When Kids Are Seen as State Duty

Nicolae Craciun’s mother put him in a state-run children’s home at age 5, then didn’t visit for a year and a half.

Now she sees him every Saturday and wants to take him home to join his three siblings. Nicolae, 10, says wistfully that he would love to return to the place he remembers from “a long time ago.”

But officials in charge of his welfare say that, short of a court order, the children’s home must keep Nicolae. “She’s not the mother, by the law. She’s just another person,” said Claudia Prichia, the administrator in charge of the case.

Romania’s child welfare system has largely eliminated the worst of the horrors exposed after the 1989 fall of communism, when as many as 150,000 children were institutionalized in a vast network of homes where malnutrition, AIDS and prison-like conditions devastated young lives.

In place of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s policies, which encouraged population growth by banning contraception and abortion but made it easy to dump children into institutions, the government now favors family reunification and prevention of abandonment.

But the idea remains widespread among parents and working-level officials in Romania that there is nothing very wrong with the state taking care of children who in almost any other society would live at home.

In 1999, for example, “4,500 newborns were left behind in maternity centers,” said Karin Hulshof, the United Nations Children’s Fund representative here in Bucharest, the capital. Even more common is for parents to turn offspring over to institutions as the children get older.

Romania, with only about 5 million people younger than 18, still has 65,000 children in institutions directly run by the state. By comparison, another former Communist nation in the region, Poland, has nearly twice the number of young people but only 18,000 in state-run institutions, according to government statistics.

The casualness with which children can be handed over to the state in Romania is reflected in cases such as that of Sorina Ciutan, 11, whose mother put her in Placement Center No. 7 here last fall. State-run homes now are usually called “placement centers,” to imply that the stay is only temporary--while children await placement with a foster family or adoptive parents.

Sorina explained that her parents had never married and that, after her father died eight years ago, she and her mother continued to live in her paternal grandparents’ home until a court ordered them evicted.

“My mother and my grandparents were constantly arguing because my grandparents wanted only me to stay and not my mother,” she said. “The trial took five years. By the time the trial ended, they didn’t want me either, and we had to move out.”

They went to the country home of her mother’s uncle, but “my school was very far away, so she decided to send me here to the placement center,” she explained. Her mother also moved back to Bucharest, but into a single room, so she “doesn’t have the conditions to keep me there,” Sorina added.

Alexandru Chirulescu, the director of Placement Center No. 7, complained that “the code of the family is nonexistent in the parents who leave their kids here. Their attitude is, ‘I’m bringing him here because I don’t have a place to live,’ or ‘I’m bringing him here because I live in a rented apartment and the owner doesn’t want to have a child around.’ ”

Gabriela Coman, policy director in the National Agency for Protection of Children’s Rights, said the roots of the problem go back to the Communist period.

“Women were expected to have four children, and abortion was prohibited,” she explained. “This began in 1970 and lasted until 1991, when a law regarding abortion was passed. . . . [Parents] only thought, ‘I don’t want to take care of them, or I can’t, so let the state take care of them because the state obliged me to have them.’ We still are confronted with this mentality.”

Things weren’t always like this.

“I remember my mother’s mother had six children, and she was very poor, but at that time no one thought of such a solution--to abandon the children,” Coman said. “We have to rebuild this strong value of the family, and then work on unemployment, poverty and the destruction of families because of drinking.”

In the Ceausescu era, the fate of children placed into state institutions could be horrible.

“All over Romania in remote areas were these monstrous institutions, with 500 or 1,000 children in one place,” the U.N.’s Hulshof said. Records of children’s birthplaces or how they were moved around were misplaced, centers often had no heat, and dirty vaccination needles or infected blood for transfusions gave many children acquired immune deficiency syndrome, she said.

Foreign assistance in the early 1990s went largely to provide food and medicine for the children, but in the late 1990s the focus shifted to supporting reforms in the system, including efforts to shut down the biggest institutions.

Sorina’s facility appears to be a pleasant enough place, despite having bars on the ground-floor windows and until recently being surrounded by what Chirulescu called a “tall, metal, prison-like fence.” The bars, once intended to keep children in, now keep burglars out, he said.

He nonetheless wants to replace them with something more attractive. The fence, already partly removed, will be replaced by something more “normal,” he added.

The 60 children here live in eight “family” clusters given whimsical names by the social workers, who act as surrogate mothers: Picasso, Tulip, Hope, Batman, Cleo, Zeo, Rabbit and Flintstone. Each “family” lives in a two-room apartment. The bedroom has four bunk beds for eight children, mixing boys and girls ranging in age from 4 years to early teens. The living room is equipped with furniture, a television and a computer used mainly for playing video games. Families eat in their living rooms, but the food is cooked by staff in a central kitchen. The center has 42 employees, including 16 social workers.

The two oldest girls at the center, in their midteens, have a small apartment of their own, including a kitchen where they can learn to cook.

Under Romanian law, some of the funding for children’s institutions comes from adoption fees paid by foreign couples. This system faces growing international criticism, especially from the European Union.

In essence, the law provides that the more money an international adoption agency contributes to Romania’s child welfare system, the more children it will be allowed to handle for adoption. With foreign couples typically paying about $25,000 to adopt a Romanian child--and more than 3,500 such adoptions taking place last year alone, including about 1,050 to the United States--the sums involved are considerable.

This has the effect of creating “competition between the international adoption agencies . . . on hard currency terms” and “reducing the child to an item to be bought and sold for cash,” said Emma Nicholson, the European Parliament’s rapporteur for Romania, who is pushing for this law to be scrapped.

The system “was set up with the best of intentions to try to provide resources for the children left behind” but “a lot of people who have looked at it closely feel it creates opportunities for corruption,” said U.S. Ambassador to Romania Jim Rosapepe.

At least some institutions are trying harder to prevent abandonment in the first place. Dumitra Dulgheru, 27, and Virgil Barbulescu, 46, an unmarried couple who had been evicted from their apartment largely because of the birth of their baby, recently showed up at the child protection office in Bucharest’s Third District ready to hand him over.

“They said, ‘We cannot afford to raise this child. Take him from us,’ ” recalled Florin Vasile-Alexandru, director of the office. But the staff arranged for Dulgheru and the baby to move into a maternal care center where mothers live with their infants. That buys the couple time to work out a long-term solution.

“I work as a night watchman,” Barbulescu explained. “It will be easy for me to find a place to stay. I spend most of my time at work. . . . We’ve always said we want to improve our situation, and we would like to raise the child ourselves.”

Georgeta Radoi, the social worker handling the case, said the parents “were crying when they came here. . . . No matter how many facilities and material things you offer a child, you cannot replace the love of a mother.”

One of the key problems slowing reform of the system is that it takes care of about the same number of adults--through employment--as it does children.

“There are 100,000 people working in institutions,” Hulshof said. “It’s an enormous work force. If all these institutions are closed, where would these people work? Many of them do not have desired qualifications. They are cooks, laundry workers, watchmen, gardeners. . . . There’s an enormous interest to just keep things as they are.”

The system is also expensive.

“There’s something wrong here: The mother can have $5 a month [in assistance] to keep her child at home, but it costs the state $150 a month to keep the child in an institution,” said Simon Mordue, who directs European Union assistance to Romania aimed at preparing the nation for membership in the community.

Maria Ionescu, general manager of Together, a Roma, or Gypsy, community development agency, said that if the state would give $40 a month--a fraction of its current expenses--to families who have a child in a center, “there’d be many families who would wish to take their children back home.”