Care homes scandal spotlights ‘inhumane and degrading’ abuse

BUCHAREST (AP):

After receiving distressed text messages from a young man worried about the conditions his friend was living in at a social care home in central Romania, Georgiana Pascu arranged an impromptu visit to inspect the facility.

“In the beginning, we were quite sure there is nothing there,” said Pascu, programme manager at the Center for Legal Resources, a rights group. She said that a day earlier, state authorities had carried out an inspection of the care home for older and disabled people, and no issues had been flagged.

But what she and her colleagues uncovered at the care home in the village of Bardesti, she said, was “outrageous … inhuman”.

“There was a very young woman who looked malnourished, she didn’t move, she didn’t speak at all — she was lying on the basement floor,” she told AP. “There was another young woman, she was crying and asking for water.”

The non-governmental organisation (NGO) discovered six residents in late July living in the Little House of Min’s cluttered, dingy basement surrounded by construction materials, in addition to 23 people living on the floors above. Four residents with severe disabilities were lying on mattresses “soiled with faeces, urine, and blood, with flies on them”, they said, who “couldn’t defend themselves and couldn’t ask for help”.

The team of three from the Center for Legal Resources immediately called the emergency services, and police and ambulance crews arrived, but even they called for backup, Pascu said. Hours later, a resident directed Pascu to what she describes as a small “secluded room … with just a bed inside” where two residents lived with “no artificial or natural light”.

The NGO’s findings triggered a judicial investigation and follow similar discoveries in other private institutions. So far, two Cabinet members were forced to resign over what Romanian media have dubbed the ‘horror homes’ scandal.

DISTURBING REVELATIONS

The discovery is just the latest in a string of disturbing revelations that have made front-page news in the local media, spotlighting the impact corruption can have on the socially vulnerable in Romania, which joined the European Union (EU) in 2007.

One of the main conditions of Romania’s accession to the EU was that it crack down on endemic corruption, but it remains one of the bloc’s most corrupt members, according to Transparency International.

In early July, police raids at three separate care homes in Ilfov County near Bucharest also uncovered widespread abuse and neglect of older and disabled people. Images emerged of residents tied to beds in filthy rooms, some exhibiting signs of physical abuse and appearing rake-thin.

In those cases, Romania’s anti-organised crime agency, DIICOT, said that two organised criminal gangs accused of human trafficking and other charges were formed in 2020 to “exploit people with disabilities or in vulnerable situations”. Prosecutors said residents were subjected to unpaid labour via acts of coercion as well as physical violence, and weren’t given enough food.

Prosecutors launched a criminal investigation and said there are more than 20 suspects in the case.

DIICOT detained three people after the findings at the Little House of Min, which it alleges formed a criminal gang in 2020 “to commit the crime of human trafficking”, and that residents were subjected to “inhumane and degrading treatment” through acts of physical and mental aggression.

Residents were being exploited under the guise of an association that withheld their state benefits payments or sums sent to them by friends and relatives, prosecutors said. Instead of the money going towards the residents’ care, it was mainly used “for the benefit of the members of the group”.

Two local officials were fired over the findings and the authorities shuttered the home.