Romania's Children
There are just under four million children under the age of 18 in Romania. According to the United Nations about 32,000 children under the age of 14 are involved in child labour.
The children of Romania have been affected by the recent economic, social and political changes. As parents have struggled to find employment, there has been an increase in poverty. Children living in these families sometimes face precarious situations such as labour exploitation, violence, and domestic violence. Many are ultimately taken into care.
The general cuts in public spending have affected children due to less investment in education and in health provision. The country continues to score low in the international Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The under-five mortality rate stands at nearly three times the EU average. The funding of services, and their quality, varies according to location. Staff turnover is also a problem in these sectors, partly because of low wages.
Despite planned measures to provide support to families, the percentage of children taken into care has remained the same over the past ten years. Small children – under the age of three – constitute the group who are most taken into care. Children with disabilities are routinely placed in institutions or with foster care; the reintegration into their family is difficult.
The health system is facing challenges: not only is it experiencing budget cuts but also corruption and shortage of drugs and staff - the latter form a significant percentage of those emigrating abroad in search of better working conditions. Parents who move abroad often leave their children behind, in most cases in the care of relatives. In 2008 over 96,000 cases were reported.
One per cent of the population has HIV/AIDS. Most of these cases are children who were brought up in the Romanian orphanages in the 1980s. Orphanage staff would inject blood as a food substitute. The syringes were not changed and with some contaminated blood, the disease spread quickly. At present the epidemic is believed to be spreading quickly through drug use and sexual transmissions - the most vulnerable groups are sex workers, street children and homeless adults and those addicted to heroin. [1]
The children of Romania have been affected by the recent economic, social and political changes. As parents have struggled to find employment, there has been an increase in poverty. Children living in these families sometimes face precarious situations such as labour exploitation, violence, and domestic violence. Many are ultimately taken into care.
The general cuts in public spending have affected children due to less investment in education and in health provision. The country continues to score low in the international Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The under-five mortality rate stands at nearly three times the EU average. The funding of services, and their quality, varies according to location. Staff turnover is also a problem in these sectors, partly because of low wages.
Despite planned measures to provide support to families, the percentage of children taken into care has remained the same over the past ten years. Small children – under the age of three – constitute the group who are most taken into care. Children with disabilities are routinely placed in institutions or with foster care; the reintegration into their family is difficult.
The health system is facing challenges: not only is it experiencing budget cuts but also corruption and shortage of drugs and staff - the latter form a significant percentage of those emigrating abroad in search of better working conditions. Parents who move abroad often leave their children behind, in most cases in the care of relatives. In 2008 over 96,000 cases were reported.
One per cent of the population has HIV/AIDS. Most of these cases are children who were brought up in the Romanian orphanages in the 1980s. Orphanage staff would inject blood as a food substitute. The syringes were not changed and with some contaminated blood, the disease spread quickly. At present the epidemic is believed to be spreading quickly through drug use and sexual transmissions - the most vulnerable groups are sex workers, street children and homeless adults and those addicted to heroin. [1]
The forgotten children
Under Ceausescu’s deranged despotism, abortion and birth control were outlawed. He demanded that all women bear at least five children in an effort to create a caste of “worker bees” that would labor in the hive of communism. Invasive investigations of women were conducted at workplaces and elsewhere to track their individual progress in making babies. The government pledged to raise the children whose parents were too poor or incapable of caring for them. Some women never wanted the children they had been ordered to conceive in the first place and were happy to offload them.
But many thought their babies would have a better life if given up—or that they had the option of collecting them later if they found the means to properly care for them. [2]
At the age of three years the children were medically examined. Disabled and orphaned children were in huge numbers brought into homes like Cighid or psychiatric hospitals, where they lived under inhumane conditions. Many children died within a few weeks because of hunger, frostbite or diseases.
But many thought their babies would have a better life if given up—or that they had the option of collecting them later if they found the means to properly care for them. [2]
At the age of three years the children were medically examined. Disabled and orphaned children were in huge numbers brought into homes like Cighid or psychiatric hospitals, where they lived under inhumane conditions. Many children died within a few weeks because of hunger, frostbite or diseases.
Most of the lucky ones found homes abroad, when thousands of Americans and Europeans flocked to Romania in the 1990s to adopt, after catching glimpses of the tragic situation through television and newspaper reports.
Those who found homes with families, in Romania or abroad, have fared better, as numerous studies have shown, than those l who remained warehoused in the system. But few abandoned children escaped untouched by their initial neglect. American and Romanian researchers have been collaborating on a long-term study, based in Bucharest, investigating the effects of living in an institution in comparison to a family setting. Living in an institution, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) has found, has significant negative effects on brain development, behavior, and psychological functions.
Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and lead researcher at BEIP, along with coauthors Nathan Fox and Charles Zeanah, have just published a book on their research, Romania’s Abandoned Children. Their ongoing study has shown that there are critical “sensitive periods” of development. For example, the IQs of children placed in foster care prior to turning two were significantly higher than IQs of those placed after age two. And language development reaches a key point at fifteen months.
The legacy of this nightmare is very much present in Romania today—and is one of the reasons, nearly twenty-five years after the death of Ceausescu and the bizarre and brutal system he created, that so many Romanian children continue to be abandoned while adult survivors struggle to make a life. A lingering social welfare mentality, coupled with lack of progressive approaches to education, a struggling economy, and halfhearted commitment to rule of law, pressurize the situation. [2]
Fewer abandoned Romanian children are living in institution-like settings today than during the Ceausescu years. Since the early 1990s, several NGOs have worked with the government to close down many of the larger, notorious orphanages. Later in that decade, the Romanian government began a foster care program, employing “maternal assistants” to take care of orphans, hopeful that this would move more kids into family settings. The most recent government data indicate that more than twenty thousand Romanian children live in foster care. The system is based on the French model: foster parents are government employees, earning the equivalent of about $200 a month, and are prohibited from other employment, even if the children are of school age.
Child welfare workers in Romania debate about whether foster parents choose this path for love or for money. While $200 a month doesn’t sound like much, it is equivalent to the salaries of some other professions in Romania, including some teachers and nurses. In many smaller cities and more rural areas, jobs are scarce and foster parenting is one of few options. “It’s not for the love,” says Catalin Ganea, a project manager for one of the biggest funders of child welfare programs in Romania, SERA Romania. “It is a contract that can be broken at any time. It’s not good to have kids in foster care or foster homes for a long time. It’s a broken connection. Sometimes the foster family has an interest because it’s the only job to have here. It’s a job—a contract between them and social services.”
In November, Ganea concluded a trial program formulated in conjunction with a county in western Romania to reintegrate one hundred and sixty abandoned children back into their biological families. The plan provided goods, like a washing machine or materials to build a house, to families on a case-by-case basis in return for accepting their child back home. Most of the families are extremely poor, often living in cement-block homes with no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. Though some of the children had been living in orphanages, many had been living in foster homes—sometimes in the same home since they were babies.
The head of one children’s charity in Romania, who asked to not be identified for fear that her statements might negatively impact her relations with the government, says she is unsure of the merits of the effort. “I don’t believe that a kid should be taken out from a good foster home after ten to fifteen years, to be placed back with his parents just because the government offered the parents an incentive to say they wanted the kid back. I believe that family is very, very important. But I also believe that family is where your heart is, where you feel peace, and where you are protected.”
She recalls a visit to the home of two elementary-aged brothers who had been reintegrated into their biological family by social services, unrelated to the SERA project. Neighbors approached her, she says, and told her the children were not safe—that the parents were drunk most of the time. The boys had previously spent their entire lives in one foster home, with guardians who were devastated when told that the kids were being removed.
But a child’s ties to his biological family, for better or worse, have become a central focus of child policy in Romania. A child’s biological parents must be deceased or indicate that they have no interest in having a relationship with the child before adoption can be considered. But what a “relationship” is, exactly, is unclear. Sometimes a mere phone call or e-mail a couple of times a year is considered sufficient. Many children now linger in the orphanage system because a parent “expresses interest” by stopping by or calling once a year. Many times, the parent can ensure the child won’t be adopted this way - leaving open the possibility that when the child gets older, he or she could finally be taken home and put to work to earn money for the family.
Even when the parent does not express any interest in maintaining a relationship with the child, the social system’s structure makes it difficult to get a child into an adoptive home within the critical periods of development that Charles Nelson and his colleagues have defined. At least a year with no familial contact must pass before a social worker can pursue adoption. Once it has officially been established that there is no interest from the biological parents, the social worker assigned to the child’s case must make contact with all adult relatives of the child, to the fourth degree - including, for example, the grandparents’ siblings - to explore the possibility that someone else in the family might take in the child. Only after this process is completed can the social worker finally file a motion to make the child adoptable.
But even from that point, other obstacles remain. A child cannot be adopted directly from an orphanage or group home; he must be adopted out of a foster home. The state slashed funding for foster parents as part of austerity measures a few years ago, meaning now fewer children can be moved through the system this way. And with the high case demand facing social workers, the process to finalize adoption is often slow.
Romania had issued a moratorium on international adoption in 2001, finally outlawing it in 2005 under pressure from EU representatives as the country made its bid for entry into the union. Romanian officials at the time said they could not effectively monitor and control the process, as rumors swirled of babies being sold at auction. But adoption inside Romania hasn’t been a success. Annually, between seven hundred and nine hundred children are adopted of the twelve hundred to fourteen hundred considered “adoptable,” a tiny fraction of the orphans within the system.
Most Romanians who apply to adopt children are couples that have been unable to have children on their own. Most of these couples are only interested in adopting babies; seventy-two percent want a child who is less than three years of age, and eighty-six percent want a child under five, according to a study by the Romanian Office of Adoptions and UNICEF. Few are open to adopting children with disabilities or those of Roma decent, which rules out a large percentage of children.
The idea of putting the needs and rights of these children first—reconnecting them with their biological families or finding them other loving homes—would require changing the social mentality of Romanians. During the Ceausescu years, parents didn’t necessarily know what they were getting into when they dropped their children off at the doorstep of a state-run institution. The poor in Romania today continue to lack education about birth control, and costs remain prohibitive for many. There also is a lingering belief that full-time childcare—for a year, five years, or more—is a service provided by the state.
Mothers have the option of leaving their newborns at the hospital when they go home. They do not have to give up the rights to the child at this point—or ever. And, as the law states, if the parents or relatives don’t renounce their relationship with the child, the child cannot be adopted. Some are eventually moved into foster care, while others remain at the hospital until they are two, when they can be sent to orphanages.
There are no national programs aimed at preventing unwanted births or child abandonment; no system for giving up your child for adoption directly or privately, as exists in the United States and Western Europe. But neither is there coordinated government support for the children who “age out” of the child protection system, leaving many on the street without the skills to find work, search for a place to live, or cook a meal. At age eighteen, or twenty-six in the rare instance when the orphan is enrolled in higher education, the young adults, like Laurentiu Ierusalim, are turned out with only a few dollars in their pockets. Each year, an estimated two thousand young adults exit orphanages in Romania. Many end up homeless, with no money or shelter, and turn to drugs and crime.
Romania seems unable to move past the shame associated with the early days of its abandoned children. While dozens of children’s charities continue to funnel money, goods, and care into the country, many international groups that came in the 1990s—some establishing model programs intended for government takeover—have gone, and few of their programs have continued. While Romania now for the most part looks at the brutal Ceausescu regime in its rearview mirror, it sees one of the few accomplishments of that dictatorship, large numbers of disquieted orphans who are now young adults, walking its streets every day. [2]
Orphans and child abandonment
In 2001, Romania placed a moratorium on international adoptions, and officially banned the practice four years later, citing widespread corruption in adoption practices across borders. Romania has no formal national assistance program for orphans after they leave state institutions. Most must leave at age 18, when they become legal adults. Few of the country’s 75,000 orphans know how to manage money, find an apartment, prepare food or search for a job. Many end up homeless and turn to crime, like prostitution, when they age out.
