St. Petersburg resident Vera Kamkina, who lost both her mother and husband last year, told the publication that “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I’m not a drug addict. Of course, my family is extremely poor. I raised my children by myself and wasn’t able to work. But I had help from relatives and charity.”

The officials told the woman that her children would be returned after she repaid 140 thousand rubles (about $4,600) in debt to the housing authorities for rent on her apartment.

In an interview on Ekho Moskvy radio, children’s rights representative Pavel Astakhov said that the authorities should take all aspects of a child’s family life into consideration in such cases, and not only material issues.

An unnamed municipal custody official denied to Novye Izvestia that children were taken from their families “because of poverty,” and that “the fairy tales about how their children were taken away are told by alcoholics who have enough money for the bottle but not for their their children.”

An amendment currently under consideration in the Russian State Duma would raise the standard for parental responsibilities to children. If adopted, parents would be required to provide children with “material support, including providing nutrition, clothing, shoes, and housing,” in addition to the appropriate care currently required by law.

Despite the clear importance for children to be properly provided for, Marina Ozhegova of the parental advocacy organization “Lots of Kids is Good!” fears that such an amendment will be harmful for both parents and children. “In Russia, 80 percent of families with multiple children live below the poverty line,” she said. “Many have their gas and electricity turned off because of debts to the housing authorities.”

Rosstat, Russia’s federal statistics agency, estimates that 5,877 children were taken into custody as a result of unfulfilled parental obligations in 2008, compared with 2,557 children in 2000.

Pavel Astakhov, a celebrity attorney that leads the “For Putin!” movement, voiced support for the law. He added that the suggested measures seemed more lenient than laws in the West: “Here, only acts that lead to material loss, which must be proven, are punished, while in other countries, the accountability sets in for any attempt to inflict such an act.”

The Chair of the Information Policy Commission of the Federation Council, Lyudmila Narusova, also voiced support for stricter control of the internet.

“The lack of legal regulation of the Internet leads to terrorist propaganda and to the publication of recommended methods on how to assemble a ‘shahid’s belt’ [a belt of explosives that is worn by Muslim suicide bombers],” she said. “The Government is obligated to keep citizens out of harm’s way, and any talk of censorship is groundless.” Narusova believes that the draft law could help prevent a wide range of crimes, including child pornography and pedophilia.

Senator Vladimir Slutsker, a Federation Council delegate from Chuvashiya who introduced his own version of an internet regulation bill in February, said that a new law was needed since the relevance of the regular law on mass-media was questionable. “It is not clearly written into the law itself, and [cases] are now given up to the buy-out of the courts.”

Nearly all the speakers agreed that controls on the internet must be reinforced. One of the few dissenting voices came from Mikhail Fedotov, a Secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists, who co-authored Russia’s the original draft law on mass-media. Fedotov is certain that there is no need to institute any new restrictions regarding extremism and other specific crimes on the internet. “What if the salesman killed the customer,” he asked, “would we try him using the law ‘On the protection of the rights of the customer?’”

Fedotov asserted that a single amendment to the law on mass-media, which would allow for prosecuting slander on the web, would suffice.