“It’s complicated”: Reflections on Orphanage Volunteerism, Ethics, and Children’s Lives

I want to begin this blog by acknowledging Yusuf, the COO of Time to Help, because the conversation I’m writing about today came about through his thoughtful response to an unexpected challenge. When he reached out to LSE to share orphanage volunteering opportunities, he was met with a clear response that orphanage volunteerism is harmful, along with research to support the university’s position. How Yusuf responded is a real lesson to us all in the field. Rather than becoming defensive or dismissing that critique and finding another place that would be interested, he chose to open up the conversation and seek different perspectives to discuss the points LSE raised. I respect his willingness to sit with discomfort, to question practice, and to invite others to think collectively about if and how things might need to shift.

I was so happy I accepted the invitation to be part of that and share some thoughts in this important conversation; to be part of a roundtable on orphanage volunteerism, sitting alongside practitioners and leaders who brought very clear and, at times, opposing positions to the table. One speaker made a strong case for banning short term orphanage volunteerism altogether and another spoke to its value and the difference it can make; both to the children and to the donors who return as informed and passionate advocates.

When it came to me, I found myself saying something much less neat!

“It’s complicated!”

I wasn’t trying to be vague or evasive, but it’s the conclusion I’ve reached by sitting with children, families, and systems where there are no clean lines between harm and care, between protection and constraint, between what should happen and what is actually possible. So, I shared three examples that could be used to argue across all these perspectives and why I said that, because I often find that stories carry the weight of these tensions better than abstract arguments.

The first was a mother who walked in and found her partner sexually abusing her 9-year-old daughter. She left, which in itself is an extraordinary act given how little support this woman had when making that decision. There were no viable options available to her; she could turn a blind eye and stay, or she could move with her children to the street. What she chose to do, was take the daughter who had suffered the abuse to the “mother’s shelter” (a shelter for girls who were no longer virgins and could not be put in an orphanage). The other girls she took to an orphanage. She herself, faced the reality of being on the street because there was no alternative provision for women in her circumstances.

What changed the trajectory of that family was a donor who paid her rent for twenty years  in advance and helped her set up a small kiosk so she could earn a living while raising her children.

That example sits at the intersection of structure and possibility. It reminds us that what we often describe as “need for institutional care” is very often a lack of sustained, meaningful support and alternatives to families in desperate situations who could continue caring for their children with the right social structures in place. That if that support is given, then the rights a child has to family, love and sustained shelter, is possible.

The second example came from work where NGOs entered with a strong sense of what should be done, and with a great deal of confidence in their own knowledge. I spoke about a moment sitting with Human Rights Watch, where there was real anger among us, well-meaning activists, about shelters being organised according to girl’s virginity status. Tables were banged. Voices were raised. The assumption was that this was clearly harmful and needed to be dismantled.

But then we saw what happened when a girl who was subjected to the humiliating and abusive “virginity check”, was ticked off as a virgin yet was too old for the orphanage and, as an exception, was placed in a the “mother’s shelter”. The girls had convinced themselves she was better respected and loved by staff (because she was a virgin) and so the children planned her kidnap and rape. Of course, none of this makes the original system acceptable. But it does show how quickly interventions can produce unintended consequences when they are not grounded in a deep understanding of context, relationships, and risk.

The third example spoke to the question “what’s the alternative? To dismantle orphanages?” … I spoke about a girl with no viable alternatives. No extended family, no extended kin and no realistic pathway out of an abusive situation with her father, so the shelter she was in, though not an ideal setting, was, however, the only place where she was physically safe.

So, when we ask whether orphanage volunteerism should be banned, or whether institutional care should be phased out, we are also asking what fills that space in the immediate term. For some children, that question is not theoretical, but about where they will sleep that night.

This led me to a thought that I hadn’t really considered when preparing for the talk. I found myself saying that ethics and philosophy can sometimes feel like the space of the privileged, because while we have these conversations, some children are dying of hunger. By no means does that justify that we stop asking difficult ethical questions. It means we ask them while recognising that people are working within urgent, constrained, and often imperfect conditions. It means holding the tension between critique and continuation, between reflection and action.

One of the gaps I highlighted in all the conversations being shared, was children’s voice. Charities that claim they are child-centred had not invested in finding out what the children themselves at these orphanages and shelters want or feel. I was met with an important question about whether children really know what they want. Whether they can meaningfully contribute to decisions about their lives. Whether their participation is reliable. I invited the group to think about how high we hold the bar for children. We expect them to be coherent, consistent, self-aware, and immune to influence in ways that we rarely expect of adults. We often have this conversation with our masters students at UCL when we discuss the age of voting, when we ask why people who are irresponsible, or may be easy influenced, or have mental health conditions limiting capacity, or who don’t know much about politics, or who are sways to vote like their partners for example, are all still able to vote. It also connects with children’s rights frameworks, particularly Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which emphasises children’s right to be heard in matters affecting them.

