Romania Facing Street Children Problem

9:23am UK, Tuesday November 23, 2004

The orphanages which used to blight Romanian society are being closed down, but the country faces a growing problem with children living on the streets.  

In the second of his special reports from Bucharest, Sky's Laurence Lee has been to meet the children who are born to beg:

The plight of Romania's children is a major problem

"We met Adriana as we drove through a main road in the middle of Bucharest.  

She was washing her socks in the canal, which was full of petrol. She had a single suitcase, and had hung her wet clothes on the metal bridge next to the canal.  

She was absolutely filthy, yet it transpired this 17-year-old spoke perfectly good English.  

She'd run away from home, apparently in disgust at her parents' inability to care for her.  

"I told my parents that they didn't have enough money to look after me," she told us. "They just said sorry."  

There are no accurate figures for how many street children there are here, but they seem to be everywhere.  

Many of them lived in the sewers until the local government forced them out, and now they simply roam and beg, an embarrassing tic on the face of Romanian society.  

But if you ask their parents - some of the two and a half million Roma who live in Romania - why they have so many children they obviously can't look after, you hardly get an answer.  

Most just say it's something they always did.  

Two Roma mothers we spoke to told us their children play with knives, and they expect them to become beggars. They even said some of their friends don't understand how the menstrual cycle works.  

If this was Latin America it would probably go unnoticed, but Romania is due to join the European union in two years time, and is apparently on course to do so.  

Yet we were told of a fast-growing paedophilia problem here, as foreign child abusers exploit the vast poverty, and we also found parents willing to sell us their own children for just a few hundred euros.  

It proved remarkably simple to buy a baby. You go to the outdoor market in Bucharest, and look for the poorest people, who, inevitably, are laden with young children.You pretend to be a couple desperate to adopt; in the space of a single afternoon we met one man who offered us whichever of his daughter's 20-or-so children we wanted; another offered us his wife's unborn child for 500 euros (£350).  

Not only does this seem to raise grave questions about Romania's suitability to be a part of the EU, it also causes a huge headache for the agencies who continue to fight a losing battle against gangs engaged in people trafficking.  

The Mayor of Bucharest, a forward-looking man who's one of the few here prepared to admit that big problems still exist, was apoplectic.  

"You wouldn't treat a dog like this," he said, and he was obviously right. "But what to do?" He reckoned it was about education, but in truth many Romanians regard the Roma as an internal cancer, keeping their country in the middle ages.  

In Romania's defence, some of the old wounds are being healed.  

It's impossible to film inside the few state orphanages which remain, but they're being closed down systematically anyway, with the help of international organisations devoted to caring for the large numbers of abandoned children.  

Romania is certainly willing to show off the good things it is doing, and many of the children we saw in a Unicef-sponsored care home in Bucharest seem happy and well fed.  

But you do have to ask yourself how a society is supposed to move forward when so many of its citizens will either sell their own children or continue to have so many in the full knowledge that they will become beggars, for life.  

Before other central European countries joined the EU this year there was a spate of stories as to whether Britain would be overwhelmed by gypsies, all of which proved inconsequential.  

Whether the Roma in Romania decide to stay where they are when they become members of the European club, or move west, may prove a different story."