No tracking. No cookies
Subscriptions
Subscriptions
Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features
The recent investigations into Syria’s “stolen children” have uncovered a bleak truth. Documents and testimonies indicate that children “disappeared” under Bashar al-Assad were hidden in so-called orphanages, including facilities run by the global charity SOS Children’s Villages. Many were not orphans, but the sons and daughters of detainees and regime opponents.
The centres were used to extort and punish their families. Reporting by Lighthouse Reports, the Observer and the BBC details mothers denied answers, records altered, and children’s identities changed. The Syria scandal demands answers, but what SOS truly needs is a reckoning with the very foundations of its model of care.
SOS is not a small organisation. It is a federation operating in more than 130 countries which presents itself as the world’s largest provider of care for children without parental care. With revenues of €1.64 billion in 2023, the organisation operates with a level of power and influence comparable to some governments. That same year it claims to have provided “a range of care options” to about 69,000 children, while supporting 103,500 families to prevent separation, according to its own impact data.
At the heart of its system are the “villages”, clusters of houses where one SOS “mother” cares for up to ten children. Marketed as “family-like care”, these villages are essentially residential institutions. The idea is not new. A century ago, Barnardo’s in the UK built “cottage homes” on the same model, later abandoned because children were stigmatised and segregated from community life. SOS has repeated this model for many decades on a global scale. With tens of thousands of children in its care, it holds enormous influence yet operates without democratic oversight.
The Syria scandal is not the first time SOS has faced serious questions. In 2021 SOS commissioned independent reviews of historical abuse after allegations surfaced across the federation. The organisation issued apologies and pointed to stronger safeguarding, but survivors and whistleblowers continue to ask who has been held accountable and how decisions were made. The federation highlights reforms including a revised child safeguarding policy, a strengthened code of conduct and the creation of a global ombuds system. Yet these measures raise questions about whether they represent genuine cultural change or reactive crisis management.
How Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan Could Quickly Crumble
The President’s America-first, Palestine-last plan for Gaza risks collapsing under its own contradictions, argues Rana Sabbagh
The notion of the villages “family-like” care also falls apart under scrutiny. SOS villages are often built on the outskirts of towns, hidden behind walls and fences that cut children off from everyday community life. However well-intentioned, this segregation reinforces stigma and marks children and young people out as different. Inside the houses, a single adult is usually responsible for eight to ten children, and when one caregiver is stretched so thin, older children frequently take on the parenting of younger peers. Evidence shows it piles stress on children and harms their long-term outcomes. A recent review of studies comparing foster and residential care underline what practitioners already know: children thrive best in families rooted in their communities rather than in institutions by another name.
In my own research in Thailand, we interviewed children living in children’s village settings, some run by SOS and some by the Government. Children described both the strengths and the strains of this model. They appreciated the stability of house mothers, but also spoke about the stigma of village life, feeling marked out at school as being different from their peers. Boys were separated at the age of 14 into male youth houses run by “uncles,” which meant sibling separation for some and added another layer of harm due to institutionalisation. These accounts illustrate the contradiction at the heart of the village model. Children may form bonds with caregivers, but the structure remains institutional, carrying risks of stigma and segregation.
The wider research evidence is clear: institutional care undermines children’s physical, social, emotional and behavioural development, a point reinforced by the 2020 Lancet Commission on Institutionalisation and Deinstitutionalisation of Children. The UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children prioritises prevention, kinship and foster care, and places institutions firmly at the bottom of the continuum of care. The UK’s recent Global Charter on Children’s Care Reform reinforces the call to close institutions and invest in families. Although some SOS countries have signed this charter and the organisation has echoed some of this language in its Care Promise, which highlights foster care, family strengthening and small group homes, the reality on the ground remains uneven..
Look closely, and a gap opens between pockets of reform (for example in 4Kenya) and the predominant model of care practised in most countries they operate in. In 2023, SOS reported 69,000 children in alternative care, but more than half, 35,200, were still living in its “family-like” villages. Just 6,400 children were in foster families (under 10%), with 19,900 in supervised independent living (some in group settings of up to eight young people) and 3,500 in small group homes. Without a global, time-bound plan to phase out villages, these figures suggest SOS continues to rely on institutional care despite its rhetoric of reform.
Change is never easy. Moving from institutions to families requires law, policy, money and a trained workforce. That is precisely why a large actor like SOS that has these resources must lead, set clear targets, publish their numbers and be open about what works and what does not. Governments and donors to SOS should now tie funding to measurable shifts into family-based care, and SOS should be required to report annually on progress towards closing institutions. Prevention and reunification must become the default, not the exception.
ENJOYING THIS ARTICLE? HELP US TO PRODUCE MORE
Receive the monthly Byline Times newspaper and help to support fearless, independent journalism that breaks stories, shapes the agenda and holds power to account.
We’re not funded by a billionaire oligarch or an offshore hedge-fund. We rely on our readers to fund our journalism. If you like what we do, please subscribe.
In 2023, almost 60% of SOS programme spending went to alternative care. This category includes foster families but its programmes remain dominated by institutional village care, while only 16 per cent was directed to family strengthening. Without a clear, time-bound plan to end reliance on these institutions framed as villages, the federation risks further entrenching institutional care under a “village” label. Donors and governments should insist that safeguarding reforms and the response to the Syria scandal, however welcome, are not a substitute for the structural change that is needed.
Children who have already endured the loss of parental care deserve more than a branded version of an institution. They deserve the chance to grow up in families, with neighbours and communities around them. If SOS cannot commit to proper family based care, then funders and governments should either divest or make every donation and grant conditional on reform.