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 (i.e. if the female parent has gone, the offspring is an orphan, regardless of the father's condition).[4]
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 them. However, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS), and other groups label any child who 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/teen/infant who has lost both parents.[6] This contrasts with the older use of half-orphan to describe children who had lost only one parent.[7]
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.
Russia: According to Russian reports from 2002 cited in the New York Times, 650,000 children are housed in orphanages. They are released at age 16, and 40% become homeless, while 30% become criminals or commit suicide.[11]
Latin America: Street children have a major presence in Latin America; some estimate that there are as many as 40 million street children in Latin America.[12] Although not all street children are orphans, all street children work and many do not have significant family support.[13]
United States: About 2 million children in the United States (or about 2.7 percent of children) have a deceased mother or father. About 100,000 children have lost both parents.[14]
Wars, epidemics (such as AIDS), pandemics, and poverty[15] have led to many children becoming orphans. The Second World War (1939-1945), with its massive numbers of deaths and vast population movements, left 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, China and elsewhere.[16]
Orphaned characters are extremely common as literary protagonists, especially in children's and fantasy literature.[17] 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.
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.
In religious texts
Mother of Peace AIDS orphanage, Zimbabwe (2005)
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
"Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan." (Hebrew Bible, Exodus 22:22)
"Be joyful at your festival—you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns".(Hebrew Bible, Book of Deuteronomy 16:14)[18]
"Leave your orphans; I will protect their lives. Your widows too can trust in me." (Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah 49:11)
"To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no more oppress." (Hebrew Bible, Psalms 10:18)
"I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you." (New Testament, John 14:18)
"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." (New Testament, James 1:27)
Qu'ran
"And they feed, for the love of God, the indigent, the orphan, and the captive," - (The Quran, The Human: 8)
"Therefore, treat not the orphan with harshness," (The Quran, The Morning Hours: 9)
"Have you not seen those who deny the faith and the Day of Judgment? Those are people who drive orphans away harshly, and do not encourage feeding the indigent. So woe be upon those who do prayer but are neglectful of it or show it off out of vanity, and those who deny even small kindnesses to others." - (The Quran, Small Kindnesses: 1-7)
"(Be good to) orphans and the very poor. And speak good words to people." (The Quran, The Heifer: 83)
"…They will ask you about the property of orphans. Say, 'Managing it in their best interests is best'. If you mix your property with theirs, they are your brothers…" (The Quran, The Heifer: 220)
"Give orphans their property, and do not substitute bad things for good. Do not assimilate their property into your own. Doing that is a serious crime." (The Quran, The Women: 2)
"Keep a close check on orphans until they reach a marriageable age, then if you perceive that they have sound judgement hand over their property to them..." (The Quran, The Women: 6)
^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.
^USAID/UNICEF/UNAIDS (2002) "Children on the brink 2002: a joint report on orphan estimates and program strategies", Washington: USAID/UNICEF/UNAIDS.
^TvT Associates/The Synergy Project (July 2002). (PDF). UNAIDS and UNICEF. Archived from the original (PDF) on December 23, 2003.
^"A Summer of Hope for Russian Orphans". The New York Times. July 21, 2002.
^Tacon, P. (1982). "Carlinhos: the hard gloss of city polish". UNICEF news. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^Scanlon, TJ (1998). "Street children in Latin America". BMJ. 316 (7144): 1596–2100. doi:10.1136/bmj.316.7144.1596. PMC1113205. PMID 9596604.
^Weaver, David (5 September 2019). "Parental Mortality and Outcomes among Minor and Adult Children". papers.ssrn.com. SSRN 3471209.
^ Roman, Nicoleta (8 November 2017). "Introduction". In Roman, Nicoleta (ed.). Orphans and Abandoned Children in European History: Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries. Routledge Studies in Modern European History. Abingdon: Routledge (published 2017). ISBN9781351628839. Retrieved 25 November 2020. The industrial revolution touched both villages and cities, with migration from one to the other going hand-in-hand with urban overpopulation and severe poverty. Urban population growth also led to an increase in abandonment, the poor swinging between finding work, begging or claiming social assistance from the State as a means of integrating themselves and their family, including their children, into society.
^ 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, see Tony Judt, Postwar: a history of Europe since 1945 (2006) p. 21.
^Philip Martin, The Writer's Guide to Fantasy Literature: From Dragon's Lair to Hero's Quest, p 16, ISBN0-87116-195-8
Bullen, John. "Orphans, Idiots, Lunatics, and More Idiots: Recent Approaches to the History of Child Welfare in Canada," Histoire Sociale: Social History, May 1985, Vol. 18 Issue 35, pp 133–145
Harrington, Joel F. "The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany (2009)
Keating, Janie. A Child for Keeps: The History of Adoption in England, 1918-45 (2009)
Miller, Timothy S. The Orphans of Byzantium: Child Welfare in the Christian Empire (2009)
Safley, Thomas Max. Children of the Laboring Poor: Expectation and Experience Among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg (2006)
Sen, Satadru. "The orphaned colony: Orphanage, child and authority in British India," Indian Economic and Social History Review, Oct-Dec 2007, Vol. 44 Issue 4, pp 463-488
Terpstra, Nicholas. Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance: Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna (2005)
United States
Berebitsky, Julie. Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood, 1851-1950 (2000)
Carp, E. Wayne, ed. Adoption in America: Historical Perspectives (2003)
Hacsi, Timothy A. A Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America (1997)
Herman, Ellen. "Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States (2008) ISBN978-0-226-32760-0
Kleinberg, S. J. Widows And Orphans First: The Family Economy And Social Welfare Policy, 1880-1939 (2006)
Miller, Julie. Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2007)
External links
Look up orphan in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Orphans.
