Postcommunist Deinstitutionalization of Children With Disabilities in Romania

Abstract

The author examines the policies and treatment of children institutionalized during and after the communist regime, the adoption policies for these children, the human rights claimed in the name of these children, and the ecology of disabilities in Romania. Institutionalized children fell into three categories: children who had one or more minor to severe disabilities, children who had been abandoned, and children who were part of ethnic minorities, especially the Roma. The author reviews the literature on these topics and adds her own perspective, as a Romanian special education teacher and researcher. While during communism, institutionalized persons were invisible to the public and kept in inhuman conditions, after communism, increased awareness about the situation in state institutions and about disabilities and human rights in general led to the adoption and implementation of new disability-friendly policies. Currently, there is increased advocacy for the rights of the people with disabilities, although great challenges remain.

Critique of deinstitutionalisation in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe

“…On the one hand, some countries have been developing and implementing deinstitutionalisation strategies and progressive legal capacity legislation (Kozma and Petri 2012). On the other hand, evidence has demonstrated that merely symbolic legal adaptations have repeatedly failed to realise meaningful changes in actual policy and practice (Kozma and Petri 2012;Phillips 2012;Turnpenny et al 2018;Walker 2011).…”