Country Report: Romania

After decades of political and social turmoil, the problem of abandoned children in Romania has turned into an issue of human trafficking and enslavement of women and children.

A Victim’s Story

When Nicoleta was a little girl in Romania, her mother abandoned her at an orphanage. But several years later, the orphanage threw her out. She remembers that “with no family, I didn’t know where to go.” She made her way to the capital city of Bucharest and lived on the street with other young orphans and runaways. Homeless, hungry, and desperate, she was grateful and eager when a group of men stopped her on the side of the road and offered her food and shelter. But their promises were false, and the men were in reality human traffickers-culprits who prey on the hundreds of thousands of orphaned and abandoned street children in Romania.

Nicoleta was forced into sex slavery, bought and sold by different traffickers and men throughout her adolescence and young adult life. At 26, Nicoleta was finally rescued by undercover American journalists from 48 Hours who bought her for $1,800. Nicoleta is now recovering at a rehabilitation center in Bucharest, but thousands of other children and women remain enslaved on Romania’s impoverished streets.

Country Background

Romania is a southeastern European country bordered by the Black Sea, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. With a population of just over 22 million, Romania has a history rich with struggle and political strife. In 1877 its independence from the Ottoman Empire was proclaimed and in 1947, after a post-war Soviet occupation, it became the Communist Republic of Romania. Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu took power in 1965, quickly rising to rule Romania with an iron fist and ruthless tactics.

Completely outlawing both birth control and abortion and demanding each woman give birth to children, Ceausescu sought to create an industrial army of sorts, forcing the construction of a human work force. Using taxes and government funds to build lavish estates for himself and his wife, he drove his people to economic tragedy. The results of Ceausescu’s rule were disastrous, with overpopulation and poverty continuing to sweep the nation even after his execution in 1989 and the eradication of the Communist government in 1996. In 2000 the center-left Social Democratic Party became Romania’s leading party, and Romania hopes to join the European Union by 2007.

Causes of Slavery

Also resulting from Ceausescu’s rule was one of the most horrific orphan situations of all time, with hundreds of thousands of infants and children left homeless, abused, and completely neglected. Investigations done in the ‘90s revealed devastating conditions with children tied to beds, starved, and mentally and emotionally disabled from being given virtually no affection or attention. Today, there are an estimated 2,000 homeless children in the city of Bucharest alone, 6,000 nationwide, and more than 50,000 children in the care of the state. Ceausescu’s two decades of abuse and forced births left close to 200,000 orphans and abandoned children in Romania-and though the number has decreased, the issue remains. With an estimated 10,000 children abandoned each year, Romanian children remain largely institutionalized and neglected due to lack of foster care and adequate orphanages. Laws passed to hinder adoption corruption and trafficking of infants prohibit all international adoptions. Overpopulated orphanages and maternal wards, where babies are often abandoned, are forced to keep only the “severely disabled,” while healthy children are sometimes designated to mental institutions or left to homelessness on city streets. All of this makes the abandoned children and formerly institutionalized adolescents and adults of Romania extremely vulnerable-physically, emotionally, and economically. Traffickers and slave dealers turn to this highly accessible group of young people in order to make high profits in popular child sex industries. A struggling economy, extremely low per capita income, and inadequate education system foster the growth of prostitution and slave-labor industries, both for women and children, nationwide.

The Process of Enslavement

Most slave dealers and human traffickers working in Romania prey on their victims with tactics of deceit, false promises of money or jobs, or outright abduction. Street children are eager for money and easily fall victim to traffickers who promise jobs. Those involved in child sex industries often simply abduct abandoned children off the streets. Demand for children in Romanian prostitution rings is thriving due to visits from interested foreign sex tourists and high profits found in child sex trafficking throughout Europe. Some of the hundreds of thousands of abandoned, homeless, and orphaned children in Romania are taken in from the street, adopted, or taken out of state-care facilities only to be sexually exploited by their new “families.” Children leaving orphanages often do not have adequate state support or protection and are subject to childhood and adolescent lives of begging, homelessness, and being coerced into slave networks. Young people like Nicoleta are held captive and repeatedly sold to interested individuals and sex organizations, threatened and abused so they will not try to escape. Lack of education and social awareness in Romania contribute to the severity and frequency of enslavement of women, children, and adolescents who simply are not aware of the danger of human trafficking.

Response on the Ground

Since the horrors of Romanian orphanages were broadcast around the world in the ‘90s, hundreds of groups have been working on the ground in Romania to secure the safety and welfare of abandoned children. Organizations such as the White Cross Mission work to place abandoned children with loving families so that they are off the streets and out of harmful institutions. Other organizations work to provide children in orphanages and hospitals with a full staff of volunteers and nurses, bringing children the affection and attention they need for healthy childhoods. All of these groups help to thwart off enslavement for abandoned children, ensuring they are healthy emotionally and physically and, if possible, placing them with families so they do not end up as vulnerable street children.

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