Report on Romania

I found this on the US Embassy's sight. They just released this in March and it is part of their report on Romania's progress/status in 2007. Verrrry interesting.

While the law protects children from abuse and neglect, the government has not established a mechanism to identify and treat abused and neglected children and their families. The abandonment of children in maternity hospitals remained a problem with over 2,216 left in hospitals by their parents in 2006, according to official statistics. NGOs claimed the official statistics did not accurately account for many abandoned children; many children living in state institutions were never officially recognized as abandoned.

The National Authority for the Protection of Children's Rights (ANPDC), in coordination with the Ministry of Health, made some progress in discouraging child abandonment through prenatal counseling and training of hospital personnel. However, children's rights NGOs and local child welfare officials reported that these efforts were insufficient to resolve the continued high number of abandonment cases, resulting in many essentially healthy children being kept in hospitals because family reintegration or foster placement was unavailable. According to the Children's High Level Group study on the prevention of child abandonment, 60 percent of children abandoned by their parents were left in hospitals, while the remaining 40 percent were abandoned in other places, including on the street.

The 2005 child welfare law and its implementation continued to create confusion among entities responsible for child welfare and to prolong the time that a child spent in the child welfare system before being reunited with biological parents or being adopted. NGOs and child protection authorities continued to report that judges, police, and social workers generally lacked clear instructions from the central government, training, and the resources necessary to implement the legislation. During the year the decision-making process improved slightly due to a better working relationship between courts and county child welfare departments. But thousands of children remained institutionalized or in foster care rather than legally approved for adoption. There were credible reports of attempts to force family reunification for abandoned children in cases where biological family members explicitly stated they did not want the children or in which there was a high risk of child abuse or child labor.

There were many reports of abandoned children being forced to wait for several years in institutions or foster care while authorities searched for their biological parents to formalize their abandonment in court. The government claimed there were only 883 children available for adoption in the country in December 2006, and over 1,680 families that wanted to adopt children. However, this number represented only a fraction of the estimated 6,000 children placed in state care each year. These low figures were due to the state's non-recognition of the physical abandonment of children. There was no time limit on parents' absence for the children to be legally recognized as abandoned. Instead, government policy aimed to reintegrate children into biological families even years after physical abandonment. Many foster parents wishing to adopt children already in their care were forced to wait for the abandoning parents' statement of abandonment in court before the children could be declared legally adoptable. Some expressed fears that the foster children who had spent years in their care could be taken back by the biological parent or relatives and forced into begging on the street.

The public child welfare system tracked approximately 102,000 children. More than half of these lived with extended families or in foster care, and approximately 26,600 lived in public and private institutions. The government continued to build smaller residential units for children in need of protection, including children with disabilities. The number of children in institutions continued to drop, from 31,000 in 2005 to 25,580 by September. The foster care system expanded to care for 20,120 children as of September compared with 16,800 children in 2005.

Abandoned children under two years of age were only allowed to be placed in foster care, or placed with other families, including for adoption, if reunification with biological parents failed. Roma children, who were disproportionately represented among abandoned children, continued to suffer racial discrimination and were rarely adopted by Romanian families.