At the same time, we know that children navigate systems that serve them, they are resilient, they are experts on their own lives. I agreed with the point that children know what adults want to hear and I gave an example of a girl who told a journalist she was out protesting because of some complex visions she had of social justice. When the journalist left, she said she was there because it was the best place to steal mobile phones! She knew what the journalist wanted to hear!

Both of those things can be true: children are not just performing when they speak, but they are also navigating context. This is where I think the relationship between academia and activism becomes so important. Research is not simply about producing knowledge. It is about developing ways of listening, observing, and asking questions that allow us to understand what is being said, what is not being said, and why. Researchers doing things like ethnographies will report back on body language, on discomfort, on consequences.

I also brought a child-centred, rights-based, sociological lens into this conversation, which helped me think through some of these tensions in a more structured way.

There are a few ideas I keep returning to:

•       Childhood as socially constructed: what we understand as a “normal” childhood is shaped by social, cultural, and economic contexts. So, when we look at children in institutional care, it becomes important to ask whose idea of childhood is shaping the response, and whether the models being used are grounded in local realities.

•       Children as social actors: children are often positioned as recipients of care, but they are also navigating, interpreting, and responding to the systems around them. One of the challenges with institutional and volunteer-led models is how little space there is for their perspectives to shape decisions. This reflects a long-standing argument in childhood studies, particularly in the work of Allison James and Alan Prout, who remind us that children are active participants in their social worlds.

•       Rights and charity: a rights-based approach asks different questions from a charitable one. It is less about what we can offer, and more about what children are entitled to, including family life, protection, and participation. That can sometimes sit in tension with models that rely on visibility, storytelling, or short-term engagement.

When we hear individual stories about children being abandoned or having nowhere to go, it becomes important to also ask what is making family separation more likely in the first place, whether that is poverty, lack of social protection, or policy gaps. When people speak about volunteers wanting to help or bringing joy, it raises questions about how those interactions are experienced by children, especially when relationships are short-lived and people move in and out of their lives. When the conversation turns to doing good, it becomes important to ask whether the forms of care being provided align with children’s rights, or whether they are becoming default responses because they are more visible, fundable, or easier to sustain.

I wanted to share some other points around ethics I brought to this meeting in case they are helpful for other conversations happening around this:

•       Ethics of Care VS Ethics of Impact: I think one of the tensions is between an ethics of care, where people are motivated by compassion and wanting to help, and an ethos of impact, which asks what the longer-term effects of those interactions are on children’s lives. Those two don’t always align, especially in contexts where relationships are short-term or transient. 

•       Power and Inequality: There’s also an ethical dimension around power, particularly in terms of who gets to move, who gets to choose to engage, and whose lives are being shaped in that process. These encounters don’t happen on equal footing. 

•       The Ethics of Representation: Another ethical question is how children are represented within these models, especially when their stories or images become part of how programmes are sustained. There’s a balance between raising awareness and avoiding forms of representation that can reduce children to symbols of need. 

•       Relational Ethics and Attachment: From a childhood perspective, relationships are central. So there’s an ethical question around what it means for children to experience repeated cycles of attachment and separation with volunteers. Even when those interactions are positive, the pattern itself can have consequences. 

•       Ethical Responsibility Beyond the Individual: I think it’s also important not to locate ethics only at the level of individual volunteers, but that the level of systems, organisations, and policies that shape what kids of engagement are possible. That’s where responsibility becomes more collective. 

When organisations describe themselves as child centred, it is worth asking very concretely what that means. Have children been asked about their experiences? Do they have a genuine choice in whether to participate? What happens if they refuse? Are their responses shaping practice, or simply being collected as evidence of impact? In many cases, these questions have not been asked at all.

So, we return to complexity and the fact that institutional care can be both harmful and, in certain contexts, protective. That volunteerism can be both well intentioned and implicated in sustaining problematic systems. That children’s voices are both essential and difficult to access in ways that are meaningful and ethical.

If there is something I took from the discussion, it is a set of questions that need to sit at the centre of any future work in this area. Questions about what creates vulnerability in the first place and about what kinds of care we are normalising. About whose knowledge shapes interventions.

And perhaps most importantly, about how we remain accountable to children’s lives as they are actually lived, not only as we might prefer to imagine them.

This reflection draws on ideas from the sociology of childhood (James & Prout, 1990; Corsaro, 2011) and children’s rights frameworks, particularly the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.