There was a heartbreaking story in The Moscow Times at the end of last week, a story about Moscow's street kids and what has brought them to a life on the streets.

It is not a happy or even particularly hopeful story, though the writer does say that President Vladimir Putin is trying to draw Russia's attention to its demographic and social welfare problems. You can read it in full here, though you will need a subscription to the paper's archives, since the Moscow Times quickly moves its stories from its free site to its paid archives.

Here's the background against which the story is set: The number of children in Russia has fallen to 29 million from 36 million over the past eight years. Despite a rapidly modernizing economy, part of Russia is being left behind, and poverty, poor health care and alcoholism are taking their toll on this population. The result is a falling birth rate, but also a greater chance that the children who are born to this group will be mistreated by their parents. The article says that, according to Child's Right, a Moscow-based advocacy group, some 2,000 Russian children are killed by parents or relatives every year, which works out to a murder rate of about 6.9 per 100,000 for children up to age 17. (The reporter notes that in the United States the rate is 1.4 per 100,000 for children up to 13.)

Some Russian children are taking to the streets to avoid abusive parents, like the 15-year-old twins featured in the story's opening paragraphs. Again using statistics from Child's Right, the reporter says about 50,000 Russian children run away from home each year. You may encounter some of them on your adoption journeys: I have a searing memory of very, very children trying to live in the archways of a building near my hotel in Vladivostok in 1999.

The statistics are not much better for children placed into the shelter of the state-run orphanages: According to the story, 20,000 of them run away each year, too. I can't find statistics for the U.S. that are directly comparable, but Covenant House, which operates shelters for runaways in 21 U.S. and international cities, says that it helped more than 60,000 young people in fiscal year 2006, and that its workers made contact with 28,000 more homeless and at-risk teenagers.

There are groups in Russia working to change the poverty, health and family dynamics that lead to these problems, and to improve the lives of those children who are already runaways. The twins, for example, are living in a Salvation Army shelter. I've bookmarked a few of these groups for my ongoing look at philanthropic efforts for children in Russia; I hope I can get to some of them soon.

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