Romania

CURE is a project run by the Crime Victim Compensation and Support Authority in Sweden together with its partners in nine member states of the EU - Belgium, Croatia, Romania, Finland, France, Italy, UK, Portugal, Slovakia. It is devoted to the problem of children as victims of all sorts of crimes in the criminal justice systems of the European Union.

Child trafficking continues to be a serious concern in South Eastern Europe, with high numbers of children trafficked for exploitative purposes. Despite increased attention and responses to the issue over the past years the capacity of governments to undertake effective measures to prevent trafficking and protect children who have suffered from being trafficked remain limited. The main obstacle are weak child protection systems, lack of financial and technical resources, limited understanding of factors that make children exposed to trafficking and failure to address the root causes and the structural dimension of the problem. Save the Children in Albania is contributing to fight against child trafficking in the region by conducting the Regional Child Trafficking Response Programme (CTRP).

This UNICEF Innocenti Working Paper by Mike Dottridge is based on interviews with 31 children from Albania, Kosovo, Moldova and Romania who experienced trafficking while under 18 years of age. The children decribe their lives before recruitment, their experiences during exploitation, as well as how the managed to escape the traffickers.

Inter Press Service presents and article by Claudia Ciobanu on the reform of child care system in Romania.
Main element of the transformation, which started in 2001, was the switch from placing children in care institutions to finding them a place in a more family-type units or with a foster family.