February 04, 2023
orphan, orphaned, articles, wikipedia, wikipedia, other, uses, disambiguation, orphan, from, greek, ορφανός, romanized, orphanós, child, whose, parents, have, died, thomas, kennington, canvas, 1885, common, usage, only, child, lost, both, parents, death, calle. For orphaned articles in Wikipedia see Wikipedia Orphan For other uses see Orphan disambiguation An orphan from the Greek orfanos romanized orphanos 1 is a child whose parents have died 2 3 Orphans by Thomas Kennington oil on canvas 1885 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 i e if the female parent has gone the offspring is an orphan regardless of the father s condition 4 Contents 1 Definitions 2 Populations 3 Notable orphans 4 History 5 In literature 6 In religious texts 7 See also 8 References 9 Bibliography 9 1 United States 10 External linksDefinitions Edit Emperor Pedro II of Brazil and his sisters Princesses Francisca and Januaria wearing mourning clothes after the death of their father Pedro I in 1834 Their mother Maria Leopoldina had died a couple of years before in 1826 Orphan on mother s grave by Uros Predic in 1888 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 them However the United Nations Children s Fund UNICEF Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS UNAIDS and other groups label any child who 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 teen infant who has lost both parents 6 This contrasts with the older use of half orphan to describe children who had lost only one parent 7 Populations Edit An 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 childrenAfrica 34 294 11 9 Asia 65 504 6 5 Latin America amp Caribbean 8 166 7 4 Total 107 964 7 6 Country Orphans as of all children AIDS orphans as of orphans Total orphans 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 lt 100 23 000 1 000 2 000 lt 100Botswana 1995 8 3 33 7 55 000 18 000 19 000 7 000 37 000 13 000 5 000 3 000Botswana 2001 15 1 70 5 98 000 69 000 69 000 58 000 91 000 69 000 62 000 61 000Lesotho 1990 10 6 2 9 73 000 lt 100 31 000 lt 100 49 000 lt 100 8 000 lt 100Lesotho 1995 10 3 5 5 77 000 4 000 31 000 1 000 52 000 4 000 7 000 1 000Lesotho 2001 17 0 53 5 137 000 73 000 66 000 38 000 108 000 63 000 37 000 32 000Malawi 1990 11 8 5 7 524 000 30 000 233 000 11 000 346 000 23 000 55 000 6 000Malawi 1995 14 2 24 6 664 000 163 000 305 000 78 000 442 000 115 000 83 000 41 000Malawi 2001 17 5 49 9 937 000 468 000 506 000 282 000 624 000 315 000 194 000 159 000Uganda 1990 12 2 17 4 1 015 000 177 000 437 000 72 000 700 000 138 000 122 000 44 000Uganda 1995 14 9 42 4 1 456 000 617 000 720 000 341 000 1 019 000 450 000 282 000 211 000Uganda 2001 14 6 51 1 1 731 000 884 000 902 000 517 000 1 144 000 581 000 315 000 257 000 8 2001 figures from 2002 UNICEF UNAIDS report 9 China A survey conducted by the Ministry of Civil Affairs in 2005 showed that China has about 573 000 orphans below 18 years old 10 Russia According to Russian reports from 2002 cited in the New York Times 650 000 children are housed in orphanages They are released at age 16 and 40 become homeless while 30 become criminals or commit suicide 11 Latin America Street children have a major presence in Latin America some estimate that there are as many as 40 million street children in Latin America 12 Although not all street children are orphans all street children work and many do not have significant family support 13 United States About 2 million children in the United States or about 2 7 percent of children have a deceased mother or father About 100 000 children have lost both parents 14 Notable orphans EditMain article List of orphans and foundlings Famous orphans include world leaders such as Aaron Burr Andrew Jackson and Pedro II of Brazil writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Leo Tolstoy and athletes such as Aaron Hernandez 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 EditWars epidemics such as AIDS pandemics and poverty 15 have led to many children becoming orphans The Second World War 1939 1945 with its massive numbers of deaths and vast population movements left 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 China and elsewhere 16 In literature Edit 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 17 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 Bronte s Jane Eyre Charles Dickens s Oliver Twist Mark Twain s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn 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 their 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 In religious texts Edit Mother of Peace AIDS orphanage Zimbabwe 2005 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 Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan Hebrew Bible Exodus 22 22 Be joyful at your festival you your sons and daughters your male and female servants and the Levites the foreigners the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns Hebrew Bible Book of Deuteronomy 16 14 18 Leave your orphans I will protect their lives Your widows too can trust in me Hebrew Bible Jeremiah 49 11 To judge the fatherless and the oppressed that the man of the earth may no more oppress Hebrew Bible Psalms 10 18 I will not leave you as orphans I will come to you New Testament