Talk:Orphan/Archive 1

How Many Orphans Are There in the World?
Today in the 21st Century, the number of orphans worldwide are at about 150 million... and growing. At any time in America there are about 100,000 children available for adoption. In countries like Africa, the number children orphaned by AIDS is staggering. About every 13 seconds, a child in Africa is orphaned because of the AIDS virus.

Interestingly enough, there are very few non-faith-based organizations focused just on orphans. As such, most cannot raise money through corporate grants and giving (most will not give to faith-based organizations)... but they have the most to give!

OrphanWorldRelief 14:37, 18 August 2007 (UTC)Doug Riggle, Founder & Executive Director,

Some Wikipedia pages which you might have meant to be going to instead of this page

 * Orphan - articles without any links to them
 * Category:Orphaned_categories - catagories without parents
 * Done! Picklebobdogflog (talk) 23:44, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Can
Can we get any information about how the orphans feel when their parents were died or got diseases?

Legal definition
The article says: "The US legal definition is someone bereft through "death or disappearance of, abandonment or desertion by, or separation or loss from, of both parents" [1]. "

This is the definition for the purposes of US Federal Immigration law only. That definition does not apply under any other law, American or otherwise. At best, it is a US legal definition, but not the US legal definition. I'm changing it to "one legal definition used in the USA". JackofOz 08:40, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Positive relationships between men and orphaned boys in fiction and film
I am removing this section. There is no reason why this is more important than any other type of orphans in fiction. Goldfritha 04:43, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree with you, plus, it sounds like if a pedophile came up with that idea of title --Josecarlos1991 (talk) 01:58, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

A link to Owen and Mzee?
I fail to see how relevant this link at the bottom of the page is. Yes, it's an orphan, but it just seems a little off topic. Any objections before I remove it (as there's bound to be objections after I do)? --Tustin2121 (talk) 19:38, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Definition of orphan
"An orphan (from the Greek ορφανός) is a child whose natural parents are absent or dead and who must be brought up in an orphanage or by foster parents.(...) Common usage limits the term to children, (or the young of animals) who have lost both parents."

I don't quite understand this. Is the meaning really that a child who has lost both parents and is growing up on the streets is technically not an orphan? Is it a Wiki Style thing that the term is presented seperated this way, or is this a POV? Google still shows the page cached as "An orphan (from the Greek ορφανός) is a person (typically a child), who has lost both parents, often through death." whereas wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn lists these definitions:
 * 1) a child who has lost both parents
 * 2) someone or something who lacks support or care or supervision
 * 3) the first line of a paragraph that is set as the last line of a page or column
 * 4) deprive of parents
 * 5) a young animal without a mother

but nothing about the requirement to be placed in care.

Please explain, because I have seen vaguely similar splintering in other articles on Wiki, where a term is shown with what seems to me to be perhaps the original meaning as the main "correct" one, and then a later mention of the one in popular usage - and with some terms I think that is giving way too much weight to the part of language that is *not* as much part of the living language - but this is of course *my* POV :D so no one has to share that! :)

It would just be great if someone could explain Cherryleaf (talk) 14:27, 19 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree I don't know when that POV slipped in but blatant POV it is and I have removed it. --BozMo talk 16:04, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

How can a baby take care of itself? It can't. It needs someone to take care of him. You couldn't leave a baby on the street. Children need care from adults. The country that doesn't care for babies has a very high infanticide rate. --Tigereyes92 (talk) 03:12, 23 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Not all orphans are babies, you know. WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:03, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

