Romania's Abandoned Children Living In Inhumane Conditions

thank you this is one of the last old style institutions left in Romania Schultz call it a placement center for children with deficiencies these kids call it home their so-called deficiencies are unclear even to the officials who keep them here and most of them aren't orphans at all they've been abandoned today there are still 220 large children's homes in Romania and thousands of kids living in the care of the state every day counts every day they are in an institution counts so it is a matter of life and death this place in the country's North is slated to shut down possibly later this year foreign wants to close the door on its dark past and its Grim institutions now the thinking is that children should be reunited with their natural family put into foster care or into smaller centers it's a massive cultural shift for children their parents and the entire Society this place was an institution for children with severe special needs uh Aid worker Stefan derabush returns to a place that haunts him to this day if you came to the building through the bars of the windows you'd hear the shouts you'd hear the screams you'd see the hands being tied to the bars this home in the northern Village of siget was known as the institution for the incurable 270 children with mental and physical disabilities were kept here the kids who are self-aggressive were simply being tight and they were left in the court like that for days on end four years ago shut it down closing these institutions has become his life's passion what's so wrong with institutionalization nobody pays attention to them individually because they're always a mass nobody cares if they're alone nobody will look will try to find out why they are sad uh they will there will hardly be anybody asking them why they are ill and and what happens and why they suffer what's become of the children Stefan durabush has moved them to a smaller home just a few kids and their carers it's a model for what the Romanian government wants across the country everything was a new experience to them getting them out seeing the grass touching the leaves it was unbelievable to see how every single sensation was extraordinary was something fascinating to them Monica is 22 years old she cannot see and doesn't talk her disabilities were almost certainly made worse by her time in the old home because before she was packed like a sandwich her position actually was more or less this one and that's how she was tied she was basically tied like a sandwich and whenever she was let loose she would heat her head with her feet very very strongly after two years in these more Humane surroundings Monica has finally stopped hitting herself but she like Danny here has never had the chance to develop properly Danny is 19 years old but looks much younger he can't walk because he too was tied to his bed in the old institution and they both were simply stuck in the cots or stuck in the on the chairs they were sat without doing activities without having any sort of inter relationship with with people they couldn't eat solid food they were basically being fed from the bucket and all they did was suck food that was all they did that was the way in which they they were eating drinking basically drinking their food for all of Romania's good intentions 27 000 children are still living in state-run homes some centers have merely changed their names and functions to survive under the new system at the codlia Home North of Bucharest the social workers asked us not to show the girls faces conditions have improved once eight girls lived to a room now only two share call the center for girls with psychological disabilities but officials had trouble telling me exactly what was wrong with the girls I'm not a specialist but uh this is a kind of kind of other mental disease so but this is not uh I I don't know all the Diagnostics so but in mainly mental disease staff here say the girls have extremely low IQs some of them were clearly bilingual hardly a sign of a lack of intelligence about it the girls at codlia are not so much mentally disabled as socially impaired by their time at the center at least that's the belief of human rights lawyer Georgiana pascu and they were placed there and in that moment I assumed that the door was closed you know you are here you have a mental disabilities and with so many children in that uh in that situation especially teenager the girls at codlia are it seems smart enough to sew the garments they make bring in money not for them but for the center it's a likely breach of Romania's own laws this country was only admitted to the European Union on the condition that it lifted its game on child welfare now it's getting millions of dollars from abroad to support children foster parents and single mothers but there are fears that joining the EU will cause more pain for the country's Young million Romanians have already left to find better paid jobs abroad many of them have left their children behind in the village of negrashti wash in the country's Northwest at least one member of every household has gone all right the pop teal family is missing a generation the parents of young arlena and razvan have left to work abroad leaving them with their grandparents grandfather John poptiel maintains the children don't miss out on anything our telephone the telephone share dynamic my old granddaughter Alina pop teal hasn't lived with her parents since she was a toddler and she misses them I can't tell my grandmother everything because she's old and she doesn't understand what's happening in this world right now of teenagers and all this stuff what's it like when razvan misses your parents what happens um he comes and tell me and then I hug him and I tell him that my mother is going to come home soon do you feel like you're a bit of a mother to him as well of course yes because my mother told me when she left that I should take care of him Elena popped Hill and her brother are lucky in one sense they have a home and people who care about them other children have been left to fend for themselves foreign to Romania's Hidden World in the capital city of Bucharest servers shaft for the city's heating system child welfare in this country is supposed to have improved but some kids are still ending up on the streets yeah this concrete bunker is home for about 20 children the youngest is just 12. some of them have run away from abusive families or children's homes the new system has failed them Ricardo is high from sniffing glue as are most of the teenagers down here the 15 year old ran away from home after his family sent him out to beg his friend Georges was left homeless when his mother went to work in Germany so who takes care of you me yo yeah friends friends it's warm down here but this is no place for children we received a lot of money from everywhere in the world and obviously people expect now to see some changes and the the fact that this kids these peoples are still here it is it is sent there's no question that overall Romania's children are better off now than before but as we discovered some are still falling through the cracks a new law says that children under the age of two can no longer live in institutions and yet here they are this is a pediatric unit complete with a doctor and nurses but there's nothing wrong with these babies except for The Misfortune of Being abandoned in modern Romania maternity Wards have become the new orphanages Dr Monica nicoara is in charge and family when he was 10 days old he had no name then and he still has no identity papers that means officially he hasn't even been born because with no idea he doesn't exist he has no rights you don't exist you have no rights and now when we are working uh on his ID his ID papers there are 23 abandoned babies in this Hospital Ward many of them are strangely quiet they've learned that crying doesn't get them anywhere so they don't bother they are babies who have never known a mother's love they have no affiliation no stability that's my mommy I go to my mommy I am safe with my Mommy I have many my mommies anyone it's okay but which is mine it's not their place in the hospital no matter the condition they are examples they shouldn't be in a court with another 10 babies around them just waiting to be fed there isn't stuff to work with them the medical stuff is not specialized in working with children their medical stuff their nurses and a baby's place is not in a hospital but for now these babies have nowhere else to go many Romanians are just too poor to take them in and foreigners are no longer allowed to adopt them I think that the issue of international adoptions was at the core of uh not doing reform in Romania until 2001-2002 because people thought generally that by sending kids abroad you would sort out the issue of child care in Romania it was totally wrong babies were changing hands for tens of thousands of dollars I think that money was being made by a whole network formed of lawyers people involved in in Social Services politicians doctors you'd have I think that nearly everybody who was involved in this kind of scheme had his or her own cut now the baby trade has been stopped but it hasn't changed a culture that for half a century encouraged parents to hand over their unwanted babies to the state has it made your job harder my job is the same but my soul is praying Romania genuinely wants to improve the lives of its children and repair its image but some Aid agencies suggest that children are still being abandoned at the same rate as in the Communist years the legacy of that era leaves on in the neglect of children it's a cycle that could take decades to break

Channel: Journeyman Pictures

Views: 542,661

Keywords: journeyman pictures, news, current affairs, world news, documentary, Lost, Children, Pediactrics, orphans, institutions, adoptopms, abuse

Id: UdUsyDUpZBU

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2016