John 14 18 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world New Testament James 1 27 Qu ran And they feed for the love of God the indigent the orphan and the captive The Quran The Human 8 Therefore treat not the orphan with harshness The Quran The Morning Hours 9 Have you not seen those who deny the faith and the Day of Judgment Those are people who drive orphans away harshly and do not encourage feeding the indigent So woe be upon those who do prayer but are neglectful of it or show it off out of vanity and those who deny even small kindnesses to others The Quran Small Kindnesses 1 7 Be good to orphans and the very poor And speak good words to people The Quran The Heifer 83 They will ask you about the property of orphans Say Managing it in their best interests is best If you mix your property with theirs they are your brothers The Quran The Heifer 220 Give orphans their property and do not substitute bad things for good Do not assimilate their property into your own Doing that is a serious crime The Quran The Women 2 Keep a close check on orphans until they reach a marriageable age then if you perceive that they have sound judgement hand over their property to them The Quran The Women 6 See also EditAdoption AIDS orphan Child abandonment Foster Legitimacy family law Orphan Train Orphanage Street children Empower Orphans Euro orphanReferences Edit ὀrfanos Henry George Liddell Robert Scott A Greek English Lexicon on Perseus Merriam Webster online dictionary The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 3rd edition One deprived by death of father or mother or usu of both a fatherless or motherless child orphan Dictionary com USCIS definition for immigration purposes Archived from the original on 2019 07 30 Retrieved 2015 10 21 UNAIDS Global Report 2008 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 USAID UNICEF UNAIDS 2002 Children on the brink 2002 a joint report on orphan estimates and program strategies Washington USAID UNICEF UNAIDS 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 China to insure orphans as preventative health measure A Summer of Hope for Russian Orphans The New York Times July 21 2002 Tacon P 1982 Carlinhos the hard gloss of city polish UNICEF news a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Scanlon TJ 1998 Street children in Latin America BMJ 316 7144 1596 2100 doi 10 1136 bmj 316 7144 1596 PMC 1113205 PMID 9596604 Weaver David 5 September 2019 Parental Mortality and Outcomes among Minor and Adult Children papers ssrn com SSRN 3471209 Roman Nicoleta 8 November 2017 Introduction In Roman Nicoleta ed Orphans and Abandoned Children in European History Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries Routledge Studies in Modern European History Abingdon Routledge published 2017 ISBN 9781351628839 Retrieved 25 November 2020 The industrial revolution touched both villages and cities with migration from one to the other going hand in hand with urban overpopulation and severe poverty Urban population growth also led to an increase in abandonment the poor swinging between finding work begging or claiming social assistance from the State as a means of integrating themselves and their family including their children into society 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 see Tony Judt Postwar a history of Europe since 1945 2006 p 21 Philip Martin The Writer s Guide to Fantasy Literature From Dragon s Lair to Hero s Quest p 16 ISBN 0 87116 195 8 Rabbi Eliezer Melamed To Enjoy and Bring Joy to Others in Peninei Halakha Laws of the FestivalsBibliography EditBullen John Orphans Idiots Lunatics and More Idiots Recent Approaches to the History of Child Welfare in Canada Histoire Sociale Social History May 1985 Vol 18 Issue 35 pp 133 145 Harrington Joel F The Unwanted Child The Fate of Foundlings Orphans and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany 2009 Keating Janie A Child for Keeps The History of Adoption in England 1918 45 2009 Miller Timothy S The Orphans of Byzantium Child Welfare in the Christian Empire 2009 Safley Thomas Max Children of the Laboring Poor Expectation and Experience Among the Orphans of Early Modern Augsburg 2006 Sen Satadru The orphaned colony Orphanage child and authority in British India Indian Economic and Social History Review Oct Dec 2007 Vol 44 Issue 4 pp 463 488 Terpstra Nicholas Abandoned Children of the Italian Renaissance Orphan Care in Florence and Bologna 2005 United States Edit Berebitsky Julie Like Our Very Own Adoption and the Changing Culture of Motherhood 1851 1950 2000 Carp E Wayne ed Adoption in America Historical Perspectives 2003 Hacsi Timothy A A Second Home Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America 1997 Herman Ellen Kinship by Design A History of Adoption in the Modern United States 2008 ISBN 978 0 226 32760 0 Kleinberg S J Widows And Orphans First The Family Economy And Social Welfare Policy 1880 1939 2006 Miller Julie Abandoned Foundlings in Nineteenth Century New York City 2007 External links Edit Look up orphan in Wiktionary the free dictionary Wikimedia Commons has media related to Orphans Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Orphan amp oldid 1134088963, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