The number of children abandoned in maternity wards dropped from 5130 in 2003 to 1315 in 2010. 28% of children abandoned are Roma. NGOs claimed that the official statistics underestimated the problem, and that many children living in state institutions were never officially recognized as abandoned. Poverty, child marriage and mobility are the primary causes of child abandonment. But most potential adoptive parents refuse to adopt Roma children.
According to the Ministry of Labor, Family, and Social Protection, there were 63,847 children in state care. Of them 39,212 were in professional foster care, 1,878 in alternative care (with guardian), and 22,757 in public or private residential care. [18]
The number of children abandoned in maternity wards dropped from 5130 in 2003 to 1315 in 2010. 28% of children abandoned are Roma. NGOs claimed that the official statistics underestimated the problem, and that many children living in state institutions were never officially recognized as abandoned. Poverty, child marriage and mobility are the primary causes of child abandonment. But most potential adoptive parents refuse to adopt Roma children.
According to the Ministry of Labor, Family, and Social Protection, there were 63,847 children in state care. Of them 39,212 were in professional foster care, 1,878 in alternative care (with guardian), and 22,757 in public or private residential care. [18]
"Have a problem? Abandon it!"
The old mentality from Communist times that a baby from a poor family had a better chance if he or she were given over to social services, is still present today and mothers, or parents, who cannot cope with their children for whatever reasons, simply surrender them in the "care" of institutions.
Unwanted newborn babies are sometimes simply left at hospital after birth. Nobody would ask questions on why... resulting in hundreds of children abandoned each year by their parents - healthy babies who shouldn't grow up in a hospital in the first place, completely forgotten by the state.
Unwanted newborn babies are sometimes simply left at hospital after birth. Nobody would ask questions on why... resulting in hundreds of children abandoned each year by their parents - healthy babies who shouldn't grow up in a hospital in the first place, completely forgotten by the state.
Today's unwanted children
The standard of living for Romanian orphans is still grave despite vast improvements since their conditions were leaked to the West after the fall of the Communist government in 1989.
Under Nicolae Ceauşescu, both abortion and contraception were forbidden, leading to a rise in birth rates. This resulted in many children being abandoned and these were joined in the orphanages by disabled and mentally ill people. Together these vulnerable groups were subjected to institutionalised neglect and abuse, including physical and sexual abuse and use of drugs to control behaviour.
Orphanages lacked both medicines and washing facilities, and children were subject to sexual and physical abuse.
The conditions in orphanages had declined after 1982, as a result of Ceauşescu's decision to seize much of the country's economic output in order to repay its foreign debt.
As the realities of life in Romanian orphanages emerged after December 1989, the reaction outside Romania was of shock at the plight of the orphans, and numerous charities were established. Numerous fund-raising activities have been conducted by various parties, such as the 1990 album Nobody's Child: Romanian Angel Appeal, which was compiled by George and Olivia Harrison for AIDS-infected orphans.
In 2006, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was criticised for a joke in which he said there were so many orphans "over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages."
In September 2005, Emma Nicholson, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, the European Parliament's rapporteur for Romania, stated "Romania has profoundly reformed [from top to bottom] its child protection system and has evolved from one of the worst systems in Europe to one of the best."
In an accession report published prior to November 2005, European Union observers were positive regarding the situation of the child care system in Romania. [7]
According to a report by the Center for Legal Resources, nearly 1,500 children have died in institutionalized orphanages in the last 4 years. And that's only half the total number of centers, because out of a total of 47 administrative units in the entire country, only 27 have responded to the questions raised by organizations defending human rights, states a report released on 10th of December, 2014.
At central level, however, no one knows exactly what the situation, because there were requested statistics.
Currently, 24,598 children are in total social protection institutions in Romania.
What has changed for Romania's orphans and disabled people since Romania entered the EU? How much have the conditions in the Romanian state institutions improved since Romania has signed the 'Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities' and since it has received hundreds of millions of Euro to improve its orphanages and institutions?
The following documentaries and articles shred light into it, and paint a very grim picture...
Under Nicolae Ceauşescu, both abortion and contraception were forbidden, leading to a rise in birth rates. This resulted in many children being abandoned and these were joined in the orphanages by disabled and mentally ill people. Together these vulnerable groups were subjected to institutionalised neglect and abuse, including physical and sexual abuse and use of drugs to control behaviour.
Orphanages lacked both medicines and washing facilities, and children were subject to sexual and physical abuse.
The conditions in orphanages had declined after 1982, as a result of Ceauşescu's decision to seize much of the country's economic output in order to repay its foreign debt.
As the realities of life in Romanian orphanages emerged after December 1989, the reaction outside Romania was of shock at the plight of the orphans, and numerous charities were established. Numerous fund-raising activities have been conducted by various parties, such as the 1990 album Nobody's Child: Romanian Angel Appeal, which was compiled by George and Olivia Harrison for AIDS-infected orphans.
In 2006, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was criticised for a joke in which he said there were so many orphans "over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages."
In September 2005, Emma Nicholson, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, the European Parliament's rapporteur for Romania, stated "Romania has profoundly reformed [from top to bottom] its child protection system and has evolved from one of the worst systems in Europe to one of the best."
In an accession report published prior to November 2005, European Union observers were positive regarding the situation of the child care system in Romania. [7]
According to a report by the Center for Legal Resources, nearly 1,500 children have died in institutionalized orphanages in the last 4 years. And that's only half the total number of centers, because out of a total of 47 administrative units in the entire country, only 27 have responded to the questions raised by organizations defending human rights, states a report released on 10th of December, 2014.
At central level, however, no one knows exactly what the situation, because there were requested statistics.
Currently, 24,598 children are in total social protection institutions in Romania.
What has changed for Romania's orphans and disabled people since Romania entered the EU? How much have the conditions in the Romanian state institutions improved since Romania has signed the 'Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities' and since it has received hundreds of millions of Euro to improve its orphanages and institutions?
The following documentaries and articles shred light into it, and paint a very grim picture...
Learned helplessness
The ultimate indictment, the obscenity that transgresses every law of sentient existence, of humanity, is when 'learned helplessness' is acquired by the most innocent in society. When babies in orphanage institutions no longer cry because they have learned that this is futile and that there will be no response... that no-one cares.
When hope has died even before it has lived!
When hope has died even before it has lived!
About the next video:
Text taken from youtube: In the hospitals in Romania there are hundreds of children abandoned by their parents. Healthy babies, who shouldn't be there, completely forgotten by the state.
They are victims of illegalities and inequalities in a country that seems to have no respect for anything anymore... Because of the lack in personnel, the hospitals abandon these babies even though they earn money because of them!
The Child Protection Organisation ignores them as well, even though it is their responsibility to save them!
Because of this situation, these babies are deprived of their fundamental right of having a family and are being left in their hospital beds. With wounds because of the swaddling clothes, the feeding bottles they are trying to use alone and a huge need of love and affection.
The Emergency Hospital in Constanta, Romania:
The empty and unguarded corridors are echoing the heartbreaking cries of abandoned babies...It's 6 o'clock in the evening and the visiting program has finished a long time ago. Without being stopped by somebody, we managed to get inside of one of the hospital rooms with a hidden camera.
The children are alone... They sit in the dark. And they are crying... Because nobody cares about them...
When we turn on the lights in the room, all the crying suddenly stops. And on the babies faces we can see little smiles... It's the happiness of not being alone anymore.
They are nobody's children... just a few of those 750 babies abandoned in the hospitals in Romania... And their number will grow larger as we go deeper into the winter.
750 children who start their lives in this way, ALONE In their little beds to which rarely someone comes near. They are learning form an early age to be happy with any kind little gesture.
The stories of these children are all different...
Text taken from youtube: In the hospitals in Romania there are hundreds of children abandoned by their parents. Healthy babies, who shouldn't be there, completely forgotten by the state.
They are victims of illegalities and inequalities in a country that seems to have no respect for anything anymore... Because of the lack in personnel, the hospitals abandon these babies even though they earn money because of them!
The Child Protection Organisation ignores them as well, even though it is their responsibility to save them!
Because of this situation, these babies are deprived of their fundamental right of having a family and are being left in their hospital beds. With wounds because of the swaddling clothes, the feeding bottles they are trying to use alone and a huge need of love and affection.
The Emergency Hospital in Constanta, Romania:
The empty and unguarded corridors are echoing the heartbreaking cries of abandoned babies...It's 6 o'clock in the evening and the visiting program has finished a long time ago. Without being stopped by somebody, we managed to get inside of one of the hospital rooms with a hidden camera.
The children are alone... They sit in the dark. And they are crying... Because nobody cares about them...
When we turn on the lights in the room, all the crying suddenly stops. And on the babies faces we can see little smiles... It's the happiness of not being alone anymore.
They are nobody's children... just a few of those 750 babies abandoned in the hospitals in Romania... And their number will grow larger as we go deeper into the winter.
750 children who start their lives in this way, ALONE In their little beds to which rarely someone comes near. They are learning form an early age to be happy with any kind little gesture.
The stories of these children are all different...
Everyone remembers the shocking pictures of Romanian orphans, tied to their cots in squalid institutions. Decades on, many children are still being held in old-style institutions.
Babies at the pediatric unit are unnaturally quiet. They've learnt there's no point in crying.
"They have no affiliation, no stability", laments supervisor Dr Monica Nicoara.
Previously, many of these babies would have been adopted by Western families. But foreign adoptions are now banned and authorities want to find Romanian families for abandoned children.
However this new system has failed many of the country's most vulnerable. Ricardo and George ended up on the streets after their parents abandoned them. They've given up on the state and now take care of each other.
Babies at the pediatric unit are unnaturally quiet. They've learnt there's no point in crying.
"They have no affiliation, no stability", laments supervisor Dr Monica Nicoara.
Previously, many of these babies would have been adopted by Western families. But foreign adoptions are now banned and authorities want to find Romanian families for abandoned children.
However this new system has failed many of the country's most vulnerable. Ricardo and George ended up on the streets after their parents abandoned them. They've given up on the state and now take care of each other.
The appalling situation of Romania’s institutionalized children:
From Ceausescu to today
by Diana Toma for WSWS.org
23 May 2012 - In 1990 the feature pages of US and European newspapers and magazines were full of photos depicting the appalling conditions prevailing for orphaned and disabled children in Romania. The many articles devoted to this theme denounced the conditions in children’s homes in the country and predicted, or at least hoped for, improvements with the introduction of a free-market system.
Recent figures reveal that, in the wake of the latest economic crisis, the slight improvements in care of children, often carried out by private charitable agencies during recent years, are being reversed.
In Romania, cases of the inhumane treatment of children left abandoned in hospitals or simply thrown in the trash by their own parents are becoming increasingly frequent. The latest UNICEF study places Romania first among European countries regarding the abandonment of children. The number of children abandoned by their parents grew last year. Statistics show that almost 950 children were abandoned in maternity hospitals, an increase of 180 compared to 2010. Poverty, with all that comes with it—unemployment, decline in real incomes, decrease in purchasing power, lack of adequate housing, etc.—is a major cause of child desertion in the country.
An explosion in the number of children deserted by their parents started in the last decades of the Stalinist regime headed by Nicolae Ceausescu. In 1967, he passed a decree banning abortions. In the following decades an estimated 2 million unwanted children were born due to the withdrawal of the mother’s right to choose an abortion and access to contraception.
