Dragana's dreams are sometimes so horrible that she hides the drawings from every one. To other people the drawings may look quite ordinary. A shack with a plane flying above it and dropping bombs. That is what Dragana used to call her brother, two years her senior. War orphans are children who lost one or both parents during the war, where the parents failed to reappear two years after the cessation of armed conflict.
Social workers prefer to use the term children without parental care.
This includes children of living parents who have lost parental rights for various reasons. The legal rights of these children are regulated by the law on family relations and the law on social protection which were adopted from the former Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina and continue to be implemented in a similar manner in both entities. According to those provisions, a child without parents is placed primarily with living relatives, in foster case families, in special children's villages with a surrogate mother or, as a last resort, in homes for children without parental care. The law on family relations also regulates the adoption of children. A child may be adopted by a married couple who are citizens of either entity, whose parental rights have not been taken away, who have never been criminally prosecuted and who are psychologically and physically completely healthy.