This report by Human Rights Watch is based on field research conducted in Bacău, Bucharest, Constanţa, Giurgiu, and Ilfov counties in February 2006, and follow-up telephone and email contacts through June 2006. Two Human Rights Watch researchers conducted individual interviews with thirty-five children and youth age sixteen to twenty living with HIV, as well as a group interview with nineteen children and youth living with HIV (representing nineteen of the twenty-four affiliates of the National Union of Organizations of Persons affected by HIV/AIDS (UNOPA), a Romanian nongovernmental organization). The children and youth interviewed represent a broad cross-section of Romania’s rural and urban children and youth living with HIV, and included those living with birth families, in extended family placements, foster care placements, NGO-run group homes, hospitals, and in the Vidra placement center, one of the few remaining orphanages for children living with HIV.