As the birth rate boomed, thousands of children were abandoned in the country’s orphanages. It is estimated that Romanian orphanages housed more than 100,000 children at the beginning of 1990. Due to the lack of adequate care, the rate of mortality among these children became the highest in Europe.
In recent years a number of articles in the international press have sought to imply that the situation in Romania’s orphanages has improved. In fact, the conditions currently prevailing in the country’s orphanages are best described as hellish, evoking the types of negligence of children that characterized early capitalism. Many years after the nightmarish images shown all over the world after the “revolution”, similar images are again being transmitted in the international press.
In 2010, Daily Telegraph reporter Angela Levin described the situation of orphaned children in Romania. Near Bistrita, she witnessed a kind of hell: “There is a place there that would be inappropriate even for animals, but it is the only shelter for 35 patients, ranging from few weeks to young adults. All suffer from physical or mental disabilities. The treatment to which they are subjected ‘takes your breath away’, is inhuman: children are restrained to their miserable beds, no one cares about their crying, while the stench of urine and faeces is overwhelming. There are no wheelchairs, elevators, or other facilities for patients with locomotive disabilities.”
In 1989, over 100,000 children were abandoned and crowded in 700 orphanages. The closing of these orphanages and finding a solution to the problem of abandoned children was one of the conditions laid down to Romania for membership of the European Union. The investigations by the British reporter showed that this demand is far from being achieved. The article raises the whereabouts of the 36 million pounds from European funds that were pumped into Romania to facilitate the closure of these orphanages.
In 2012, the situation remains deplorable. A report by HCC Romania was released in April this year. It showed that there are still more than 20,000 children in Romania’s orphanages. From the total of 159 placement centres, half of the children of school age are not enrolled in the educational system. The main reasons described by the directors of the centres are severe medical problems, deficiencies that prevent these children attending school, but also issues such as the lack of a known identity of the children or the absence of free places in kindergartens. A quarter of the investigated centres do not provide anything resembling the type of care necessary for these children.
Thirteen years ago, sociologist Charles Nelson commenced a study demonstrating what happens to the brains of those raised in orphanages. Along with colleagues at Harvard University, Nelson studied 136 children placed in an orphanage in Bucharest. Although his report did not name the centre, his descriptions shocked the West: “Children are raised in an Spartan environment, where they are forced to stare for hours at a white wall, they are obliged to observe a very strict schedule and the lack of affection shown by those who take care of them is really shocking”, he wrote. “Their behaviour shows severe deficiencies … and communicative problems.”
The recommendations made by HCC Romania report are, in this context, even more important. The report concluded that the state needs to pay special attention to the integration of these children into society. “The young people coming out of this system represent a very vulnerable category. The implementation of development programs and social services is badly needed: housing, employment, counselling and emotional support could partially mitigate the shock of independent lives, for which these young people are not at all prepared.”
In fact, Romania is currently struggling with huge deficits in its social service system and an unprecedented political chaos that only serves to make the future of these children more perilous. Official employment, which gravely underestimates the true extent of the problem, now stands at 7.5 percent, or 735,000, with an additional 29,000 losing their jobs in the month of March. These are the figures recently made public by the National Institute of Statistics (INS).
Under conditions of a dysfunctional society, its weakest members are the hardest hit. Most of the stipulated social protections are inoperative. Laws adopted are not applied, the number of employees of state institutions are diminishing every year, and many of the state partnerships with private agencies only exist on paper.
In 2010—as part of the measures to reduce public spending—the government headed by Emil Boc cut 20 percent of the funding to feed the children living in state institutions. There is also a stop in place for new foster parents. This means that many small children refused admission to institutions end up in hospitals.
The consequences are dramatic. The number of children who try to commit suicide or flee from these placement centres is increasing. Statistics indicate that three out of every ten children try through various ways to escape the life they lead in orphanage homes.
As if this situation were not troubling enough, Gabriela Alexandrescu, president of Save the Children in Romania, told the press last Tuesday: “The rate of premature births—which is a major risk for infant mortality—is 9 percent in Romania, double that of other EU states. This makes Romania the country with most infant deaths in the EU.”
In addition to poverty, poor infrastructure and lack of information, the emigration of medical personnel seeking better prospects abroad is one of the main reasons for this development, Save the Children announced in Bucharest. [9]
Recent figures reveal that, in the wake of the latest economic crisis, the slight improvements in care of children, often carried out by private charitable agencies during recent years, are being reversed.
In Romania, cases of the inhumane treatment of children left abandoned in hospitals or simply thrown in the trash by their own parents are becoming increasingly frequent. The latest UNICEF study places Romania first among European countries regarding the abandonment of children. The number of children abandoned by their parents grew last year. Statistics show that almost 950 children were abandoned in maternity hospitals, an increase of 180 compared to 2010. Poverty, with all that comes with it—unemployment, decline in real incomes, decrease in purchasing power, lack of adequate housing, etc.—is a major cause of child desertion in the country.
An explosion in the number of children deserted by their parents started in the last decades of the Stalinist regime headed by Nicolae Ceausescu. In 1967, he passed a decree banning abortions. In the following decades an estimated 2 million unwanted children were born due to the withdrawal of the mother’s right to choose an abortion and access to contraception.
As the birth rate boomed, thousands of children were abandoned in the country’s orphanages. It is estimated that Romanian orphanages housed more than 100,000 children at the beginning of 1990. Due to the lack of adequate care, the rate of mortality among these children became the highest in Europe.
In recent years a number of articles in the international press have sought to imply that the situation in Romania’s orphanages has improved. In fact, the conditions currently prevailing in the country’s orphanages are best described as hellish, evoking the types of negligence of children that characterized early capitalism. Many years after the nightmarish images shown all over the world after the “revolution”, similar images are again being transmitted in the international press.
In 2010, Daily Telegraph reporter Angela Levin described the situation of orphaned children in Romania. Near Bistrita, she witnessed a kind of hell: “There is a place there that would be inappropriate even for animals, but it is the only shelter for 35 patients, ranging from few weeks to young adults. All suffer from physical or mental disabilities. The treatment to which they are subjected ‘takes your breath away’, is inhuman: children are restrained to their miserable beds, no one cares about their crying, while the stench of urine and faeces is overwhelming. There are no wheelchairs, elevators, or other facilities for patients with locomotive disabilities.”
In 1989, over 100,000 children were abandoned and crowded in 700 orphanages. The closing of these orphanages and finding a solution to the problem of abandoned children was one of the conditions laid down to Romania for membership of the European Union. The investigations by the British reporter showed that this demand is far from being achieved. The article raises the whereabouts of the 36 million pounds from European funds that were pumped into Romania to facilitate the closure of these orphanages.
In 2012, the situation remains deplorable. A report by HCC Romania was released in April this year. It showed that there are still more than 20,000 children in Romania’s orphanages. From the total of 159 placement centres, half of the children of school age are not enrolled in the educational system. The main reasons described by the directors of the centres are severe medical problems, deficiencies that prevent these children attending school, but also issues such as the lack of a known identity of the children or the absence of free places in kindergartens. A quarter of the investigated centres do not provide anything resembling the type of care necessary for these children.
Thirteen years ago, sociologist Charles Nelson commenced a study demonstrating what happens to the brains of those raised in orphanages. Along with colleagues at Harvard University, Nelson studied 136 children placed in an orphanage in Bucharest. Although his report did not name the centre, his descriptions shocked the West: “Children are raised in an Spartan environment, where they are forced to stare for hours at a white wall, they are obliged to observe a very strict schedule and the lack of affection shown by those who take care of them is really shocking”, he wrote. “Their behaviour shows severe deficiencies … and communicative problems.”
The recommendations made by HCC Romania report are, in this context, even more important. The report concluded that the state needs to pay special attention to the integration of these children into society. “The young people coming out of this system represent a very vulnerable category. The implementation of development programs and social services is badly needed: housing, employment, counselling and emotional support could partially mitigate the shock of independent lives, for which these young people are not at all prepared.”
In fact, Romania is currently struggling with huge deficits in its social service system and an unprecedented political chaos that only serves to make the future of these children more perilous. Official employment, which gravely underestimates the true extent of the problem, now stands at 7.5 percent, or 735,000, with an additional 29,000 losing their jobs in the month of March. These are the figures recently made public by the National Institute of Statistics (INS).
Under conditions of a dysfunctional society, its weakest members are the hardest hit. Most of the stipulated social protections are inoperative. Laws adopted are not applied, the number of employees of state institutions are diminishing every year, and many of the state partnerships with private agencies only exist on paper.
In 2010—as part of the measures to reduce public spending—the government headed by Emil Boc cut 20 percent of the funding to feed the children living in state institutions. There is also a stop in place for new foster parents. This means that many small children refused admission to institutions end up in hospitals.
The consequences are dramatic. The number of children who try to commit suicide or flee from these placement centres is increasing. Statistics indicate that three out of every ten children try through various ways to escape the life they lead in orphanage homes.
As if this situation were not troubling enough, Gabriela Alexandrescu, president of Save the Children in Romania, told the press last Tuesday: “The rate of premature births—which is a major risk for infant mortality—is 9 percent in Romania, double that of other EU states. This makes Romania the country with most infant deaths in the EU.”
In addition to poverty, poor infrastructure and lack of information, the emigration of medical personnel seeking better prospects abroad is one of the main reasons for this development, Save the Children announced in Bucharest. [9]
"I don't know of one child that does not know how to handle
a computer and doesn't have a smartphone"
Victor Ponta - Prime Minister of Romania, September 2014
During an interview on why over three million students and preschoolers have started school on September 15, 2014 but without the digital textbooks promised by the Government, Romania's Prime Minister, Victor Ponta, either living in a bubble, or clearly detached from reality, stated that he did not know of a class, or even ONE child, that did not know how to use a computer and doesn't have a smartphone. [3]
Well... the truth is that in Romania an increasing number of poor children are seeing chances of getting access to education reduced rather than enhanced. According to the Ministry of Education, schools dropout rates have tripled since the late 1990s among some vulnerable social categories, such as children from rural areas, from poor families in the cities, and Roma kids. [4]
Before World War II the literacy rate in Romania ranked among the lowest in Europe. In 1930, at the time of the first official census, more than 38 percent of the population over seven years of age were considered illiterate: 50 percent of the women and over 25 percent of the men in the entire population of about 18 million were unable to read or write. In rural areas, where most of the population lived, illiteracy rate was considered even higher. Prominent reasons for the lack of literacy were that children of school age either were not enrolled in school or, if they were enrolled, did not attend classes regularly. There was also a fairly large percentage of children who left school without completing their studies or, having completed only the compulsory first four grades, relapsed into illiteracy in adult life. [5]
Romania has made efforts to shift from the didactic classroom methods of the Communist era to a more modern teaching philosophy suited to the challenges of the 21st century, including drawing up a new curriculum. However, OECD figures indicate that educational attainment in the country has actually declined since the Soviet era, mainly due to insufficient resources and other government priorities. Reading skills fell, and Romania found itself ranked among the worst-performing countries in the region for reading, maths and science.
As in other areas of children’s rights, education suffers from a rural/urban disparity, with better qualified and more proficient teaching staff typically working in cities and towns. University autonomy gives the Ministry of Education little influence on practices and standards. Teacher training involves a six-month course on pedagogy but no practical classroom experience, which does not equip teachers for their demanding role. The poor esteem in which the teaching profession is held – not to mention the low salaries – also deters many of the most able young graduates from pursuing a teaching career. Infrastructure, too, can be lacking; for example school labs may be poorly equipped.
