Institutionalized Children in Russia: Grouping the Regions by the Scale of the Phenomenon

This study provides an initial classification of information on the social and geographic distribution of children’s residential care institutions in Russia, and it characterizes the relationship between this information and the level of criminalization and victimization of minors. We provide data on the number of such residential care facilities and their child placement statistics in the various regions of the Russian Federation. We rank these regions according to these variables, and we classify them into three clusters: favorable, troubled, and unstable. We discovered material differences between the Russian regions across all variables. At the same time, Russia’s federal districts differ significantly from each other only in terms of rates of crime and the victimization of minors and not in terms of their number of residential care facilities, wards, and the “concentration” of such institutions. We discovered that the factor of “institutionalized children” contributed significantly to the regional level of juvenile delinquency on the basis of the results of a correlation and regression analysis. The region’s average number of wards per residential care facility and the predominance of Muslim population turned out to be insignificant variables. The first excluded variable (characterizing living conditions) is important for developing and optimizing children’s residential care plans. It is discussed in the Letter of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation dated 9/1/2014 no. VK-1850/07. The second excluded variable is used to analytically reconstruct the set of factors that cause significant interregional variances in the number of residential care facilities and their wards.