Greek Financial Crisis Tearing Apart Families and Children

By Palash R. Ghosh

The deep financial crisis in Greece has cut swath of misery across the country, particularly upon families struggling to feed their children.

The Greek media are filled with tales of woe, including rising suicides, child abandonments and increasing rates of depression, among other horrors.

The case of one Dimitris Gasparinatos may symbolize the pain that has enveloped the economically crippled nation.

According to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian, just prior to Christmas, the 42-year-old father of 10 asked Greek authorities to take four of his children into care because he could no longer afford to feed them.

Gasparinatos and his wife Christina live in a small flat in the port city of Patras and had to get by on his monthly salary of 960 euros ($1240) and welfare payments of 460 euros ($595) every two months.

That translates to about $18,450 annually – for a dozen people.

The Gasparinatos are also deeply in debt.

"The crisis had killed us. I am ashamed to say but it had got to the point where I couldn't even afford the [two euros] needed to buy bread,” Gasparinatos told the Guardian.

“We didn’t want to break up the family but we did think it would be easier for them if four of my children were sent to an institution for maybe two or three years.”

The following day, his 37-year-old wife appeared at the local government town hall and asked officials to “save” her kids.

Theoharis Massaras, the local deputy mayor and director of social works at Patras, told the paper that requests for aid and food have tripled since last year.

“They weren't what I'd call traditionally low-income people,” the mayor added. “Many had good jobs until this year when their shops and businesses closed. But to be asked to take children away was something new. When we visited their home and saw the situation for ourselves, the third world conditions, the poverty and filth, we couldn't believe our eyes."

The Greek newspaper Kathimerini recently reported that 500 families had asked the charity SOS Children’s Villages to take their children off their hands.

Greece, which has accepted hundreds of billions in financial aid from the EU and IMF, has imposed a harsh austerity program to try to climb out of its deep debt.

Among other things, the Athens government will put 30,000 civil servants on 12 months' notice with a 60 percent pay cut and replace only one in 10 retiring public workers until 2014: Cut certain pensions by 20 percent; significantly raise taxes on virtually everything from cars to cigarettes; and commence a wholesale disposal of state-controlled assets.

A senior official at ADEDY, the public workers union which has been organizing strikes and rallies to protest the government’s spending cuts and austerity measures, told the Guardian: "People are going hungry, families are breaking up, and instances are mounting of mothers and fathers no longer being able to bring up their own kids. Until now there has been a conspiracy of silence around the tragic effects of the austerity measures the [International Monetary Fund] and [European Union] are asking us to take."

Similarly, a social worker named Dimitris Tzouras told the Guardian: "Unfortunately, there's been a huge increase in demand from families in need. In the greater Attica region [around Athens], we're talking about a 100 percent increase partly because public welfare is in such disarray people have no one else to turn to."

Tzouras added: "Parents who feel they can no longer look after children are calling in, but our policy is to do whatever we can to keep families united. The crisis has exacerbated underlying problems that in the past may just have threatened to tear families apart. It's not only the vulnerable. It's now affecting the middle class."

Last month. George Protopapas, director of SOS Children's Villages in Greece, said in an interview on the charity’s Web site: ”These are hard times, and nobody knows exactly what's going to happen. It is quite depressing for all of us that it is currently so difficult to find the correct solutions for these political, economic, and social issues.”

Protopapas also warned that with charitable organizations coming under the government’s draconian tax policies, his organization might not survive.

“Our means won't last more than another six months to continue our programs as usual and to guarantee the well-being of the children,” he said. “Naturally we are looking for new ways out. However, if the new taxes remain the way they are, it is possible that by the end of next year we will be forced to stop a number of our programs.”

Costas Yannopoulos, head of charity called the Smile of the Child, has seen up close how the crisis has damaged Greek families.

"The crisis has made a bad situation worse," he complained to The Guardian. "Alcoholism, drug abuse and psychiatric problems are on the rise and more and more children are being abandoned on the streets."

The Athens News newspaper frequently reports on new masses of homeless on the capital city’s streets. The paper recently reported that two small 4-year old boys were left abandoned on the doorstep of Kovitos, an NGO in Athens founded by a priest.

Even more tragic, last week a one-week-old baby was abandoned on a plot of land next to a hotel in Thessaloniki in northern Greece.

It is unclear just how many homeless people there are in Greece. In January of this year, the NGO called Klimaka and the Red Cross estimated there are at least 20,000 homeless Greeks; that number has surely climbed significantly since then.

Yiannis Sykroutris, the head of the Greek Red Cross’s homeless program, told the Kathimerini newspaper: “What we are seeing now is unprecedented. We are being approached by people one would never imagine as homeless. There are also owners of small-scale manufacturing units and other traders who have gone bankrupt. We have even seen entire families on the street.”

Greek Financial Crisis Tearing Apart Families and Children