There can also be other practical barriers to access. Poor parents may decide not to send their children to school due to embarrassment at their lack of appropriate clothing and footwear. Bus services taking children to school may lack funding for petrol or a driver. Dropout is another problem, though it is worse among older age groups. It is estimated that 300,000-400,000 children in Romania get little or no formal education. [4]
Well... the truth is that in Romania an increasing number of poor children are seeing chances of getting access to education reduced rather than enhanced. According to the Ministry of Education, schools dropout rates have tripled since the late 1990s among some vulnerable social categories, such as children from rural areas, from poor families in the cities, and Roma kids. [4]
Before World War II the literacy rate in Romania ranked among the lowest in Europe. In 1930, at the time of the first official census, more than 38 percent of the population over seven years of age were considered illiterate: 50 percent of the women and over 25 percent of the men in the entire population of about 18 million were unable to read or write. In rural areas, where most of the population lived, illiteracy rate was considered even higher. Prominent reasons for the lack of literacy were that children of school age either were not enrolled in school or, if they were enrolled, did not attend classes regularly. There was also a fairly large percentage of children who left school without completing their studies or, having completed only the compulsory first four grades, relapsed into illiteracy in adult life. [5]
Romania has made efforts to shift from the didactic classroom methods of the Communist era to a more modern teaching philosophy suited to the challenges of the 21st century, including drawing up a new curriculum. However, OECD figures indicate that educational attainment in the country has actually declined since the Soviet era, mainly due to insufficient resources and other government priorities. Reading skills fell, and Romania found itself ranked among the worst-performing countries in the region for reading, maths and science.
As in other areas of children’s rights, education suffers from a rural/urban disparity, with better qualified and more proficient teaching staff typically working in cities and towns. University autonomy gives the Ministry of Education little influence on practices and standards. Teacher training involves a six-month course on pedagogy but no practical classroom experience, which does not equip teachers for their demanding role. The poor esteem in which the teaching profession is held – not to mention the low salaries – also deters many of the most able young graduates from pursuing a teaching career. Infrastructure, too, can be lacking; for example school labs may be poorly equipped.
There can also be other practical barriers to access. Poor parents may decide not to send their children to school due to embarrassment at their lack of appropriate clothing and footwear. Bus services taking children to school may lack funding for petrol or a driver. Dropout is another problem, though it is worse among older age groups. It is estimated that 300,000-400,000 children in Romania get little or no formal education. [4]
Roma children face all the barriers that prevent other disadvantaged children from gaining a good education, and often to a greater extent. They typically live in deprived communities, with poverty rates four times higher than the national average.
Lack of the appropriate clothing or equipment may deter Roma parents from sending their children to school. Discrimination and social exclusion remain common: in some schools Roma children are segregated from the mainstream student body, and schools attended by large numbers of Roma are typically in worse condition than other institutions.
In wider Romanian society, many of the wealthiest figures are relatively uneducated. This is accentuated in the Roma community, and parents may see little value in their children attending school rather than helping support the family financially. School mediators from the Roma community form a vital link between the education system and families but it is often difficult to fill the role, both due to a lack of qualified candidates (high school studies are required) and to budget cuts.
Another Roma custom that can interfere with children’s education is early marriage and childbirth (this is not widespread, but overwhelmingly affects girls). Roma girls are sometimes kept at home to take care of younger siblings. [6]
A study on Roma (Tarnovski 2012) showed that 20% of the children (6-16 years old) were not enrolled in school. According to the study, illiteracy affects 25% of the Roma aged 16 and older, being higher in rural, Roma compact communities and among women. Educational attainment, as showed by the quoted study, is very low among Roma, as almost half either have no formal education or graduated primary school, around one third graduated lower secondary education while only 15% have upper secondary education. Those with a university degree are only 1%.
"What will 'they' become when they grow up?"
Child abuse, neglect and corporal punishment
Many parents in Romania employ corporal punishment. Violence in schools, by both teachers and other children, is high by world standards, and schools are also the scene of sexual abuse and drugs. Another major issue is child labour. Widespread subsistence farming and rural poverty mean that many young people are involved in agriculture. In the majority of cases the working hours and conditions are exploitative and breach legal requirements, stopping children from going to school or being able to enjoy their leisure time.
Legislation in this field has been improving for the past ten years, the most recent example being the revision and updating of the hazardous work list in 2009. This has been backed up by a gradual but significant increase in budgetary allocations, though the economic crisis has put many areas of government spending in doubt. While EU accession has been the stimulus of much improvement in the law protecting children, increased freedom of movement presents new challenges, such as greater ease of child trafficking, and there have been cases of Romanian children being taken to Western Europe to beg or steal. Children are also sent to beg on the streets of Bucharest and other major cities. [10]
A Canadian study which used data from more than 23,000 adults collected in 2012 found that experiencing corporal punishment before the age of 16 was associated with mental disorders (including depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, alcohol abuse/dependence, drug abuse/dependence, phobias and eating disorders) and thinking about or attempting suicide. (Afifi, T. O. (2014), “Child abuse and mental disorders in Canada”, Canadian Medical Association Journal¸ published online 22 April 2014)
A 2014 study, which used data from 1,874 children in the USA collected when the children were aged 1, 3, 5 and 9, found that there was a reciprocal relationship between children’s aggressive behaviour and being “spanked” by their mothers. Children who were “spanked” were more likely to behave aggressively and break rules 2-4 years later, and in turn, these children were then more likely to be spanked, creating a “vicious cycle”. (MacKenzie, M. J. et al (2014), “Spanking and Children’s Externalizing Behavior Across the First Decade of Life: Evidence for Transactional Processes”, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, published online 25 March 2014)
A study conducted in Romania, published in 2014, found that fewer children reported experiencing corporal punishment from their parents in 2012 than in a similar study carried out in 2001. In 2001, 84% of children said that their parents hit them with a hand without leaving a mark; by 2012, this had fallen to 62%. Prohibition was achieved in 2004. (Save the Children Romania, (2014), Child Neglect and Abuse: National Sociologic Study (English summary), Save the Children & Child Protection Department, Ministry of Labour, Family, Social Protection and Elderly) [17]
Legislation in this field has been improving for the past ten years, the most recent example being the revision and updating of the hazardous work list in 2009. This has been backed up by a gradual but significant increase in budgetary allocations, though the economic crisis has put many areas of government spending in doubt. While EU accession has been the stimulus of much improvement in the law protecting children, increased freedom of movement presents new challenges, such as greater ease of child trafficking, and there have been cases of Romanian children being taken to Western Europe to beg or steal. Children are also sent to beg on the streets of Bucharest and other major cities. [10]
A Canadian study which used data from more than 23,000 adults collected in 2012 found that experiencing corporal punishment before the age of 16 was associated with mental disorders (including depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, alcohol abuse/dependence, drug abuse/dependence, phobias and eating disorders) and thinking about or attempting suicide. (Afifi, T. O. (2014), “Child abuse and mental disorders in Canada”, Canadian Medical Association Journal¸ published online 22 April 2014)
A 2014 study, which used data from 1,874 children in the USA collected when the children were aged 1, 3, 5 and 9, found that there was a reciprocal relationship between children’s aggressive behaviour and being “spanked” by their mothers. Children who were “spanked” were more likely to behave aggressively and break rules 2-4 years later, and in turn, these children were then more likely to be spanked, creating a “vicious cycle”. (MacKenzie, M. J. et al (2014), “Spanking and Children’s Externalizing Behavior Across the First Decade of Life: Evidence for Transactional Processes”, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, published online 25 March 2014)
A study conducted in Romania, published in 2014, found that fewer children reported experiencing corporal punishment from their parents in 2012 than in a similar study carried out in 2001. In 2001, 84% of children said that their parents hit them with a hand without leaving a mark; by 2012, this had fallen to 62%. Prohibition was achieved in 2004. (Save the Children Romania, (2014), Child Neglect and Abuse: National Sociologic Study (English summary), Save the Children & Child Protection Department, Ministry of Labour, Family, Social Protection and Elderly) [17]
New EU-Safety rules will make children's life safer
According to new EU Safety Regulation that entered into force in 2011, children are to be banned from taking part in traditional Christmas games, from blowing up balloons to blowing on party whistles.
The EU toy safety directive, agreed and implemented by Government, states that balloons must not be blown up by unsupervised children under the age of eight, in case they accidentally swallow them and choke.
Despite having been popular favourites for generations of children, party games including whistles and magnetic fishing games are to be banned because their small parts or chemicals used in making them are decreed to be too risky.
Apparently harmless toys that children have enjoyed for decades are now regarded by EU regulators as posing an unacceptable safety risk.
Whistle blowers, that scroll out into a a long coloured paper tongue when sounded – a party favourite at family Christmas meals – are now classed as unsafe for all children under 14. The new rules are designed to protect children from the chance that a piece of the whistle could be swallowed and cause choking. [14]
The EU toy safety directive, agreed and implemented by Government, states that balloons must not be blown up by unsupervised children under the age of eight, in case they accidentally swallow them and choke.
Despite having been popular favourites for generations of children, party games including whistles and magnetic fishing games are to be banned because their small parts or chemicals used in making them are decreed to be too risky.
Apparently harmless toys that children have enjoyed for decades are now regarded by EU regulators as posing an unacceptable safety risk.
Whistle blowers, that scroll out into a a long coloured paper tongue when sounded – a party favourite at family Christmas meals – are now classed as unsafe for all children under 14. The new rules are designed to protect children from the chance that a piece of the whistle could be swallowed and cause choking. [14]
The street children
According to the Directorate for the Protection of Children, at the end of September there were 1400 homeless children nationwide. NGOs working with homeless children believed there were actually two or three times that number. Some estimate that as many as 2,000 children live in tunnels that run under the city. The collapse of communism, which negatively impacted the economy has forced children into poverty. As a result, these children resort to begging and stealing to survive. Romania is aiming to end its reputation for neglect of children and is hoping to close large orphanages. As a result, children are returning to violent homes or ending up on the streets. [19]
Life on the streets puts children at increased risk of violence, sexual exploitation, health problems, drug abuse, illiteracy and discrimination by the authorities. [10]
Life on the streets puts children at increased risk of violence, sexual exploitation, health problems, drug abuse, illiteracy and discrimination by the authorities. [10]
Child labour
According to a report published by the UNHCR - The UN Refugee Agency - An estimated 1.2 percent of children ages 5 to 14 years were counted as working in Romania in 2000.
Approximately 1.4 percent of all boys 5 to 14 were working compared to 0.9 percent of all girls in the same age group. The majority of working children were found in the agricultural sector (97.1 percent), followed by services (2.3 percent), and other sectors (0.6 percent). It is common for children in rural areas to work on family farms or help with household chores.
Children were involved in activities such as washing cars, selling merchandise on the streets, loading and unloading merchandise, and collecting waste products.
According to a 2004 report, between 60,000 to 70,000 children, more than 1 percent of all of Romania's children, were involved in activities identified as the worst forms of child labor, including begging, drug dealing, stealing, prostitution, or were victims of child trafficking.
Street children, children in urban areas, and Roma children are the most vulnerable to labor and sexual exploitation. It is estimated that about 30 percent of sex workers in Bucharest, the capital city, are under 18 years of age.
Child labor is one of many problems associated with poverty. In 2002, less than 2.0 percent of the population in Romania were living on less than USD 1 a day.