AIDS orphans
I believe that the definition of orphans used by AIDS researchers is different from what's presented in this article. An AIDS orphan is a child whose mother has died from HIV/AIDS. While in many cases an AIDS orphan has lost both parents, an African child whose mother died from AIDS is generally counted as an "AIDS orphan" even if the child is living with his father. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:21, 20 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Hmm, need to think about that. As far as I know this is a UNICEF-driven political definition which flies in the face of common usage and exists to try to make a political point. The argument presented is that the mother is THE care giver so no mother means bereft of parental care. Broadly "parent means mother" has been contested and overturned in European law (there was a big Irish test case whose name escapes me). If the argument is true the current text already implies they are orphans (as included under bereft of parental care in this case). If the argument is untrue the current text is correct so I suggest we leave it. Otherwise if the use is notable enough a very carefully worded added sentence is possible. --BozMo talk 12:13, 20 August 2008 (UTC)


 * "AIDS orphan" is a sufficiently notable topic that it could have its own article. The quoted phrase "AIDS orphans" gets more than half a million hits.  Dozens of agencies are dedicated to the sole task of dealing with AIDS orphans.  AIDS is probably the single leading cause of kids being orphaned, and almost the only reason that Western media talks about orphans.  It should certainly be mentioned here; the question is whether it should also have its own article.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 20 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Fair point. But given this article is pretty short why not start a section here rather than another article which people will want to merge. When its long enough it can easily be demerged. --BozMo talk 20:24, 20 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I think that's the best place to start, but don't really have time to write it this week (or probably next). Would you like to?  WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:38, 21 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Sorry am tied up with the Schools Wikipedia until the next launch at 10 Sept. --BozMo talk 09:13, 21 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, one of us will get back to it another time, or perhaps someone will see this and start for us. There's no deadline, after all.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:35, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Significant charities section
This section as currently written doesn't seem to be particularly enlightening to readers and could easily become a bit of a magnet for people to simply add their favorite noble institution to. Could we make this instead into more of a section on how societies have responded to orphans? Sort of outlining the progression through other family or starve; religious imperatives to care and church based institutions; charities; state orphanages... (could do with a few sources so this is accurate rather than my assumptions about how this progressed). -- SiobhanHansa 15:04, 7 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I have deleted the list. AFAICT Barnardos which is famous for orphans stopped doing that in about 1970. The whole article needs work though including adding some of this type of material. However "how societies have responded to orphans" sounds a bit of an OR topic to me. :) --BozMo talk 15:07, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Well it certainly would be OR if I wrote what I thought about it! In general though the development of the social obligation to care for orphans that exists in most societies today is reasonable fodder for sociologists and social historians. If there have well respected published papers or books on the subject they could add some depth to the article.  I am not however promoting the idea of cherry picking examples throughout history to come up with what ever current editors think is a reasonable outline  :-) -- SiobhanHansa 16:52, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I think that section was just spambait. I'm glad to have it removed.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:11, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Orphans in Victorian Era
Babycakes123 (talk) 14:36, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Copied from a user talk page
I struggle a bit with orphans, but I think your usage may be casual and what you have left is an opinion on usage. The version you changed was clear on "popular usage" but the extensive line of dictionaries on my shelf (OED, Chambers, Collins) all use the word "lost" which is possibly a euphemism for dead or possibly not. Orphanages were all full of "little Annies" whose parents may or may not have been dead. "Orphan" in reference to orphaned lines on documents etc often means "separated from" and although I have some reasonable level of greek it is not enough to disambiguate because of the same problem of euphemism. There are also a lot of phrases like "social orphan" etc which do not imply death (mind you neither does grass widow so perhaps that argument is weak). Can I suggest we change the wording to "lost theiur parents" which is the most popular in the dictionaries I have and accept an equal degree of ambiguity? --BozMo talk 09:24, 24 March 2009 (UTC)


