Nobody’s Children: Orphans of the HIV Epidemic

By the year 2000, an estimated 82,000 to 125,000 children will become orphans of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Nobody’s Orphans of the HIV Epidemic shows how caregivers and the community can meet the ever-increasing social and economic needs of these children and their new families. Care providers learn ways to expand their imaginations to create new solutions and to approach the difficult issue of permanency planning. For the children and parents who are victims of the HIV epidemic and for the adoptive parents of these special children, Nobody’s Children is a book about courage, hope, and inspiration.

Author Steven Dansky details how the HIV epidemic has further disintegrated an already challenged family structure and how the nexus of poverty and substance use is central, in certain populations, to the effect of HIV disease. The orphans of HIV are children left behind from families functioning, for the most part, marginally. However, Nobody’s Children provides the living proof that one can survive the most dire circumstances. The book takes the struggle to survive into reconstituted a single mother choosing to adopt, gay men refusing to succumb to societal prohibitions against parenting, and parents infected by HIV discussing their condition with their children. Other vital topics this book clarifies for you