Romania is a country of origin, transit, and destination for trafficked women and girls. Victims from Moldova, Ukraine, and other parts of the former Soviet Union are trafficked through Romania to Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Italy, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, and South Korea for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
Boys have also been trafficked. Children were trafficked within Romania for purposes of begging or agricultural work. The National Authority for Child Protection reported that in 2005, it received 773 notifications of assistance rendered to victims of trafficking. Of that number, 317 children were repatriated, primarily from Western Europe. [15]
Approximately 1.4 percent of all boys 5 to 14 were working compared to 0.9 percent of all girls in the same age group. The majority of working children were found in the agricultural sector (97.1 percent), followed by services (2.3 percent), and other sectors (0.6 percent). It is common for children in rural areas to work on family farms or help with household chores.
Children were involved in activities such as washing cars, selling merchandise on the streets, loading and unloading merchandise, and collecting waste products.
According to a 2004 report, between 60,000 to 70,000 children, more than 1 percent of all of Romania's children, were involved in activities identified as the worst forms of child labor, including begging, drug dealing, stealing, prostitution, or were victims of child trafficking.
Street children, children in urban areas, and Roma children are the most vulnerable to labor and sexual exploitation. It is estimated that about 30 percent of sex workers in Bucharest, the capital city, are under 18 years of age.
Child labor is one of many problems associated with poverty. In 2002, less than 2.0 percent of the population in Romania were living on less than USD 1 a day.
Romania is a country of origin, transit, and destination for trafficked women and girls. Victims from Moldova, Ukraine, and other parts of the former Soviet Union are trafficked through Romania to Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Italy, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, and South Korea for the purpose of sexual exploitation.
Boys have also been trafficked. Children were trafficked within Romania for purposes of begging or agricultural work. The National Authority for Child Protection reported that in 2005, it received 773 notifications of assistance rendered to victims of trafficking. Of that number, 317 children were repatriated, primarily from Western Europe. [15]
A number of street children in Romania are involved in prostitution or have been forced to engage in the production of pornographic material, while other vulnerable children are also recruited by paedophiles or trafficking networks at a very early age.
Street children are among the most vulnerable groups of children, and both girls and boys are sexually exploited at a very early age. Rape is very frequent in the streets, and girls and very young boys are the main victims.
Child prostitution and human trafficking
Romania is mainly a country of origin for the trafficking in children for sexual purposes. The trafficking in Romanian children for prostitution to European Union (EU) countries has increased since January 2002, when Romanian citizens were no longer required to obtain a visa (for a stay of up to 90 days in a six-month period) for Schengen countries.
As in other eastern European countries, girls are recruited through false promises, made by acquaintances, friends or relatives, of well-paid jobs abroad that do not require particular skills (to work as babysitters, waitresses or housekeepers). Sometimes parents are also involved, and give written consent for their child to leave the country, even when they know that she/he will be exploited (sexually or otherwise).
The trafficking networks that recruit children in Romania follow pre-established routes, and the child is usually accompanied by different persons on the way to their final destination. [11]
As in other eastern European countries, girls are recruited through false promises, made by acquaintances, friends or relatives, of well-paid jobs abroad that do not require particular skills (to work as babysitters, waitresses or housekeepers). Sometimes parents are also involved, and give written consent for their child to leave the country, even when they know that she/he will be exploited (sexually or otherwise).
The trafficking networks that recruit children in Romania follow pre-established routes, and the child is usually accompanied by different persons on the way to their final destination. [11]
The sad issue of children being sold for prostitution and trafficked to other countries is not recent. As far back as 1997, journalist Nick Davies documented it already in an article published in the Daily Mail. Romania has joined the European Family in 2007 but not only has child prostitution and trafficking not be reduced, but it has worsened as immigration controls have become less rigorous.
Below, the story of 14-years-old Bella, documented by Nick Davies in 1997 [12]
There is a gypsy woman in Bucharest who spends several hours each night standing on the pavement of a residential street called Stirbei Voda, about five minutes drive from the city centre, selling a little something to the passers-by.
The gypsy woman does well. Most nights, she earns around 300,000 lei, which is more than most Romanians earn in a month. Nearly all of her customers are foreigners – British businessmen, for example – who are easily rich enough to pay.
The little something which she is selling is called Nella. She is 14 years old, small and slightly podgy. She has brown hair which she has done her best to brush into a sophisticated style and a little smear of turquoise make-up dabbed inexpertly over each of her eyes.
As long as my translator and I pay the gypsy her cash, Nella is allowed to talk, so now she sits in a smoky bar near by, staring down into her lap and fiddling with the skin on her thumb while she tells her story. It is a story that unlocks several scandals.
She says she comes from a town called Giurgiu about 40 miles south of Bucharest on the banks of the Danube. Her father worked in the oil fields there but he drank his wages and often, when he was drunk, he battered her. He did this from the earliest years of her life and since no one ever tried to defend her or to punish him, she decided to run. She says she was only six when she hid in the toilet of a passenger train and escaped to Bucharest.
For a year, she survived on the streets of the city, partly by begging coins from old women (she says they were the only people she dared to ask) and partly by sheltering in the home of a woman who noticed this lost child and offered her help. Nella thinks she might have been happy if she had been able to stay with this woman but after about a year, the woman was forced to leave Bucharest and took Nella to a children’s home.
There she lived for four years. No one tried to find out where she came from. No one offered to help her with her problems. When she was eleven, she ran away and found a distant relative of her mother’s in Bucharest, but she knew she could not stay there for long in case her bullying father found her. A woman in the same street said her sister might look after her. Nella grasped at this straw and found herself in the care of the gypsy woman.
For a few months, it was all right. The gypsy woman cared for her and cooked for her but then one day, shortly after Nella’s twelfth birthday, the woman told her that she wanted to sell her for sex. Nella refused to do it. The gypsy insisted. She threatened to put Nella back on the street: if she wanted to stay, she would have to obey. So Nella submitted and a few days later, she was sold to an Italian businessman for £15. A few weeks later she was sold again and then again until she was being sold once or twice each night. She doesn’t go to school, she doesn’t play with other children, she lives in a world of condoms and cigarette smoke. Nella says it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t care.
The point of Nella’s story is not just that she was beaten out of her home by her own father; nor that she lived rough on the streets of a European capital city when she was only six years old; nor even that she is being hired out now like some kind of human toy. The real point is that, as she has bounced from one kind of trouble to another, no one with any official power has ever tried to help her. In this, she shares the fate of tens of thousands of Romanian children. And that is the real scandal.
Seven years ago, as Romanians celebrated the fall of the Communist dictator Ceausescu, the West looked on in disbelief when the doors of his institutions were opened to reveal nearly one hundred thousand children in a state of the most dire neglect. They were emaciated, unwashed, badly clothed and maddened with boredom, rocking neurotically backwards and forwards in cots that had become prisons.
The West poured aid into the children’s homes. More than nine thousand charities arrived in the country bringing convoys of trucks loaded with toys and blankets and medical supplies. British charities led the way. The BBC children’s programme Blue Peter alone raised £6.4 million. The European Union and the World Bank sent millions more.
But seven years later, despite all of the money and all of the good will, in spite of the selfless efforts of a tide of British volunteers, the reality is that the troubled children of Romania continue to suffer. Travelling in Romania, I found evidence that:
* millions of pounds of aid has been wasted – misspent and sometimes stolen;
* tens of thousands of children in state homes continue to live in squalour and neglect;
* thousands of children have left the homes and ended up on the streets of Bucharest in a vortex of crime and sexual exploitation.
Most of these children are not orphans. They have been abandoned by their parents, originally because Ceausescu banned abortion and contraception but more recently because poverty in Romania has become so bad that some families simply cannot afford to support their children, particularly if they are handicapped.
Some families gave up their children to be adopted by Western families after Ceasescu’s fall, but the Romanian government stopped this. There are no welfare services. For seven years, most families in trouble have had no alternative but to take their children to one of the 600 state homes. There are now thousands more children in these places than there were seven years ago and, in most of them, conditions are still hellish.
A large part of the problem is that Romania is living in the long shadow of the old Communist dictatorship, a complicated mess of bureaucracy and corruption. Until six months ago, when a new government was elected, the fate of the country’s orphans was being pulled between five different government ministries. The new Secretary of State for Child Protection, Cristian Tabacaru, makes no attempt to hide the bungling which this produced.
“It was impossible to make a strategy,” he told me. “Each ministry wanted its own institutions to get the money. They established a national committee which they all sat on, but it did not function, because the representatives of the different ministries fought with each other and because none of them had any power in their ministries to take decisions.”
Millions of pounds sank in this bureaucratic swamp. Tabacaru, who was apointed only six months ago, says that the government ear-marked at least five million ECUs (about £4.2 million) of European Counterpart Funds for child protection, but he has managed to find only about a fifth of it. The rest has simply disappeared. “Nobody will tell me how this money was spent. They say they didn’t use it. Then we are looking in the budget and we cannot find it. It is not there.”
A further 12 million ECUs (about £8.4 million) was pledged for the children from the European Phare fund – money from Brussels to rebuild former Communist regimes. But almost all of this has been spent on ‘technical assistance’ – drawing up programmes, setting up experiments, conducting studies. Charities complain that only 300,000 ECUs was passed on to them to be spent directly on humanitarian aid for the children.
Ion Predescu, executive director of PNC, the largest children’s aid project in the country, told me: “Most of that money has never been seen. They should have given it to the local councils but the ministries would not let go of it.” Tabacaru says the money was misspent from the moment the programme was planned. “This is also about politics beause the government did not show enough interest to the problem of the children. The money was not well administered.”
A further $150 million from the World Bank went the same way. Under the terms of their deal with the bank, the Romanian health ministry were allowed to spend the money on a wide range of health projects including “childcare and adolescents”. Charities say that none of it – not one dollar – reached the children’s homes.
The Western charities who poured into Romania suffered also. Numerous charities report that impoverished staff at the homes stole the clothes and medicine and toys that were being trucked to the children. Some officials started small businesses, peddling stolen aid. In Oradea, in western Romania, the White Cross Mission from Truro in Cornwall, left $4,000 with a local priest to pay for the building of an extension to a house. Two years later, the extension does not exist, and the $4,000 has disappeared, apparently into a private business which the priest is running on the side.
Nick Fenton, director of Childhope UK, told me: “There is corruption and maladministration of funds. It’s not necessarily the fault of the Romanians. If you have been in a black hole for 40 years and suddenly there are all these nice people coming in like Father Christmas distributing cash and goodies and then disappearing, you just spend it the best way you know. Where there have been partnerships and control and training, there has been some success. But well-meaning people have dumped fairly large chunks of money and gone off elsewhere.”
Nella and her friends on the streets of Bucharest are the most visible sign of this chaos – some three thousand children who have spilled out of the homes in search of a better life. The main station, the Gara de Nord, has become a magnet for hundreds of street urchins who spend their winters down in the steaming sewers twenty feet below the street and their summers on the city streets. To talk to them is to enter a secret world of need and crime and sexual abuse.
At first, there is only one, a small boy with an impish face and a purple bobble hat. His face is caked in grime. His chest, which is visible through the gashes in his over-sized jacket, is the same. In his right fist, he is carrying a dirty white plastic bag and, every couple of minutes, he lifts it to his mouth and sucks on the opening. Glue. On the promise of a packet of cigarettes he agrees to talk.
He says his name is Adi. He is 12 years old, although he is as small and thin as a six-year-old. He has no idea where he was born or who his parents were but he knows he has lived here for five years, since he ran away from a children’s home in Bucharest to escape the beatings. He spends his days in the Metro begging from passengers on the trains or here, in the station, looking for scraps in the waste bins.
As he talks, half a dozen other young boys come up and when I hand Adi his packet of cigarettes, the biggest of them takes them for himself. They all start to offer to sell their own stories on the same terms. The big lad, whose name is Gheorghe, goes first. It is soon clear that he is in charge, that the small ones beg and steal on his behalf. And that is not all.
