The Orphans Still Fighting For Life

Sixteen years after the West was shocked by images of abused children in Romanian orphanages, the decaying homes are being closed to comply with EU membership demands. But many of the orphans are being pushed out into places where they are even more at risk.

Peter Stanford in Bucharest
Sunday March 26, 2006
The Observer

The group of teenagers standing in the seedy hallway look more intrigued than worried. 'Are you the police?'

The police drop in regularly at the Pinocchio Orphanage in Bucharest, just around the corner from the Gara de Nord railway terminus. Many of its 100 residents have been found on the streets near the station, or in the sewers below.

With battered concrete stairwells and corridors, peeling paintwork, bars on the windows, bunk beds packed into too-small rooms, an ever-present pack of stray dogs and an overwhelming stench of boiled food and stale cigarettes, Pinocchio is just the sort of institution that is supposed to be part of Romania's unhappy communist past. One of the conditions for the country's imminent European Union membership is total reform of its childcare system. Europe wanted no more of the images of starving, children in crumbling orphanages which made Romania a byword for child neglect after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.

Officials are keen to trumpet they are models of good practice in looking after children. Cosmina Simiean, senior counsellor to the child protection minister, goes so far as to suggest Romanian provision is now better than in other EU nations. A decision is expected next month on whether Romania can join the EU in 2007 or must wait until 2008.

There has been some improvement. Supported by millions of euros from Brussels, the number of children in institutions has dropped by half from almost 60,000 in the year 2000. The number reunited with families or in foster or small family style homes has risen from 12,000 to 50,000. Amid the back-slapping, however, are voices of concern - not least that of the author JK Rowling, who was in Bucharest last month - at how far reforms on paper have penetrated orphanages like the Pinocchio.

Dealing with the needs of a generation of children abandoned in poor facilities, EU pressure may be dictating too ambitious a timetable for dispersing the troubled youngsters into a community too poor and prejudiced to sustain them.

Romanians are impatient to play down anything that might postpone the happy ending of their journey from communist hell-hole to modern European state. Having, on average, one seventh of the purchasing power of western Europeans, they believe, perhaps naively, that EU membership will transform an economy where the majority still live in grinding poverty, crammed three generations to a room in crumbling Soviet-era tower blocks, or scrape a living in farming. Next to such hopes, the fate of children long accustomed to being shut away, out of sight and out of mind, is little more than a distraction.

So are the children, such as Sauter, 17, at Pinocchio just at the back of the queue of beneficiaries of a brave new world?

Tall, blond and teenager-gaunt, Sauter has a smattering of English. He has been here for 11 years. After his parents divorced, his father lost contact and his mother went off with his little sister to find work in Vienna. She handed her son over to the care of the state. He has heard nothing from her since. He stares defiantly when questioned, his arms crossed over his chest. 'I never think about her.'

Such stories are commonplace. Romania's economy relies on funds sent back from expatriates, and many parents go abroad as the only way out of poverty. Most leave their children behind.

There is a pervasive culture of child abandonment. Next to Sauter on a derelict sofa in the bleak day-room, the TV oozing music in the corner, Loreta, 16, is another long-term resident, with her brother Markuf. She says, without ever meeting my eyes, that their mother works and lives on the streets of Bucharest and comes to see her once a year. Anca, also 16, was thrown out by her stepfather.

Emilia, 17, has no use for parents - hers abandoned her to go overseas. Minutes later she is in tears, comforted by the friends who, she says, are her family now. Emilia is to be one of the first Pinocchio children to go into a smaller home, staffed by 'social mothers'. Provision can be made until Emilia is 26 if she continues in education. But she doesn't want to go. She cannot conceive of life outside Pinocchio, but it is earmarked for eventual closure.

It may be easier to find homes for the younger children. Their craving for affection is irresistible. Some linger in the corridor outside, waiting to hug me. One calls me 'mama'. But who will take on a difficult teenager? Then there is the prejudice against the sizeable gypsy minority.

A disproportionate number of children in care come from Roma backgrounds where family bonds have traditionally proved weaker. Most Romanians refuse even to countenance taking on a Roma child.

The number of children abandoned here is staggering. In just one of Bucharest's six administrative sectors, 135 children a year are abandoned in maternity units by mothers. That is more than one every three days. Unicef puts the national annual figure at 9,000, hardly changed from the Ceausescu era.

You have to go back to communist times to understand the mindset. The dictatorship encouraged breeding to staff state-controlled industries. Contraception and abortion were not available. Parents travelling to towns to find work were forced to stay in dormitories and leave their children behind in state care. A 1954 law described children as the property of the state rather than of their families.

Ceausescu also had a fascist streak. Any child who was less than physically or mentally perfect was immediately taken away and put in a closed institution where they couldn't be seen. A hair lip brought a life sentence.

