UNICEF counts orphans differently from everyday English
In common speech an orphan is a child who has lost both parents to death. Dictionaries also allow unknown or permanently abandoning parents; some U.S. legal language adds disappearance. UNICEF and partners may count a child who has lost one parent, widening the statistic sharply.
Animal husbandry usually keys orphan status to the mother alone. Human policy debates hinge on definitions because wars, epidemics such as AIDS, pandemics, and poverty create differently measured populations of children needing care.
The Second World War, fought from 1939 to 1945, left enormous numbers of parentless children, with European estimates running from 1 million to 13 million; the historian Judt put the figures at 9,000 in Czechoslovakia, 60,000 in the Netherlands and 300,000 in Poland. Orphans are comparatively rare in rich countries, where most children see both parents survive, and far more common in war-torn places such as Afghanistan. A 2005 Chinese government survey found roughly 573,000 orphans under 18, and Russian reports from 2002 counted 650,000 children in orphanages, released at 16 with 40 percent becoming homeless. In the United States about 2 million children, or 2.7 percent, have lost a mother or father, and around 100,000 have lost both.
Swedish uses a word meaning parentless, which leaves open whether the parents died or simply vanished. Well-known orphans include Aaron Burr, Andrew Jackson, Pedro II of Brazil, Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy, Louis Armstrong and Marilyn Monroe, while Henry Darger depicted the grim conditions of his orphanage in his art. Fiction is full of them, from Cinderella, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and Anne of Green Gables to Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, because losing parents frees a hero from family duties for adventure. The Bible and the Quran both treat protecting orphans as a sacred duty, and Moses and Muhammad were orphaned as children; Exodus 22:22 forbids exploiting a widow or orphan.
Source: Orphan