Gheorghe explains as a matter of fact how this French guy called Michel came to the station and bought some clothes for some of the boys. Gheorghe made friends with Michel, who bought him a radio and said he could earn some good money if he helped him with something. So Gheorghe agreed to round up a couple of the younger boys and go with them in Michel’s camper van. They drove out of town towards the airport, found a quiet street and then Gheorghe kept watch while Michel climbed into the back with the two boys and used them for sex. For this, he paid 50,000 lei – about £5. Gheorghe took it all.
Michel came back quite often in his camper van and bought more little presents for the boys and made the same deal with Gheorghe. Others did the same.There was an American called Chuck, a 45-year-old businessman from Oklahoma, who not only offered them food and drink but also set up an agency to help them and took them back to his flat so they had somewhere to sleep. Two months ago, Chuck was arrested and charged with sexually abusing two of them, who were aged 12 and 10. The police say they found video tapes of Chuck with four boys.
There were some Germans, too, who were interested in the girls who live on the streets. Earlier this month, police in Germany broke up a paedophile ring who had been trying to sell a large collection of videos showing the sexual abuse of children. One of the men, a cook who had been living with his wife and child in a small town just outside Vienna in Austria, told the police that the videos had been made in Romania. They had found the young girls in the main railway station, he said. They were aged between nine and twelve and, as far as he knew, they had picked up, filmed and abused at least 29 of them.
It is a dangerous life. There was a girl called Maria who was living with them but one New Year’s Eve she was gang-raped and she died. Some of them are HIV positive; others have tuberculosis. All of them are hungry.
By now, there are about a dozen street children, all elbowing their way to the front, trying to tell their stories, begging for cigarettes, sucking on their glue bags and all talking at once – about policemen who hassle them and people who beat them and how they have syphilis and nothing to eat. And, through all this blizzard of pain, all of them, over and over again say the same single thing about themselves: they used to live in children’s homes but life was so bad that they ran away.
In Romania today, everyone admits that most of the children’s homes are still bad. There are some which have been lucky – who received plenty of Western aid and who managed to reform themselves. Others received aid and then relapsed when the charity ended. Some received no aid at all.
From his vantage point at the head of the country’s largest charity for children, Ion Predescu estimates that at least two thirds of the children’s homes are still incapable of caring for their occupants. Nick Fenton from Childhope UK agrees: “A lot of the poorest and most revolting conditions appear to have been cleared up, at least in Bucharest. Outside Bucharest, conditions are often still bad.”
The homes are overcrowded. Charity workers report up to 40 children crammed into a single room, often not leaving for months at a time. They are understaffed. Cristian Andrei, who runs Romania’s service for children with AIDS, told me that it was common for one carer to be left with 30, 40 or even 50 children. “Sometimes the carer is really the janitor, because there are no specialised staff,” he said.
They cannot afford a healthy diet. Officially, they receive only 5,300 lei a day for food for each child – about 50 pence. Many receive less. The Vidra Hospital just outside Bucharest says it has only 2,700 lei a day for food for each of the 90 abandoned children in its care. Western volunteers say children under three are often left in their cots all day and fed on nothing but reconstituted milk and water. “Then they assess them as retarded and put them in an institution for life,” one told me.
In 1995, the director of the home in Focsani spent too much on food and was forced to make up the difference from his own pocket. In 1996, he persuaded a sponsor to help him pay for the food with the result that he managed to save a little money. The government then penalised him for failing to spend his allotted funds.
The homes are often short of drugs. The Lupu hospital in Bucharest reported that for several days at a time it was running out of the chemicals it needs to perform HIV tests. It has also run out of AZT with which to treat the AIDS children. Outside Bucharest, hospitals lack even the most basic medicine. Some cannot even check that donated blood is free of AIDS and other diseases.
Although most of the young children on the streets of Bucharest have run away from the conditions in these homes, there are hundreds of others who have been dumped on the streets at the age of 18 when the institutions will no longer cater for them.
I met two sisters, Maria and Daniella, aged 21 and 23, both well-dressed and confident, apparently enjoying the fruits of Romania’s economic freedom. As they talked, it became clear that their affluent appearance masked two bitter secrets.
The first was a childhood of despair which had begun with their drunken father beating their mother until finally the marriage collapsed and their mother, unable to support her young children, abandoned Maria and Daniella and her two other toddlers to the state. They had grown up together in a home in the south of Bucharest with their hair cropped, fighting for survival in the same conditions which were to shock the world.
The two of them remembered the officials who were running the home stealing the meat that the children were supposed to eat and taking the clothes that their mother sometimes brought for them. They remembered endless slappings and beatings, the fat and potatoes they were given for meals and how, sometimes, they would slip out on to the streets to beg for food. There was always the sound of children crying, they said, and the sight of the handicapped children rocking endlessly in their cots.
“I couldn’t believe that it had happened to us,” Daniella said. “I couldn’t believe parents would throw away their children like rubbish. I hate those people who ran the homes. I know how many bad things they did for us. I think they have no hearts. They work just to take their money. I dreamed about finding my parents so they could give me love and teach me good things and protect me and help me.”
It was when they came to talk about their lives after they left the orphanages that the other bitter secret emerged. Both of them have now become prostitutes. And they say that almost all of the other girls who they know from the children’s home have done the same. “There is nothing else for us,” Maria said.
Ion Predescu has seen the same pattern. “I would say at least 80% of the girls from the Bucharest homes end up as prostitutes. Some of them leave the homes with no ID card – so they cannot get work. Most of them leave with no address to go to – so they cannot get work. And they have learned no skills in there. The homes teach them how to make electrical transformers. But these transformers have not been used in the outside world for 20 years. It is a useless skill.”
Now there are signs that life may become even harder. Of the nine thousand charities who once came to help the children of Romania, Predescu believes fewer then twenty are still there. The aid has moved away to Zaire and Rwanda and Bosnia. The new government is making deep cuts in public spending: the budget for the children’s homes is likely to fall even lower and the ministry of health is axing nearly 30,000 staff, some of whom have been working in the homes.
Everyone says that there is one glimmer of hope for the children. The new government is trying. Cristian Tabacaru finally has the power which the old confusion of ministries lacked. He has ideas. He has scrapped the old Communist law which compelled families in trouble to give their children to insitutions. He wants to take the children back to their families, to provide them with support, to let the local councils develop their own social services. But on his first day in office, the Minister of Finance told him: “Congratulations on your new job. Unfortunately, there is no budget for your programme.”
Outside the Gara de Nord, a rat runs along the pavement carrying a crust of bread as big as its head. It turns off the pavement, hops through some cast-iron railings and disappears into a group of half a dozen small slumbering bodies on a patch of grass.
By the taxi rank opposite the Hotel Continental, a young pimp offers to sell me Gina for £10. She is young and pretty and she says she must be careful. She was arrested by the police the other day. No, they didn’t fine her. They took her to a room with a long table and some filing cabinets and took it in turns to rape her.
A few minutes drive away, on Stirbei Voda, a gypsy woman smiles at the passers by. [12]
Below, the story of 14-years-old Bella, documented by Nick Davies in 1997 [12]
There is a gypsy woman in Bucharest who spends several hours each night standing on the pavement of a residential street called Stirbei Voda, about five minutes drive from the city centre, selling a little something to the passers-by.
The gypsy woman does well. Most nights, she earns around 300,000 lei, which is more than most Romanians earn in a month. Nearly all of her customers are foreigners – British businessmen, for example – who are easily rich enough to pay.
The little something which she is selling is called Nella. She is 14 years old, small and slightly podgy. She has brown hair which she has done her best to brush into a sophisticated style and a little smear of turquoise make-up dabbed inexpertly over each of her eyes.
As long as my translator and I pay the gypsy her cash, Nella is allowed to talk, so now she sits in a smoky bar near by, staring down into her lap and fiddling with the skin on her thumb while she tells her story. It is a story that unlocks several scandals.
She says she comes from a town called Giurgiu about 40 miles south of Bucharest on the banks of the Danube. Her father worked in the oil fields there but he drank his wages and often, when he was drunk, he battered her. He did this from the earliest years of her life and since no one ever tried to defend her or to punish him, she decided to run. She says she was only six when she hid in the toilet of a passenger train and escaped to Bucharest.
For a year, she survived on the streets of the city, partly by begging coins from old women (she says they were the only people she dared to ask) and partly by sheltering in the home of a woman who noticed this lost child and offered her help. Nella thinks she might have been happy if she had been able to stay with this woman but after about a year, the woman was forced to leave Bucharest and took Nella to a children’s home.
There she lived for four years. No one tried to find out where she came from. No one offered to help her with her problems. When she was eleven, she ran away and found a distant relative of her mother’s in Bucharest, but she knew she could not stay there for long in case her bullying father found her. A woman in the same street said her sister might look after her. Nella grasped at this straw and found herself in the care of the gypsy woman.
For a few months, it was all right. The gypsy woman cared for her and cooked for her but then one day, shortly after Nella’s twelfth birthday, the woman told her that she wanted to sell her for sex. Nella refused to do it. The gypsy insisted. She threatened to put Nella back on the street: if she wanted to stay, she would have to obey. So Nella submitted and a few days later, she was sold to an Italian businessman for £15. A few weeks later she was sold again and then again until she was being sold once or twice each night. She doesn’t go to school, she doesn’t play with other children, she lives in a world of condoms and cigarette smoke. Nella says it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t care.
The point of Nella’s story is not just that she was beaten out of her home by her own father; nor that she lived rough on the streets of a European capital city when she was only six years old; nor even that she is being hired out now like some kind of human toy. The real point is that, as she has bounced from one kind of trouble to another, no one with any official power has ever tried to help her. In this, she shares the fate of tens of thousands of Romanian children. And that is the real scandal.
Seven years ago, as Romanians celebrated the fall of the Communist dictator Ceausescu, the West looked on in disbelief when the doors of his institutions were opened to reveal nearly one hundred thousand children in a state of the most dire neglect. They were emaciated, unwashed, badly clothed and maddened with boredom, rocking neurotically backwards and forwards in cots that had become prisons.
The West poured aid into the children’s homes. More than nine thousand charities arrived in the country bringing convoys of trucks loaded with toys and blankets and medical supplies. British charities led the way. The BBC children’s programme Blue Peter alone raised £6.4 million. The European Union and the World Bank sent millions more.
But seven years later, despite all of the money and all of the good will, in spite of the selfless efforts of a tide of British volunteers, the reality is that the troubled children of Romania continue to suffer. Travelling in Romania, I found evidence that:
* millions of pounds of aid has been wasted – misspent and sometimes stolen;
* tens of thousands of children in state homes continue to live in squalour and neglect;
* thousands of children have left the homes and ended up on the streets of Bucharest in a vortex of crime and sexual exploitation.
Most of these children are not orphans. They have been abandoned by their parents, originally because Ceausescu banned abortion and contraception but more recently because poverty in Romania has become so bad that some families simply cannot afford to support their children, particularly if they are handicapped.
Some families gave up their children to be adopted by Western families after Ceasescu’s fall, but the Romanian government stopped this. There are no welfare services. For seven years, most families in trouble have had no alternative but to take their children to one of the 600 state homes. There are now thousands more children in these places than there were seven years ago and, in most of them, conditions are still hellish.
A large part of the problem is that Romania is living in the long shadow of the old Communist dictatorship, a complicated mess of bureaucracy and corruption. Until six months ago, when a new government was elected, the fate of the country’s orphans was being pulled between five different government ministries. The new Secretary of State for Child Protection, Cristian Tabacaru, makes no attempt to hide the bungling which this produced.
