Abandoned child: how many invisible children are there in Russia
Investigators have opened a criminal case under the article on negligence after media reports about the identification of an 11-year-old "mowgli" girl in the village of Vavilovo near Ufa. The child lived without documents and did not attend school. Law enforcement officers will check the agencies of the juvenile neglect and delinquency prevention system, which have overlooked a large family with a child who is completely invisible to social institutions. However, this case is not an isolated one. According to experts, the problem is that when working with children in Russia, there is a declarative system rather than an identification one: if a family does not seek help (medical, educational, etc.), the state risks not noticing the person. For more information, see the Izvestia article.
Why didn't the child study until he was 11 years old
A criminal case was initiated by the Ufa interdistrict Investigative Department of the SU IC of Russia for the Republic of Bashkortostan under the article on negligence after the publication that a girl "mowgli" was found in a large family in Bashkiria. It is alleged that by the age of 11 she had never gone to school, was not officially registered anywhere, and did not have a birth certificate. At the same time, the girl's mother allegedly does not hide this fact and does not try to solve the problem.
According to media reports, there are nine children in the family. It is reported that their mother is not involved in their upbringing, and their father does not live in the family. With reference to the villagers, the article says that teenagers drink alcohol, behave aggressively towards other local children, and the guardianship authorities, the juvenile affairs service, doctors and the school do not take any measures.
The investigators are going to give a legal assessment of the actions (inaction) of officials of the system for the prevention of neglect and juvenile delinquency.
Olga Panchikhina, the Commissioner for Children's Rights in the Republic of Bashkortostan, told Izvestia that she had already worked out the problem of a large family from the village of Vavilovo with guardianship authorities and local authorities. She explained that there really is a problem, but "not everything is as scary" as described in the publication.
— The girl really has no documents and she does not go to school. Her relatives — her mother and older brothers and sisters — teach her, but not in the education system, but at home, on their own," the source told Izvestia. "She can read." Now we need to choose the right educational trajectory, check whether her knowledge is sufficient for the fourth grade, where something needs to be improved.
Olga Panchikhina confirmed that the girl's mother indeed has nine children, but only three of them are minors. Everyone, except for the youngest daughter, is in school.
The Commissioner for Children's Rights stressed that this family cannot be called "marginal" or "dysfunctional." The prevention authorities knew about her existence, but she did not come to their attention due to any problems. At the same time, Olga Panchikhina emphasized, the family "definitely needs help now," at least with obtaining documents.
Izvestia also sent a request to the Mikhailovsky Village Council, the Ufa district administration and the government of Bashkortostan. No responses had been received at the time of publication.
How many unaccounted-for children are there in Russia
The appearance of "mowgli" children is periodically recorded by the media in various regions of the country. For example, in Tyumen in 2022, the social protection authorities removed a 15-year-old teenager from the family, who hardly ate or left the house. He also never went to school, and he was very retarded in his development.
In 2020, a child was found in a wooded area near Balashikha — he lived in a hut in a "camp" for the homeless. And in 2019, a girl of about five years old was accidentally discovered in Moscow, who lived in an apartment among a mountain of garbage.
The media gets the most high-profile cases when a child not only does not go to school, but his very life is in danger. However, there are children who continue to live in families, while remaining invisible to any social institutions, be it a school, a polyclinic, guardianship authorities, etc. Experts note that these cases are rare, but it is impossible to count the number of such children.
In July 2025, the Ministry of Education reported that there were 6,652 children aged 7 to 17 who did not attend educational institutions throughout Russia. Of these, 2,350 are under the age of 15, that is, they do not even receive general education. Every second of this number does not study for health reasons.
At the same time, information has been repeatedly voiced that there is a very large number of migrant children in the country who do not attend schools. The interregional resource center for Migration and Interethnic Relations estimated their number at more than 500 thousand people. Similar data was announced in January 2026. Elena Alshanskaya, President of the Volunteers in Aid of Orphaned Children Charitable Foundation, notes that the new rules for the admission of migrant children to school can only worsen this problem.
How to find invisible children
If a child does not receive education or documents, his parents may be punished under the article of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation on failure to fulfill duties for the upbringing, education and protection of the rights and interests of a minor, said Victoria Chesnokova, lawyer, senior associate at the Monastyrsky, Zyuba, Stepanov and Partners Bar Association. However, the sanctions are small: from a warning to a fine of 2,000 rubles.
— In addition, the family can be placed on preventive registration for the organization of individual work, the purpose of which is social and pedagogical rehabilitation, - said the interlocutor of Izvestia.
At the same time, the authorities and institutions of the juvenile neglect and delinquency prevention system are required to identify children and families in a socially dangerous situation. But in practice, the check is carried out only after receiving a request from a school, clinic or the police, as well as upon receipt of information from neighbors, eyewitnesses or other caring people.
The problem, according to Svetlana Stroganova, the program director of the Our Children Foundation, is that Russia has developed a declarative, rather than revealing, system of social assistance.
— In addition, our information transfer system and interdepartmental interaction are complicated. At the stage of transferring data from one department to another — for example, a child has been born, it is necessary to transfer data from healthcare to the social system — there may be a malfunction," she added.
In turn, Alexander Spivak, Chairman of the Board of the National Foundation for the Protection of Children from Abuse, noted that the state should not monitor every child, but is obliged to identify cases when children's rights are violated. He also considered interagency cooperation to be a problem.
— If a child was born in a medical institution, it is already known about him, and he should not fall out of sight. With the patronage of young children, it is quite possible to detect the absence of a birth certificate for a child or the presence of serious problems with providing care for him, and inform the guardianship authorities about this. Signals from neighbors, if any, should also be checked," the expert emphasized.
The heads of districts or municipalities are responsible for accounting for children in need of education, explained Elena Alshanskaya. This is usually regulated by regulations at the local level.
Alexander Spivak cited as an example a regulatory legal act of one of the municipalities of the Tambov region, which explicitly states that authorized representatives of municipal educational organizations "conduct household accounting" twice a year to identify children who are not enrolled or shy away from education. These data are collected by the Ministry of Education twice a year — on May 1 and October 1.
"But let's be honest, the heads of the administration and education departments on the territory do not have the opportunity to really track each child,— Elena Alshanskaya noted. — This requires an apartment-by-apartment bypass, and this practice looks especially unrealizable in a modern metropolis.
This accounting is difficult for people who move from one locality to another, rent a house and do not register. It is in such situations that the child most often "disappears" from the field of view of certain services: it is not known where the family went, whether there is any school that picked up the child there, etc.
Olga Panchikhina also tells about this, who in her work as a commissioner came across similar cases: for example, a child studied until the 5th grade in family education, and then the family moved to another region and did not attach to any school.
According to Svetlana Stroganova, the solution to the problem may be to set up interdepartmental interaction processes and debug accounting mechanisms, as well as at least a partial transition to an identification system of social assistance. In addition, it is important to increase the financing of the industry, because the shortage of personnel in the social and educational spheres will make the problem even more significant.
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