Graphs and charts and leftover kids

So after the last post, I started to wonder - just how significant is the elimination of Russian-American adoption to the Russian orphanage system?  It's obviously hugely significant to the children who have already met an American family, but won't be adopted due to the suddenness of the ban.  And it's obviously hugely significant to those families.  And it's hugely significant to those particular kids that won't be adopted this year or next year or the year after that. 

But how many is that, and how does this number compare to the number of Russian orphans adopted each year by Russian families, or other non-American families?  In the Kotlas orphanage, at least as of 2008 (translation), about half of the children adopted went to non-Russian families.  That's one data point.
For another, I looked at some recent news stories on Russian-American adoption.  Unfortunately, these stories tend to be a bit thin on numbers.  Even the best of them, like this one from the New York Times, throw out a couple numbers and leave it at that.  From that article:

In 2011, about 1,000 Russian children were adopted by Americans, more than any other foreign country, but still a tiny number given that nearly 120,000 children in Russia are eligible for adoption.

American Adoption Statistics
The numbers in the Times story are correct as far as they go, but the impression they leave is somewhat misleading.  The story compares 1,000 adoptions per year to the total number of Russian orphans of all ages - comparing apples and orchards, in other words.  In addition, it turns out that the 1,000 orphans adopted in 2011 by Americans (of which Elena is one) is the lowest number since the early 1990s.  Here, courtesy of the US State Department, is a graph of Russian orphans adopted by Americans in each of the last 19 years:

Russian orphans adopted by American citizens, by year
FY 1993 - 2011, from the US State Department site.

It's rather startling to realize that adoptions of Russian orphans by Americans have already declined 75% compared to a decade ago.  The tighter restrictions imposed since c. 2006 have had a larger effect in reducing the number of Russian orphans adopted by Americans than the last turn of the spigot that completely eliminates the adoption of Russian orphans by Ameroican families.

Even accounting for the recent dropoff, 60,000 Russian orphans have been adopted by Americans since 1993 - and that's not a tiny number at all compared to 120,000.

Russian Adoption Statistics
But the other part of the puzzle is: who else is adopting Russian orphans, and how many are being adopted?  How does the "tiny number" of 1,000 stack up against that?

To find out, let's look to the Russian Education Agency (the department responsible for orphanages in Russia), which has some statistics on adoption of Russian orphans. Here, for example (English translation), are the totals over the last 20 years of adoptions of Russian children, both by Russian citizens and by foreign nationals.  These numbers can be approximately compared to the numbers given by the US State Department site for children adopted by Americans specifically ("approximately" because the US site gives totals by fiscal year, October - September, rather than calendar year).  Graphing the number of orphans adopted by Russian citizens, US citizens, and non-US foreign citizens (i.e., "everyone else"), gives the following chart, beginning in 1997 when American adoptions were peaking:

Adoption of Russian orphans, Russian v. international families,  1997-2011

Over 1997-2011, the number of Russian orphans adopted by Russian families has fluctuated around 8000 per year, while the number adopted by non-US foreign families has been about 2000 to 3000 per year.  The US share, as seen in the previous graph, has dropped every year since 2004.  Still, the 1000 adoptions by US citizens in 2011 is nearly 10% of the total: not such a "tiny number" that the comparison to 120,000 makes it look like.  In 1998-2004, when the US share was in the 4000-5000 range, fully one-third of the orphans adopted in Russia were adopted by American families.

Age ranges
The Russian Education Agency also has a database of children available for adoption located on their website (English translation).  All the kids are listed with a picture and short description - you can search the database if you like (click the blue tab that says "искать," which simply means "search") As of right now, the text says there are 130,000 children in the database.  A search reveals more like 104,000 children in the database.  Neither number quite matches the 120,000 the Times (and Russian sources) quotes, but it's safe to say there really are somewhere north of 100,000 Russian orphans waiting for families.

In any case, the 120,000 or 130,000 or 104,000 number is a little deceiving - for whatever reason, the population of orphans is skewed toward older children.  Here's a graph of the number of children in the database, by age (since the data are from the end of 2012, the "year born" in the database is exactly correlated with the children's age):

Number of orphans in the Russian database, by age
from Russian Education Agency database (English translation). 

I don't know why there are so many more older children than younger ones. Perhaps the larger number of older children is due to the different economic and social climate in Russia 8 or 12 or 16 years ago, or perhaps it's due to children being removed from their families when they're older (as the commenter below suggests), or perhaps it's a combination of the two - I'm not knowlegable enough to know what th eunderlying reason for the skew is.
Age and adoption
According to the Russian statistics (English translation), roughly 92% of the yearly adoptions are of children 6 years of age or under. That's interesting and significant because, as shown in the graph above, only 20% of Russian orphans are in that age range.
Conversely, of the 80 or 90 thousand orphans age 7 and older, only 1000 or fewer are adopted each year.  Dismal odds indeed.  The preference for younger  children is certainly understandable - Elena was two when we adopted her - but it's sad to think there are so many leftover kids; ones that maybe could have already been adopted, were there families for them six or eight or ten years ago.  And reducing the number of adoptions, as the Russian government is doing, will only widen the gap between the number of waiting kids and the number of available families. 

Still, even now, some older kids are adopted, and  some of those adoptions were by American families.  For one story, I recommend Tiny Green Elephants as an example of the adoption of a nine-year-old girl from Russia.  The Tiny Green Elephants blog is chock-full of pictures and stories, and well worth the read.

Since we're talking about age, let's look a little closer at the graph showing the ages of adopted kids (English translation).  One thing that jumps out is the heavy concentration of  Russians adopting children under one year old - these young babies are preferentially slated for adoption by Russian citizens, and over half of the adoptions by Russians are of these very young children.

The Russian database website has data on adoptions by age over the last eight years or so.  Simply splitting the orphans into "under one year old" and "over one year old" and looking at the number of orphans adopted by Russian citizens, US citizens, and non-US foreign citizens  (again using comparable US State Department numbers) gives two remarkably different graphs.  The first, of Russian orphans under one year, looks like this:


Adoption of Russian orphans UNDER one year old, years 2004-2011

Essentially all Russian orphans adopted during their first year are adopted by Russians.  But looking at the older orphans paints a very different picture:

Adoption of Russian orphans OVER one year old, years 2004-2011

Older children are still adopted substantially by non-Russians, and at one time nearly half of these older children were adopted by Americans.  Even now, the nearly 1000 adoptions per year of older children looks like anything but a "tiny number."

So look one more time at this last graph:.  The green band represents thousands of Russian orphans being given a chance with a new family.  That's what is lost when the powerful play politics wth the powerless.