“It was impossible to make a strategy,” he told me. “Each ministry wanted its own institutions to get the money. They established a national committee which they all sat on, but it did not function, because the representatives of the different ministries fought with each other and because none of them had any power in their ministries to take decisions.”
Millions of pounds sank in this bureaucratic swamp. Tabacaru, who was apointed only six months ago, says that the government ear-marked at least five million ECUs (about £4.2 million) of European Counterpart Funds for child protection, but he has managed to find only about a fifth of it. The rest has simply disappeared. “Nobody will tell me how this money was spent. They say they didn’t use it. Then we are looking in the budget and we cannot find it. It is not there.”
A further 12 million ECUs (about £8.4 million) was pledged for the children from the European Phare fund – money from Brussels to rebuild former Communist regimes. But almost all of this has been spent on ‘technical assistance’ – drawing up programmes, setting up experiments, conducting studies. Charities complain that only 300,000 ECUs was passed on to them to be spent directly on humanitarian aid for the children.
Ion Predescu, executive director of PNC, the largest children’s aid project in the country, told me: “Most of that money has never been seen. They should have given it to the local councils but the ministries would not let go of it.” Tabacaru says the money was misspent from the moment the programme was planned. “This is also about politics beause the government did not show enough interest to the problem of the children. The money was not well administered.”
A further $150 million from the World Bank went the same way. Under the terms of their deal with the bank, the Romanian health ministry were allowed to spend the money on a wide range of health projects including “childcare and adolescents”. Charities say that none of it – not one dollar – reached the children’s homes.
The Western charities who poured into Romania suffered also. Numerous charities report that impoverished staff at the homes stole the clothes and medicine and toys that were being trucked to the children. Some officials started small businesses, peddling stolen aid. In Oradea, in western Romania, the White Cross Mission from Truro in Cornwall, left $4,000 with a local priest to pay for the building of an extension to a house. Two years later, the extension does not exist, and the $4,000 has disappeared, apparently into a private business which the priest is running on the side.
Nick Fenton, director of Childhope UK, told me: “There is corruption and maladministration of funds. It’s not necessarily the fault of the Romanians. If you have been in a black hole for 40 years and suddenly there are all these nice people coming in like Father Christmas distributing cash and goodies and then disappearing, you just spend it the best way you know. Where there have been partnerships and control and training, there has been some success. But well-meaning people have dumped fairly large chunks of money and gone off elsewhere.”
Nella and her friends on the streets of Bucharest are the most visible sign of this chaos – some three thousand children who have spilled out of the homes in search of a better life. The main station, the Gara de Nord, has become a magnet for hundreds of street urchins who spend their winters down in the steaming sewers twenty feet below the street and their summers on the city streets. To talk to them is to enter a secret world of need and crime and sexual abuse.
At first, there is only one, a small boy with an impish face and a purple bobble hat. His face is caked in grime. His chest, which is visible through the gashes in his over-sized jacket, is the same. In his right fist, he is carrying a dirty white plastic bag and, every couple of minutes, he lifts it to his mouth and sucks on the opening. Glue. On the promise of a packet of cigarettes he agrees to talk.
He says his name is Adi. He is 12 years old, although he is as small and thin as a six-year-old. He has no idea where he was born or who his parents were but he knows he has lived here for five years, since he ran away from a children’s home in Bucharest to escape the beatings. He spends his days in the Metro begging from passengers on the trains or here, in the station, looking for scraps in the waste bins.
As he talks, half a dozen other young boys come up and when I hand Adi his packet of cigarettes, the biggest of them takes them for himself. They all start to offer to sell their own stories on the same terms. The big lad, whose name is Gheorghe, goes first. It is soon clear that he is in charge, that the small ones beg and steal on his behalf. And that is not all.
Gheorghe explains as a matter of fact how this French guy called Michel came to the station and bought some clothes for some of the boys. Gheorghe made friends with Michel, who bought him a radio and said he could earn some good money if he helped him with something. So Gheorghe agreed to round up a couple of the younger boys and go with them in Michel’s camper van. They drove out of town towards the airport, found a quiet street and then Gheorghe kept watch while Michel climbed into the back with the two boys and used them for sex. For this, he paid 50,000 lei – about £5. Gheorghe took it all.
Michel came back quite often in his camper van and bought more little presents for the boys and made the same deal with Gheorghe. Others did the same.There was an American called Chuck, a 45-year-old businessman from Oklahoma, who not only offered them food and drink but also set up an agency to help them and took them back to his flat so they had somewhere to sleep. Two months ago, Chuck was arrested and charged with sexually abusing two of them, who were aged 12 and 10. The police say they found video tapes of Chuck with four boys.
There were some Germans, too, who were interested in the girls who live on the streets. Earlier this month, police in Germany broke up a paedophile ring who had been trying to sell a large collection of videos showing the sexual abuse of children. One of the men, a cook who had been living with his wife and child in a small town just outside Vienna in Austria, told the police that the videos had been made in Romania. They had found the young girls in the main railway station, he said. They were aged between nine and twelve and, as far as he knew, they had picked up, filmed and abused at least 29 of them.
It is a dangerous life. There was a girl called Maria who was living with them but one New Year’s Eve she was gang-raped and she died. Some of them are HIV positive; others have tuberculosis. All of them are hungry.
By now, there are about a dozen street children, all elbowing their way to the front, trying to tell their stories, begging for cigarettes, sucking on their glue bags and all talking at once – about policemen who hassle them and people who beat them and how they have syphilis and nothing to eat. And, through all this blizzard of pain, all of them, over and over again say the same single thing about themselves: they used to live in children’s homes but life was so bad that they ran away.
In Romania today, everyone admits that most of the children’s homes are still bad. There are some which have been lucky – who received plenty of Western aid and who managed to reform themselves. Others received aid and then relapsed when the charity ended. Some received no aid at all.
From his vantage point at the head of the country’s largest charity for children, Ion Predescu estimates that at least two thirds of the children’s homes are still incapable of caring for their occupants. Nick Fenton from Childhope UK agrees: “A lot of the poorest and most revolting conditions appear to have been cleared up, at least in Bucharest. Outside Bucharest, conditions are often still bad.”
The homes are overcrowded. Charity workers report up to 40 children crammed into a single room, often not leaving for months at a time. They are understaffed. Cristian Andrei, who runs Romania’s service for children with AIDS, told me that it was common for one carer to be left with 30, 40 or even 50 children. “Sometimes the carer is really the janitor, because there are no specialised staff,” he said.
They cannot afford a healthy diet. Officially, they receive only 5,300 lei a day for food for each child – about 50 pence. Many receive less. The Vidra Hospital just outside Bucharest says it has only 2,700 lei a day for food for each of the 90 abandoned children in its care. Western volunteers say children under three are often left in their cots all day and fed on nothing but reconstituted milk and water. “Then they assess them as retarded and put them in an institution for life,” one told me.
In 1995, the director of the home in Focsani spent too much on food and was forced to make up the difference from his own pocket. In 1996, he persuaded a sponsor to help him pay for the food with the result that he managed to save a little money. The government then penalised him for failing to spend his allotted funds.
The homes are often short of drugs. The Lupu hospital in Bucharest reported that for several days at a time it was running out of the chemicals it needs to perform HIV tests. It has also run out of AZT with which to treat the AIDS children. Outside Bucharest, hospitals lack even the most basic medicine. Some cannot even check that donated blood is free of AIDS and other diseases.
Although most of the young children on the streets of Bucharest have run away from the conditions in these homes, there are hundreds of others who have been dumped on the streets at the age of 18 when the institutions will no longer cater for them.
I met two sisters, Maria and Daniella, aged 21 and 23, both well-dressed and confident, apparently enjoying the fruits of Romania’s economic freedom. As they talked, it became clear that their affluent appearance masked two bitter secrets.
The first was a childhood of despair which had begun with their drunken father beating their mother until finally the marriage collapsed and their mother, unable to support her young children, abandoned Maria and Daniella and her two other toddlers to the state. They had grown up together in a home in the south of Bucharest with their hair cropped, fighting for survival in the same conditions which were to shock the world.
The two of them remembered the officials who were running the home stealing the meat that the children were supposed to eat and taking the clothes that their mother sometimes brought for them. They remembered endless slappings and beatings, the fat and potatoes they were given for meals and how, sometimes, they would slip out on to the streets to beg for food. There was always the sound of children crying, they said, and the sight of the handicapped children rocking endlessly in their cots.
“I couldn’t believe that it had happened to us,” Daniella said. “I couldn’t believe parents would throw away their children like rubbish. I hate those people who ran the homes. I know how many bad things they did for us. I think they have no hearts. They work just to take their money. I dreamed about finding my parents so they could give me love and teach me good things and protect me and help me.”
It was when they came to talk about their lives after they left the orphanages that the other bitter secret emerged. Both of them have now become prostitutes. And they say that almost all of the other girls who they know from the children’s home have done the same. “There is nothing else for us,” Maria said.
Ion Predescu has seen the same pattern. “I would say at least 80% of the girls from the Bucharest homes end up as prostitutes. Some of them leave the homes with no ID card – so they cannot get work. Most of them leave with no address to go to – so they cannot get work. And they have learned no skills in there. The homes teach them how to make electrical transformers. But these transformers have not been used in the outside world for 20 years. It is a useless skill.”
Now there are signs that life may become even harder. Of the nine thousand charities who once came to help the children of Romania, Predescu believes fewer then twenty are still there. The aid has moved away to Zaire and Rwanda and Bosnia. The new government is making deep cuts in public spending: the budget for the children’s homes is likely to fall even lower and the ministry of health is axing nearly 30,000 staff, some of whom have been working in the homes.
Everyone says that there is one glimmer of hope for the children. The new government is trying. Cristian Tabacaru finally has the power which the old confusion of ministries lacked. He has ideas. He has scrapped the old Communist law which compelled families in trouble to give their children to insitutions. He wants to take the children back to their families, to provide them with support, to let the local councils develop their own social services. But on his first day in office, the Minister of Finance told him: “Congratulations on your new job. Unfortunately, there is no budget for your programme.”
Outside the Gara de Nord, a rat runs along the pavement carrying a crust of bread as big as its head. It turns off the pavement, hops through some cast-iron railings and disappears into a group of half a dozen small slumbering bodies on a patch of grass.
By the taxi rank opposite the Hotel Continental, a young pimp offers to sell me Gina for £10. She is young and pretty and she says she must be careful. She was arrested by the police the other day. No, they didn’t fine her. They took her to a room with a long table and some filing cabinets and took it in turns to rape her.
A few minutes drive away, on Stirbei Voda, a gypsy woman smiles at the passers by. [12]
Exposure to domestic violence and sexual abuse
Exposure to sexual abuse and domestic violence is significant in Romania. Both impact on the child's psychological health and determine behaviour patterns including aggressive violence which can be enacted against people, or the readily available supply of street animals. To explore this subject in greater depth please read the article 'Breaking the Cycle of Abuse' on the page ALL CONNECTED.
Exposure to animal abuse is another form of psychological violence
The 'Making the Link' Pilot Study found that in Bistrita, Romania, 86,3 % of the study group children had witnessed animal abuse in public. 65 % claimed to have been emotionally affected by the experience. [13]
Such abuse has been identified as poisoning, hanging and mutilation of homeless animals. This provides a direct contrast to western societies where almost 50% of dog owners considered their pets to be ‘members of the family’. A survey of psychologists who practice as therapists in the USA, indicated that the overwhelming majority (87%) considered animal abuse to be a mental health issue.
Children (10%) who admitted to abusing animals also correlated with aggression against people and property. They identified a predilection for committing theft but also displayed reduced empathy and suicidal tendencies.