'In terms of children,' says Emma Nicholson, the Liberal Democrat MEP and EU rapporteur on Romania from 1999 to 2004, 'Ceausescu left Romania with the worst of both vile ideologies he embraced. Changing that mentality is one of the greatest challenges facing the country.' Adina Codres, head of child abandonment in Bucharest, adds: 'Our main problem now is the emotional immaturity of parents. Many don't have any parental role models to imitate.' In western Europe we are used to social services being forced to step in to help children in dysfunctional families. In Romania, parents approach authorities to hand over their own children, seeing the state as a relief from a burden.

There is, nevertheless, much pride among child protection services at what has been achieved in a short time. Every childcare office we visit presents folders of statistics for children moved out of old institutions back into families.

In central Bucharest, in the shadow of the city's Arcul de Triumpf, a copy of the Parisian original, there is the building once called simply Cradle Number One - a grim 500-bed orphanage. It has been renamed St Ecaterina's and refurbished with EU money as a daycare centre for 200 disabled children, with speech therapists, psychologists and hydrotherapy rooms.

Seven-year-old Emilian has come from Moldavia for therapy for his autism. His grandmother, accompanying him in her traditional black hat and red shawl, has already seen an improvement.

In another part of the capital, St Andrei's, a former 100-bed orphanage, has been transformed into a kindergarten where poorer families can bring their children for daycare, enabling parents to work and keep their youngsters. Space has been found on the site for a unit where young, vulnerable mothers can live for up to a year after having children.

Bianca, 17, was thrown out by her family when her child, Dacia, was born. Like many Romanians they held devout Orthodox Christian beliefs and condemned a young unmarried mother. In the past, says the centre's director, Dr Elena Tarta-Arsene, Dacia would have been just another abandoned baby, but Bianca is now training as a hairdresser to support the two of them.

A key part of EU intervention has been to insist Romania no longer export its children. The government has been required to ban overseas adoptions. 'Overseas adoptions were not done in the right manner,' says Theodora Bertzi, secretary of state at the Romanian Office for Adoptions. 'The system, the law and all the specialists involved were oriented towards separating the child from the family. Now we have a law that requires that everything is done to keep children with their biological family and, if that fails, in foster care or adoptive care within their own country.'

But the statistics can hide the stories. Nicu, 10, and his six-year-old brother, Alin, lived for most of their lives in Luminita, one of the orphanages. At EU insistence a closure date was set for the home. Thanks to Fara, a British charity working here, foster parents were found.

'They were a big challenge,' said Fara's Romania director, Cornelia Mihaescu. 'They were completely wild and those years in an institution had left deep scars. We believe they may have been sedated while in the home to keep them calm. It was fairly standard practice.'

But then they arrived in the foster mother's home, without sedation, and they started smashing it up, ripping up sheets, smearing ink on the walls and attacking other children at school.

'Although she was a good woman who tried very hard, the foster mother could not cope,' explains Mihaescu.

Fara went to the child protection team to explain that Nicu and Alin could no longer stay with the foster mother, but Luminita was closing. They made contact with the boys' father - a violent alcoholic who had shown little interest in them - and they were placed with him.

'He lives in a tiny room with no electricity. We have tried to support him, but he doesn't want to know,' says Mihaescu. 'Food we gave for the children was taken by the father's friends.' In the statistics, Nicu and Alin appear as a success story - reunited with their family.

At its 16-bed home in Jud Ilfov, a desolate suburb of Bucharest, Fara cares for other children who slip through the net. The authorities are keen that Mihaela and Marius, six and eight, an enchanting sister and brother with big lashes and ready smiles, should be reunited with their father. Their mother left two years ago for France, but he lives nearby with a new girlfriend. When the children go for weekends they return full of tales of drunken visitors, broken nights' sleep and general anxiety.

They don't want to go again, but the authorities insist. 'If you are asking me if there have been significant imperfections in the deinstitutionalisation process, then the answer must be yes,' acknowledges Emma Nicholson. 'But overall the new system offers the best building blocks for the future. The improvements in so short a time have been truly staggering.' Many charities working in Romania have doubts about precisely that staggering speed. New laws are welcomed, but they are concerned by the authorities' determination to present childcare reforms as a job almost completed.'

They are not very open-minded to deal with,' says Iulian Mocanu of Children on the Edge, a UK-based charity working with vulnerable youngsters. 'It is difficult to approach them with sensitive subjects because they take it personally. They can't be told they don't always do their jobs properly. We are seeing a lot of children's rights broken. They are not asked their opinion when it comes to important changes in their protection plan. They have no say in transfers to other centres or into care systems in other areas. They are emotionally abused and verbally abused by people working in the system. If I have a frustration, it is the fact that we have no one higher to go and tell about this.'The blue and gold EU flag is everywhere - on buildings, on the overalls of workers in childcare centres, on the leaflets they hand out. Yet in this EU fever there is evidence that with some vulnerable youngsters, Brussels is achieving the very opposite of what it set out to do. Theodora Bertzi insists the EU intervention over childcare reform has been 'a support rather than a pressure'.

But asked if without the EU's time constraints it could have been done better, even this minister hesitates and keeps her counsel.