 * That's fine with me. What I want to avoid is the inappropriate impression that temporary circumstances can make someone an orphan.  If a parent has been shipped off to war, there's a "separation", but the kids aren't orphans.  If a mentally ill parent runs off during a manic fit, there's a "disappearance", but the kids aren't orphans.  If the kids are removed from abusive parents and all parental rights are permanently terminated, they're still not orphans.
 * The article also needs some decent social information: Orphans often qualify for state assistance; many end up living with relatives, in formal foster care, or orphanages; some are homeless; the impact on education; and so forth.  I wonder whether we could find any decent information on modern orphans in the developed world.  (Historical information and developing-world information should be easier to find, as there are more orphans to write about.)  WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:13, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The article needs a few things. I agreed with you that both legally and generally as a minimum a child needs to be believed to have lost their parents permanently. Whether "lost" means "death" is not clear. Frustratingly I have trawled a whole range of dictionaries to find a definite "is dead needed" answer and find that is this only implied in the simpler dictionaries (in the Oxford ones in the paperback dictionary and below, such as the schools dictionary). In comprehensive dictionaries ambiguity is opened e.g. for the Oxford ones the concise and bigger say (and I don't have a consistent set of editions available) "a child bereaved of parent(s)" with bereaved defined as "of death etc". So whatever "etc" means, it is not exclusively death. I think I would also be happy with a phrase like "usually by death" but that's a bit OR because I cannot find exactly that. I will try please feel free to rehack (and perhaps move this to the article talk page): I am doing no better than iterating. --BozMo talk 19:02, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * The ambiguity is probably due to real-world problems: Imagine a baby whose father is unknown.  If the mother dies in childbirth, then the baby is effectively an orphan, because nobody knows anything about the father, even though the father is probably alive.  Perhaps we should have a section specifically on the variations in defining an orphan.  AIDS orphans, for example, are specifically defined as having lost a mother to AIDS, whether or not the father is alive.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:25, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * On Aids Orphans even that isn't really true (and if so by whom? who can define what is "technically" what: usage rules). Even UNICEF who have been advocating the "maternal death means orphan" definition also use varying expressions like "double orphan" and "half orphan" and "maternal orphan" also of which imply a different definition and are as confusing as anything (on top of which no NGO on Earth insists on establishing the cause of death for parents of AIDS orphans because culture forbids autopsy and anyway this label gives additional problems for the child so in practice the terms is only ever accurately used in demographic statistics). In practice whether someone is technically an orphan or not rarely opens specific social rights, occasionally opens specific rights to care (e.g. because of the way widows and orphans are treated in the Koran) and probably matters most in immigration law. --BozMo talk 20:07, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * To add see http://www.unicef.org/media/media_45290.html "UNICEF and global partners define an orphan as a child who has lost one or both parents" so that includes Prince Harry and someone whose unknown father dies. What a mess. --BozMo talk 20:13, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * See the UNAIDS reports on AIDS orphans, such as page 5 of this one, which says "UNAIDS, WHO and UNICEF define AIDS orphans as children who lose their mother to AIDS before reaching the age of 15 years. Some of these children have also lost, or will later lose, their father to AIDS." The decision is based, in part, on the difficulty of identifying fathers.
 * This one has an interesting footnote at the bottom of page 13: "Contrary to traditional usage, UNAIDS uses “orphan” to describe a child who has lost either one or both parents; the organization uses the terms “maternal orphan”, “paternal orphan”, and “double orphan” to describe a child who has lost its mother, father, or both parents, respectively."  (The term AIDS orphan is deprecated by some agencies now.)  That could be a useful source for what is both the normal use and the more specific terms.
 * Must run, WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:10, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Good source, thanks. I think we now have three or four different types of definition: common usage, technical amongst development agencies (with several variants), legal/immigration. There is also the question of how young a child needs to be (16, 18, independent etc.) but I guess sticking to "child" is safe. What is still unclear to me is whether common usage insists on "dead" or just means permanently lost. This euphemism of lost is prevalent in aid organisations too. --BozMo talk 06:31, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Just my personal opinion, but I think that permanently lost is probably acceptable for common use. It feels like people conflate "an orphan" and "might as well be an orphan".  The age of the child depends on when a culture expects teens to be capable of supporting themselves instead of being dependent on their parents for basic necessities.  I agree that the term is very rarely applied to people whose parents died when they were adults.
 * Should we copy this conversation to the article's talk page? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:17, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Inclusion of specific definitions
My edit here http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Orphan&diff=next&oldid=295164595 was reverted by BozMo for the reason that "...the added link is marginal not RS and also SA specific in the intro to a general discussion". I have no idea what "marginal not RS" means.