Extrapolation of the study numbers over a societal time-frame of 40 years would suggest around 4,000 individuals in a typical Romanian city with a population of 60,000, exhibiting such aggressive, crime-oriented tendencies.
Animal abuser profile correlations:
Such abuse has been identified as poisoning, hanging and mutilation of homeless animals. This provides a direct contrast to western societies where almost 50% of dog owners considered their pets to be ‘members of the family’. A survey of psychologists who practice as therapists in the USA, indicated that the overwhelming majority (87%) considered animal abuse to be a mental health issue.
Children (10%) who admitted to abusing animals also correlated with aggression against people and property. They identified a predilection for committing theft but also displayed reduced empathy and suicidal tendencies.
Extrapolation of the study numbers over a societal time-frame of 40 years would suggest around 4,000 individuals in a typical Romanian city with a population of 60,000, exhibiting such aggressive, crime-oriented tendencies.
Animal abuser profile correlations:
- Contemplating suicide (r=.213 p<0.01)
- Aggression (e.g. N=168), fighting (r= .202 p<.001), physically attacking people (r= .277, p< 0.01), hot temper (r= .224 p<0.01)
- Destruction of own and other's property - Own property (r=.214 p<0.01) - Other's property (r= .350 p< 0.001)
- Mood swings (r= .162 P<0.01)
- Arson (r= .208 P<0.01 )
- Theft (r= .269 P<0.01)
- Thoughts that others would think were strange ( r= .221 P<0.01)
- Think about sex too much (r= .271 P<0.01)
- Honesty (r = -.236 P <0.01)
- Get into many fights (r = .202 P<0.01)
In his article 'The Emergence of Callous and Unemotional Traits in the Developing Child' published in the book 'The Invisible Rape of Europe', Clinical Professor and Executive Director of the Institute for Human-Animal Connection at the University of Denver (USA), Philip Tedeschi, who is also a Project-Partner of the 'Making the Link' Study, explains why exposure to animal abuse is a form of psychological violence:
Over 14 years ago, researcher Arnold Arluke suggested that children’s exposure to violence had the potential to further the “generalization of deviance", whereby the abuse of animals can be internalized by children as one of a range of anti-social behaviors learned by children. Since that time, in academic and research initiatives around the world and with a broad consensus among child development specialists, there is agreement that exposure to animal abuse is significant in teaching children a deviant and pathological interaction pattern that may manifest within a behavioral and psychosocial spectrum of associated with violence and antisocial functioning in the developing anti social adolescent and adult.
One of the current agendas in responding to trends of human generated violence, is to define the origins and the development trajectory of Psychopathy. In work done in both the US and elsewhere there is incontrovertible evidence that early exposure to animal abuse has the outcome of establishing the psychological environment for the early on set of what is often referenced as “Callous and Unemotional Traits”. For youth who in early developmental terms get exposed to substantial suffering, cruelty and violence are at increased risk of developing a mental status that makes them less sensitive to other's feelings and function in a less empathic manner. It also appears to contribute to impulsive, aggressive and antisocial patterns, with increased risk for the development of, and eventual diagnosis of conduct disorder.
Youths who present with both lower impulse control and also minimal empathic regard for others are at greater risk of the development of adult antisocial functioning and adult psychopathic personality traits. In studies that have examined this developmental trajectory it appears that the development of callous aggression are at significantly increased risk of engaging in cruel behaviors. In 1987, researchers, Felthous and Kellert concluded that exposure to animal abuse in children posed a substantial risk factor for the development of disruptive behavior disorders, the childhood diagnostic precursor, to anti-social characteristics in adults. At that time they defined this exposure to animal abuse as “A pattern of deliberately, repeatedly and unnecessarily hurting vertebrate animals in a manner likely to cause serious injury". Of significance in this early definition was that the cruelty was inflicted on animals in “deliberate” ways and “knowingly”. These definitions should alert us to the significant mental health implications of the institutionalized extermination laws and even social normative activity of animal cruelty. This should particularly be of concern when youth are repeatedly exposed to cruelty. This type of cruelty has been found to be distinct from a psychological standpoint from accidental and emphasize the deliberate nature of the cruel action.
As we further explore this issue and attempt to establish prevention models that would ensure that youths are not developing under circumstances shaping them with a low empathy, callousness and unemotional traits, we consistently find that these behaviors are generally learned. The learning can be within a family context, situational and broader social exposure. From this empirical conclusion it is clear that we must be vigilant to the experience and exposure to cruelty that occur, especially while children are in formative developmental stages. There are many other dimensions related to how animal cruelty can contribute to increased risk factors in children. This idea has very important implication for public health mandates, community intervention policies to support the health and wellbeing of children and the treatment and response to animals we all live among. [16]
Over 14 years ago, researcher Arnold Arluke suggested that children’s exposure to violence had the potential to further the “generalization of deviance", whereby the abuse of animals can be internalized by children as one of a range of anti-social behaviors learned by children. Since that time, in academic and research initiatives around the world and with a broad consensus among child development specialists, there is agreement that exposure to animal abuse is significant in teaching children a deviant and pathological interaction pattern that may manifest within a behavioral and psychosocial spectrum of associated with violence and antisocial functioning in the developing anti social adolescent and adult.
One of the current agendas in responding to trends of human generated violence, is to define the origins and the development trajectory of Psychopathy. In work done in both the US and elsewhere there is incontrovertible evidence that early exposure to animal abuse has the outcome of establishing the psychological environment for the early on set of what is often referenced as “Callous and Unemotional Traits”. For youth who in early developmental terms get exposed to substantial suffering, cruelty and violence are at increased risk of developing a mental status that makes them less sensitive to other's feelings and function in a less empathic manner. It also appears to contribute to impulsive, aggressive and antisocial patterns, with increased risk for the development of, and eventual diagnosis of conduct disorder.
Youths who present with both lower impulse control and also minimal empathic regard for others are at greater risk of the development of adult antisocial functioning and adult psychopathic personality traits. In studies that have examined this developmental trajectory it appears that the development of callous aggression are at significantly increased risk of engaging in cruel behaviors. In 1987, researchers, Felthous and Kellert concluded that exposure to animal abuse in children posed a substantial risk factor for the development of disruptive behavior disorders, the childhood diagnostic precursor, to anti-social characteristics in adults. At that time they defined this exposure to animal abuse as “A pattern of deliberately, repeatedly and unnecessarily hurting vertebrate animals in a manner likely to cause serious injury". Of significance in this early definition was that the cruelty was inflicted on animals in “deliberate” ways and “knowingly”. These definitions should alert us to the significant mental health implications of the institutionalized extermination laws and even social normative activity of animal cruelty. This should particularly be of concern when youth are repeatedly exposed to cruelty. This type of cruelty has been found to be distinct from a psychological standpoint from accidental and emphasize the deliberate nature of the cruel action.
As we further explore this issue and attempt to establish prevention models that would ensure that youths are not developing under circumstances shaping them with a low empathy, callousness and unemotional traits, we consistently find that these behaviors are generally learned. The learning can be within a family context, situational and broader social exposure. From this empirical conclusion it is clear that we must be vigilant to the experience and exposure to cruelty that occur, especially while children are in formative developmental stages. There are many other dimensions related to how animal cruelty can contribute to increased risk factors in children. This idea has very important implication for public health mandates, community intervention policies to support the health and wellbeing of children and the treatment and response to animals we all live among. [16]
CHARTER OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
Article 24 - The rights of the child
1. Children shall have the right to such protection and care as is necessary for their well-being. They may express their views freely. Such views shall be taken into consideration on matters which concern them in accordance with their age and maturity.
2. In all actions relating to children, whether taken by public authorities or private institutions, the child’s best interests must be a primary consideration.
List of References
1) http://www.sos-childrensvillages.org/where-we-help/europe/romania
2) http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/orphaned-history-child-welfare-crisis-romania
3) http://www.ziare.com/victor-ponta/premier/ponta-nu-stiu-daca-mai-e-vreun-copil-chiar-si-de-clasa-i-care-sa-nu-aiba-telefon-cu-internet-1321941
4) http://globalgeopolitics.net/wordpress/2009/05/13/education-illiteracy-rising-in-parts-of-europe/
5) http://www.unicef.org/romania/children_1602.html
6) http://www.unicef.org/romania/children_1604.html
7) http://mdac.info/en/content/european-commission-funding-disability-segregation-and-abuse-breaches-international-law
8) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/romania/8128644/My-glimpse-of-hell-and-the-pitiful-children-who-have-been-betrayed.html
9) http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/05/roma-m23.html
10) http://www.unicef.org/romania/children_1601.html
11) http://www.ecpat.net/sites/default/files/Global_Monitoring_Report-ROMANIA.pdf
12) http://www.nickdavies.net/1997/06/01/child-abuse-and-corruption-in-romania-two-stories/
13) http://theinvisiblerapeofeurope.weebly.com/nothing-happens-in-isolation.html
14) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/
15) http://www.refworld.org/docid/48d749043b.html
16) http://theinvisiblerapeofeurope.weebly.com/the-emergence-of-callous-and-unemotional-traits-in-the-developing-child.html
17) http://www.endcorporalpunishment.org/pages/pdfs/newsletters/Issue27-June2014.pdf
Pictures of Roma children and their families via Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2424296/At-home-Roma-Remote-villages-people-struggle-terrible-poverty-continue-traditional-way-life.html#ixzz3If1zTczd
18) http://davidchronic.com/2014/06/09/the-situation-in-romania-2014/
19) http://www.antena3.ro/romania/realitatea-lagarelor-de-copii-din-romania-aproape-1-500-de-copii-institutionalizati-au-murit-in-276491.html
1) http://www.sos-childrensvillages.org/where-we-help/europe/romania
2) http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/orphaned-history-child-welfare-crisis-romania
3) http://www.ziare.com/victor-ponta/premier/ponta-nu-stiu-daca-mai-e-vreun-copil-chiar-si-de-clasa-i-care-sa-nu-aiba-telefon-cu-internet-1321941
4) http://globalgeopolitics.net/wordpress/2009/05/13/education-illiteracy-rising-in-parts-of-europe/
5) http://www.unicef.org/romania/children_1602.html
6) http://www.unicef.org/romania/children_1604.html
7) http://mdac.info/en/content/european-commission-funding-disability-segregation-and-abuse-breaches-international-law
8) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/romania/8128644/My-glimpse-of-hell-and-the-pitiful-children-who-have-been-betrayed.html
9) http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/05/roma-m23.html
10) http://www.unicef.org/romania/children_1601.html
11) http://www.ecpat.net/sites/default/files/Global_Monitoring_Report-ROMANIA.pdf
12) http://www.nickdavies.net/1997/06/01/child-abuse-and-corruption-in-romania-two-stories/
13) http://theinvisiblerapeofeurope.weebly.com/nothing-happens-in-isolation.html
14) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/
15) http://www.refworld.org/docid/48d749043b.html
16) http://theinvisiblerapeofeurope.weebly.com/the-emergence-of-callous-and-unemotional-traits-in-the-developing-child.html
17) http://www.endcorporalpunishment.org/pages/pdfs/newsletters/Issue27-June2014.pdf
Pictures of Roma children and their families via Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2424296/At-home-Roma-Remote-villages-people-struggle-terrible-poverty-continue-traditional-way-life.html#ixzz3If1zTczd
18) http://davidchronic.com/2014/06/09/the-situation-in-romania-2014/
19) http://www.antena3.ro/romania/realitatea-lagarelor-de-copii-din-romania-aproape-1-500-de-copii-institutionalizati-au-murit-in-276491.html