This chapter appears in Child Maltreatment in Residential Care: History, Research, and Current Practice, a volume of research examining the institutionalization of children, child abuse and neglect in residential care, and interventions preventing and responding to violence against children living in out-of-home care settings around the world.
Abstract
In 1990, Romania signed the United Nations (UN) Convention on the rights of children. This created the conditions for the adoption of some measures that lead to the improvement of children’s lives by protecting them against neglect and abuse. This study is the result of a secondary analysis of study data collected in 1999 that focused on neglect and abuse existing in the long-term residential centers of Romania. Our goal was to reconstruct the living conditions of institutionalized children at the end of the 1990s, based on the requirements formulated in the Convention articles. This reconstruction has more than a historical value. It may contribute to our understanding of institutional neglect whose victims were thousands of children who were cared by an inadequate protective system. This analysis included a national representative sample of 3164 (1701 boys and 1463 girls) children residing in 80 different long-term residential centers (i.e., nurseries, centers for preschool and school aged, and institutions for disabled) between 0 and 19 years of age (M = 9.45; SD = 5.39) whose quality of life was measured following the UN Convention vision on the rights of children. The results show that respect of children’s fundamental rights varied within each type of institution. Thus, 9 years after signing the Convention and after 2 years of intense structural reforms, the respect given to the basic human rights of Romanian children placed in long-term residential centers still had many weak points, but included some accomplishments as well.