)
Botswana (1990) 5.9 3.0 34,000 1,000 14,000 < 100 23,000 1,000 2,000 < 100
Botswana (1995) 8.3 33.7 55,000 18,000 19,000 7,000 37,000 13,000 5,000 3,000
Botswana (2001) 15.1 70.5 98,000 69,000 69,000 58,000 91,000 69,000 62,000 61,000
Lesotho (1990) 10.6 2.9 73,000 < 100 31,000 < 100 49,000 < 100 8,000 < 100
Lesotho (1995) 10.3 5.5 77,000 4,000 31,000 1,000 52,000 4,000 7,000 1,000
Lesotho (2001) 17.0 53.5 137,000 73,000 66,000 38,000 108,000 63,000 37,000 32,000
Malawi (1990) 11.8 5.7 524,000 30,000 233,000 11,000 346,000 23,000 55,000 6,000
Malawi (1995) 14.2 24.6 664,000 163,000 305,000 78,000 442,000 115,000 83,000 41,000
Malawi (2001) 17.5 49.9 937,000 468,000 506,000 282,000 624,000 315,000 194,000 159,000
Uganda (1990) 12.2 17.4 1,015,000 177,000 437,000 72,000 700,000 138,000 122,000 44,000
Uganda (1995) 14.9 42.4 1,456,000 617,000 720,000 341,000 1,019,000 450,000 282,000 211,000
Uganda (2001) 14.6 51.1 1,731,000 884,000 902,000 517,000 1,144,000 581,000 315,000 257,000

[8]

Notable orphans

Famous orphans include world leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Andrew Jackson; the Hebrew prophet Moses and the Muslim prophet Muhammad; writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, and Leo Tolstoy; athletes such as Aaron Hernandez or Jacques Villeneuve. The American orphan Henry Darger portrayed the horrible conditions of his orphanage in his art work. Other notable orphans include entertainment greats such as Louis Armstrong, Marilyn Monroe, Babe Ruth, Ray Charles and Frances McDormand, and innumerable fictional characters in literature and comics.

History

Wars and great epidemics, such as AIDS, have created many orphans. The Second World War, with its massive numbers of deaths and population movements, created large numbers of orphans in many countries—with estimates for Europe ranging from 1,000,000 to 13,000,000. Judt (2006) estimates there were 9,000 orphaned children in Czechoslovakia, 60,000 in the Netherlands 300,000 in Poland and 200,000 in Yugoslavia, plus many more in the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy and elsewhere.[14]

In literature

Mime offers food to the young Siegfried, an orphan he is raising; Illustration by Arthur Rackham to Richard Wagner's Siegfried

Orphaned characters are extremely common as literary protagonists, especially in children's and fantasy literature.[15] The lack of parents leaves the characters to pursue more interesting and adventurous lives, by freeing them from familial obligations and controls, and depriving them of more prosaic lives. It creates characters that are self-contained and introspective and who strive for affection. Orphans can metaphorically search for self-understanding through attempting to know their roots. Parents can also be allies and sources of aid for children, and removing the parents makes the character's difficulties more severe. Parents, furthermore, can be irrelevant to the theme a writer is trying to develop, and orphaning the character frees the writer from the necessity to depict such an irrelevant relationship; if one parent-child relationship is important, removing the other parent prevents complicating the necessary relationship. All these characteristics make orphans attractive characters for authors.

Orphans are common in fairy tales, such as most variants of Cinderella.

A number of well-known authors have written books featuring orphans. Examples from classic literature include Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Among more recent authors, A. J. Cronin, Lemony Snicket, A. F. Coniglio, Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling, as well as some less well-known authors of famous orphans like Little Orphan Annie have used orphans as major characters. One recurring storyline has been the relationship that the orphan can have with an adult from outside his or her immediate family as seen in Lyle Kessler's play Orphans.

Orphans are especially common as characters in comic books. Almost all the most popular heroes are orphans: Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Robin, The Flash, Captain Marvel, Captain America, and Green Arrow were all orphaned. Orphans are also very common among villains: Bane, Catwoman, and Magneto are examples. Lex Luthor, Deadpool, and Carnage can also be included on this list, though they killed one or both of their parents. Supporting characters befriended by the heroes are also often orphans, including the Newsboy Legion and Rick Jones.

Cartoons

All of the orphan children from the 1936 Color Classic, Christmas Comes But Once a Year produced by Fleischer Studios, were voiced by Mae Questel.

In religious texts

Many religious texts, including the Bible and the Quran, contain the idea that helping and defending orphans is a very important and God-pleasing matter. The religious leaders Moses and Muhammad were orphaned as children. Several scriptural citations describe how orphans should be treated:

Bible

Qu'ran

See also

References

  1. ↑ ὀρφανός, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, on Perseus
  2. ↑ Merriam-Webster online dictionary
  3. ↑ Concise Oxford Dictionary, 6th edition "a child bereaved of parents" with bereaved meaning (of death etc) deprived of a relation
  4. ↑ "orphan". Dictionary.com.
  5. ↑ USCIS definition for immigration purposes
  6. ↑ UNAIDS Global Report 2008
  7. ↑ See, for example, this 19th-century news story about The Society for the Relief of Half-Orphan and Destitute Children, or this one about the Protestant Half-Orphan Asylum.
  8. ↑ USAID/UNICEF/UNAIDS (2002) "Children on the brink 2002: a joint report on orphan estimates and program strategies", Washington: USAID/UNICEF/UNAIDS.
  9. ↑ TvT Associates/The Synergy Project (July 2002). "Children on the Brink 2002: A Joint Report on Orphan Estimates and Program Strategies" (PDF). UNAIDS and UNICEF. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 23, 2003.
  10. ↑ China to insure orphans as preventitive health measure
  11. ↑ "A Summer of Hope for Russian Orphans". The New York Times. July 21, 2002.
  12. ↑ Tacon, P. (1982). "Carlinhos: the hard gloss of city polish". UNICEF news.
  13. ↑ Scanlon, TJ (1998). "Street children in Latin America". BMJ.
  14. ↑ For a high estimate see I.C.B. Dear and M.R.D. Foot, eds. The Oxford companion to World War II (1995) p 208; for lower Tony Judt, Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945 (2006) p. 21
  15. ↑ Philip Martin, The Writer's Guide to Fantasy Literature: From Dragon's Lair to Hero's Quest, p 16, ISBN 0-87116-195-8

Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Concise Oxford Dictionary, 6th edition "a child bereaved of parents" with bereaved meaning (of death etc.) deprived of a relation USCIS definition for immigration purposes UNAIDS Global Report 2008 The Society for the Relief of Half-Orphan and Destitute Children

Bibliography

United States

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