TV cameras captured images of shaven-headed, emaciated children tied to rusting cots, or banging their heads against peeling, crumbling walls.  Dressed in filthy rags, Romania’s unwanted children stared out at the world with huge eyes in pale, gaunt faces. The legacy of Ceaucescu’s disastrous economic and demographic policies was finally revealed to the world in 1989, and it was catastrophic.

How did the problem start?

In 1966, one year after Ceaucescu became head of Romania’s Communist Party, contraception and abortion were outlawed for women under 40 with less than four children. The following year, the birth rate doubled.  Over the coming years, restrictions on the use of contraception were made even stronger as the deluded dictator attempted to breed a workforce that would grow the country’s manufacturing industries and make Romania a powerful industrial nation.

Romanian women were forced, cajoled and incentivised into having more and more children, and then encouraged to take them to orphanages where the state would take care of them.  In the 1980s, when Ceaucescu’s attempts to pay down Romania’s national debt caused the introduction of stringent food rationing, desperate parents figured that at least if their children were in orphanages, they would have food.  During this decade the orphanage population swelled to over 150,000 children.

Since Ceaucescu’s fall in 1989, successive legislation has improved the situation for Romania’s abandoned children, but today there are still nearly 95,000 registered as being in the care of the authorities – nearly 2.5% of Romania’s children.

Where do these children come from?

• Romanian social workers cite poverty as the main underlying factor for child abandonment.
• 40% of ‘abandoned’ children have been removed from their families for their own welfare.  Until Romania’s accession to the European Union in 2007, there was no real organised system of foster care.  Children who were neglected or abused were taken by social workers to orphanages, or ‘placement centres’ as they are more properly called.
• 30% have been left at medical facilities.  Although medical treatment is theoretically free in Romania, widespread bribery is the norm, and access to healthcare is limited in poor rural communities.  Families in poverty know that a chronically sick child will receive the treatment they need if they are left in the care of the state.
• 20% have been voluntarily surrendered by their parents.  In cases of extreme poverty, or the sickness, death or imprisonment of a parent, children will sometimes be surrendered to state care.
• 10% of abandoned children are in state care because one or both of their parents are working abroad.  Children are sometimes left in the care of older siblings, or elderly grandparents and the state is forced to intervene.

Today’s orphanages are a vast improvement on 20 years ago

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How are abandoned children cared for?

• As many as 25,000 abandoned children are placed by the state into their own extended family (up to four degrees removed) where they are monitored regularly.
• As part of their accession into the European Union, Romania set up a system of accredited foster care.  Now around 20% of abandoned children are in foster care placements.  While this has been a big step forwards, there have been scandals involving foster carers abusing children in their care.  A foster mother was recently imprisoned for murdering a child in her care – the child’s real mother had been sent to prison for stealing food.
• Another 20% of children are homed in ‘community placement centres’. These are apartments or houses, homing up to ten children with a live-in house parent.  These compromises between foster care and orphanages often provide a relatively stable home for abandoned children, if properly monitored.
• The rest of Romania’s abandoned children still live in ‘placement centres’ or orphanages.  While these large institutions have improved immensely in the last 20 years, they are still impersonal institutions where children have no privacy, are often brutally bullied by older inhabitants and grow up without any sense of what it means to belong to any kind of family. 

Romania has made great improvements in the last 20 years, but it is clear that there is still a long, long way to go.  Although orphanages are less-overcrowded and better staffed, they are still impersonal places that leave children without the skills they need to survive independent living.  Little is offered in the way of life-skills training, counselling or therapy.  Despite the caring attitudes of the vast majority of childcare workers, there are still stories of abuse, and support from the state ceases the moment an abandoned child leaves full-time education, leaving many vulnerable young adults facing an uncertain future in a country where nearly 30% of the population are classed as living in poverty.