No family, no alternative

No family, no alternative

published in issue 4592 page 4 at 2010-01-07

At the end of last year, the Boc Cabinet flatly rejected a proposal by the Romanian Office for Adoptions (ORA) for a more relaxed legislation on international adoptions, without giving a reason for its decision. The PM only contented himself with saying the government had not approached the issue and the current legislation is in line with international norms.

Other decision-makers in the social protection area declared themselves ‘shocked’ at ORA’s proposal, which they say leaves the impression Romania is unable to give protection to its abandoned children, and therefore has to resort to international adoptions, yet again. This is the truth unfortunately, and the indignation of those paid to make sure child rights are observed in Romania is tantamount to hypocrisy, as far as orphans are offered no alternative to the basic right to have a family, a chance to a normal life.

Statistics of the past 20 years show the majority of abandoned children doesn’t find a family, living their life in ‘the system’, transferred from the behemoth orphanages of the Ceausescu era to family-type houses or, in slightly more fortunate cases, to the care of maternal assistants.

Even if their basic needs are guaranteed, at a precarious level, obviously, these children are marked for life by the traumas of abandonment, lack of affection, the feeling of non-belonging and insecurity. These children are discriminated against outright, as the Romanian state does not offer them chances equal to those of other children, especially that they are again abandoned at the mercy of fate beyond the age of 18.

Certainly, there are also happy cases when the children turned adolescents succeed in attending university, with the guarantee they can find a home until they graduate. There are also charitable associations and non-governmental organizations that decided to substitute for the indifferent authorities, offering these children a home and helping them find a job. Unfortunately, they are the exception rather than the rule. A recent Antena 1 feature report presented some touching cases of children adopted in the 1990s by families from the United States, Australia and Italy, who returned to Romania to meet their biological parents. They all came back accompanied by their adoptive parents, foreigners thanks to whom today, they are happy, educated people with strong family values. One of them admitted that for many years he believed his mother abandoned him because she did not love him, yet, once he arrived in Romania, he realized she abandoned him exactly because she loved him and wished him to have a better life.

You can’t help but wonder what would have happened with this teenager and thousands others like him, had he remained with the protection system in Romania. The chance to be adopted by a family here is rather small whereas the prospect of spending your childhood in foster institutions is quite high.

Though many were quick to criticize ORA’s proposal, including Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne, at whose request Romania banned international adoptions in 2001, the relevant draft law seeks to extend adoption area so that more children have the chance to find a family. Under the bill, the persons eligible for international adoptions may include the uncles or aunts of the children or Romanian citizens residing abroad, which means ‘the selling of children’, as some labelled it, will be out of question ( if corruption is of course eliminated). According to a law that came into force in 2005, only the child’s second degree relatives, the grandparents namely, are eligible for international adoptions. The new bill only allows international adoption if the national adoption failed, as well as the child’s consequent monitoring mechanisms in the adopting family by means of cooperation with social services abroad. According to the Romanian Office for Adoptions, there have been 1,200 to 1,400 national adoptions over the past 10 years, and an abandonment rate of 1,700 children/year. The data are nonetheless deceiving, mainly if you look at 2008 alone, when a quarter of adoptions were made by one of the parents, therefore refers to children who had a home already.

Throughout the 1990s, Romania had the image of a children-exporting country, as it allowed certain associations to broker international adoptions, charging important amounts of money from foreign families willing to adopt. Romania abruptly banned international adoptions instead of taking the proper measures to render the adoption process transparent and eradicate the corruption. At the time, nobody thought to only implement the new legislation after the files ongoing at the time were concluded, which resulted in the drama of over 1,000 children who vainly waited for years for their foreign parents to come and take them abroad, and that of those parents that hoped to bring the Romanian child into their home. To this day, the state has failed to repair the injustice done and nobody apologized for dashing some children’s hopes to have a family.

Unfortunately, the future of orphans in Romania does not look better either. A draft emergency ordinance proposed by the National Authority for Protection of Child Rights, an institution about to be disbanded under the 2010 budget law, as it will be merged into the National Authority for Family Protection (whose budget and personnel will be trimmed down accordingly), stipulates the drastic reduction of the number of abandoned children or those held as children at-risk and their entrustment to maternal assistants, over the next five years, a move association with a nearly RON 400 M spending cut. Actually, one of the main reasons for amending the family-type Services legislation, is the ‘need for reconfiguring and prioritizing child special protection rights amid the ongoing economic crisis,’ as the substantiation note reads.

What the bill seeks actually is but take the orphans out of the protection system for abandoned children by reducing the number of maternal assistants and entrusting the children to ‘an extended family’, up to the child’s fourth grade relatives, and friends of relatives as well. What the authorities do practically is to entrust the children to a family that has already rejected them, since their being entrusted to a family-type home or a maternal assistant will only be based on a social inquiry which, on paper at least, should eliminate first all the possibilities of adoption and entrustment to a relative or other persons close to the family. In other words, a useless step which should have already been taken had the law in effect been observed. The problem is, the state is unwilling to pay maternal assistants (many of whom are poorly trained, unevaluated and even downright abusive, as the dramatic case showed of a four year-old boy killed by a maternal assistant in Buzau), salary rights for overtime, night bonuses or other rights they won in court, and thought to distribute the children to ‘extended families’ instead, thus saving substantial amounts of money, as the children’s relatives or their friends will not receive either salaries, bonuses or placement allocations. The state will offer these children but a monthly allowance of RON 250 (nearly EUR 60), a derisory amount that cannot even cover the basic food needs for that time interval.

Given the circumstances, a more flexible adoption legislation being rejected outright, without taking into count the pro and con arguments, by none other than exactly the institution mostly responsible to come up with the best measures for orphaned children protection, stands testimony to the lack of interest shown in the fate of these children to whom life was so unkind.

by Rodica Pricop

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