The complaint seems to be that what the South African definition is, is not very relevant. Well, if that is so, then why is the USA definition in the article? :-) It seems to me that if there are different legal definitions for 'orphan', then a subsection in the article devoted to them would seem relevant. Alternatively, instead of simply saying "there are many definitions" why not give some examples of different definitions? -- leuce (talk) 17:21, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Leuce. Welcome and thanks for trying to improve the article. There is a degree of subjective judgement here. However the problem is basically not to do with South Africa versus USA (I don't come from either but have certainly visited South Africa far more often). On why the US definition not a South African one the guiding principle is that of "undue weight" (WP:UNDUE), the US definition is the current only "legal" one which the editors of the article have come across and was unique in several ways (for example the question of whether bereaved means dead). The South Africa one you added was hearsay, not from a sufficiently reliable source just differing in age from the ones listed . The source for "The definition that is often used in South African AIDS statistics" was not very significant (not a government or official site, apparently just a Cape Town children's institute/charity), did not clearly state on the URL given the definition you claimed (you cannot leave the reader to guess and search to see what "often" means) did not clearly make the Wikipedia guidelines for a reliable source (for example, it seems to publish opinion leaflets not peer reviewed papers and "often" is a vague claim which does not seem supported). Hope that makes some sense. --BozMo talk 19:49, 9 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Incidentally just to add to the fun, looking at the UNICEF website although UNICEF does seem to define an Aids Orphan as 15 or less, it also seems to define an orphan as any child who has lost their parents/mother and children as being up to 18 unless the law says otherwise. So you can be an orphan up to 18 but only an Aids Orphan is 15 or less? Anyone got any insight on this? --BozMo talk 20:10, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that it would be good and helpful to the reader to have more definitions that just the US and UNICEF, particularly if there are any material differences. I'd also like the definitions to come from truly authoritative sources, so that we're sure that the information is 100% correct.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:11, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

Random bit of information at the top
There's a random few sentences at the top of this page that look like somebody was trying to edit it and didn't quite know how. Could somebody either remove it or put it in the right place? I'm not sure how or where it should go, myself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.169.26.29 (talk) 01:51, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. S7evyn (talk) 04:16, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

nooooo. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.195.142.14 (talk) 23:02, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Updated needed
The figures are from 2002 whereas at least 2004 exists and the article in my (partial) view is far less clear than, for example, this editorial which contains a summary table which we could use. --BozMo talk 20:16, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Miscellaneous
Sounds like me Lin Rongxiang 14:53, 30 December 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ronggy (talk • contribs)

Copyright problem removed
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 * i fixed it. Rjensen (talk) 12:34, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Orphan. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20031223185028/http://www.usaid.gov/pop_health/aids/Publications/docs/childrenbrink.pdf to http://www.usaid.gov/pop_health/aids/Publications/docs/childrenbrink.pdf

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Notable orphans
I'm sorry, but some of the people listed were not in fact orphans in any sense of the term. Louis Armstrong bounced in between his mother and father's homes all throughout his childhood until he permanently left home as a teen, but I read nothing that suggests either of them died before he reached adulthood. Frances McDormand was adopted by a couple as a baby; no mention of her parents being deceased. Jacques Villeneuve's father died when he was a child, but his mother did not. Same with Aaron Hernandez. The only people born in the 20th century listed in the article who actually meet the definition of an orphan are Marilyn Monroe and Ray Charles. Did no one bother verifying the bios of other celebrities before adding them to the article as examples? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.48.53.245 (talk) 07:01, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Elder orphans
There is a variant of orphans called "elder orphans," which are senior citizens who have outlived the rest of their family. Have you ever heard of that term? 132.238.209.209 (talk) 16:33, 28 April 2022 (UTC)