OVC Support Toolkit  >  Introduction 

Terminology

There is a great deal of debate and discussion over what terms to use to refer to children who have been affected by HIV/AIDS, and how these various terms should be defined. AIDS Orphans? Children Affected by AIDS (CABA)? Orphans and other vulnerable children (OVC)?

Key points about terminology are:

1. Activities should focus on all vulnerable children and not just orphans or those affected by HIV/AIDS. Local communities should establish for themselves which children they consider to be vulnerable.
2. It may be helpful to have an agreed definition of orphan when seeking to assess the impact of HIV/AIDS in a given area.
3. An orphan is usually defined as a child under the age of 18 who has had one or both parents die.
4. All terminology used should be respectful and avoid increasing stigma and discrimination. The people these terms are describing are first and foremost children.
5. This toolkit uses the term orphans and other vulnerable children wherever possible, in order to highlight that other children are vulnerable as well as orphans.

Why use common terms?

There are a number of reasons behind efforts to use common terms when describing children who have been affected by HIV/AIDS, and to have commonly agreed definitions of those terms.

1. It helps when discussing activities, either verbally or in print, to know that people are using terms, for example 'orphan', in the same way. This allows people to compare one area with another.
2. Clear definitions are helpful when seeking to quantify the effect of HIV/AIDS in a given population over a particular period. For example, different papers may give very different figures for the projected number of orphans and other vulnerable children. However, this may be due to differences in the way terms have been defined.
3. Some terms have been introduced to avoid discriminatory, stigmatising or misleading terms. For example, the term "AIDS orphan" is now no longer used because it increases stigma and falsely implies that children orphaned by AIDS are themselves infected with HIV. Unfortunately, even some of the terms selected for these reasons, for example, "children affected by AIDS" and "orphans and other vulnerable children" may themselves be stigmatising, particularly when used as acronyms (CABA and OVC).

However, serious problems occur if these terms and definitions are used by organisations to decide if a particular child or family can receive their services . Children may be denied services because they do not fit within a particular group despite the fact that they have been identified as particularly needy by the local community. Decisions about which children should receive services should be based on local, community assessments of need.

Also, there is evidence that some groups use particular terms for the wrong reason. For example, some organisations have started using the term OVC because they believe that this is required by donors, or they wish to appear knowledgeable.

Defining criteria

Attempts to define children into various groups use a number of criteria which are discussed here:

• Parental death: The definition of an orphan involves the death of one or more parents. Initial work on children orphaned by AIDS (for example by UNAIDS) defined an orphan as a child whose mother or both parents had died. However, this definition was strongly criticised for underestimating the total number of orphans and the impact of paternal death. Consequently, more recent publications (such as Children on the Brink, 2002) define an orphan as any child under 18 who has lost one or both parents. They also recognise different types of orphans:
• a paternal orphan is a child whose father has died
• a maternal orphan is a child whose mother has died
• a double orphan is a child whose parents have both died
• Cause of death: It may be helpful to estimate the number of children orphaned by AIDS as a way of showing the impact of the epidemic in a particular geographical area. However, the cause of death should not be used for programming purposes . This is because such "targeting" increases stigma and discrimination .
• Defining a child: Internationally, a child is defined as a person under 18 years of age. This toolkit uses the terms child and children in this way. The term 'children and young people' is also used in the toolkit when seeking to emphasise inclusion of older children, that is those aged 15-18. However, many documents relating to orphans and other vulnerable children focus on those under the age of 15 (Children on the Brink, 2002 and the global strategic framework because they draw on data from standard health surveys which categorise age in this way. This means that the number of orphans and other vulnerable children in a particular geographical area will be underestimated, if those age 15-18 are excluded. Although international definitions define childhood in terms of age, many traditional concepts of childhood do not. They equate childhood with dependency and see the end of childhood as the achievement of a particular thing, such as marriage or completing full-time education, rather than the attainment of a specific age.
• Vulnerability: Other children and young people, as well as orphans, lack support and are vulnerable. Children and young people may live outside of parental care even when their parents are still alive or they may take on parental responsibilities when parents become ill. Children may also be vulnerable due to their own illness or disability. Also, non-orphaned children living in the same household as orphaned children may be vulnerable. In many African languages the word that would be translated as "orphan" in English includes all such vulnerable children. Various terms have been used in English to describe these children, such as 'virtual' 'social'or 'de facto' orphans. However, they are most commonly referred to as 'vulnerable children'.

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