In the summer of 2006, a group of children who had been forced to beg, engage in prostitution, and commit petty crimes was returned to Bulgaria from Austria and the Czech Republic. This underscored the need for the children to be housed in a place that could guarantee protection, while also allowing for a team of psychologists, pedagogues and social workers to provide emergency support to the children in that difficult moment. During the second half of 2006, taking advantage of Austrian expertise, the International Social Service Foundation of Bulgaria funded the equipping and launching of the first crisis center in the village of Balvan in the Municipality of Veliko Turnovo. The project provides social services for children who have been returned to the country as the victims of trafficking. At the end of the year, the center’s financing was taken over by the government. In 2007, two more crisis centers were opened in Pazardzhik and Dragoman, while at the beginning of 2008, crisis centers opened up in Montana, Silistra and Alfatar as well. By 2010, Bulgaria already had 12 crisis centers with a total capacity of 123 beds.

Placement in a crisis center is accomplished by an order from the director of one of the Directorates for Social Assistance. According to the Agency for Social Assistance’s statistics, there were 259 orders issued by directors of Directorates for Social Assistants to place children in crisis centers during 2010. The agency’s monitoring shows that children repatriated from abroad were most often used to pick-pocket, beg or were sexually exploited. Despite the fact that the number of children repatriated from abroad increases with every growing year, the cases of such children being placed in crisis centers are few and far between.

Here the obvious question arises – so where are the children being placed in crisis centers coming from? It turns out that the new social service has expanded its scope and that in recent years children have been landing in these centers for all sorts of reasons – predominantly those who are victims of domestic violence and of “internal trafficking,” who are forced to steal or beg, but in Bulgaria, rather than abroad. In such placements, the institutions believe that the leading factor in such cases not anti-social behavior, but rather the fact that the child has been victimized and that he should be worked with. Of course, the exceptions to this rule are numerous, but this is due to subjectivism in evaluating individual cases. There are more than a few cases of children being placed in crisis centers when indications suggest that the leading cause seems to be anti-social behavior. Which is not to say that specialists at crisis centers could not work with such children. The problem is that children to whom corrective measures should be applied should not live together with children who have suffered at the hands of older people and who have experienced the shock of exploitation. Observation of the administrative process of placement shows that the Directorates for Social Assistance often make mistakes due to an inability to evaluate to what extent a child needs social services in the form of a crisis center. In such cases, the managers of the crisis centers can ask for information about the child in advance and oppose the placement. In a few cases, administrative placement has allowed for gross violations of the children’s rights – refusal to submit a request to the regional court or placement for a period of time significantly longer than that stipulated by law.

To avoid such arbitrariness, lawgivers have introduced legal sanctions for the placement of children in crisis centers, but in cases in which the Directorates for Social Assistance do not turn to the courts, arbitrariness is unavoidable. Observations of placements carried out by court order have also found serious violations of the law, however. In larger cities, the courts are not in a position to examine placement requests immediately and to rule within the one-month deadline required by law. Because of this, some of the placements occur without judicial sanction or the court decision for placement is received by the crisis center with a huge delay, often after the child’s stay has ended. In some of the court decisions, the starting date for the placement is the date when the court order comes into force, which leads to the extension of six-month stays by up to several more months. Even more alarming is the tendency for a child in a crisis center to be placed in another crisis center once his stay at the first is over; in a few cases this has led to multiple placements, which renders meaningless the qualification of crisis centers as a social service of a residential type. In the cases of children staying in crisis centers for longer than three months, it is obvious that this is not a question of urgent psychological intervention, but of ongoing institutionalization, which, against the backdrop of limitations on the freedom of movement, carries in its wake a series of negative consequences: educational deficit, clientelism, inability to independently make decisions, interruption of contact with loved ones and relatives, and inadaptability to life in a family context.

An obvious question arises against the backdrop of this distressing practice: why has the latest good initiative to help children at risk run up against imprecise legislation and a lack of experience on the part of the government workers responsible for implementing it, leading in the end to serious violations of children’s rights?

               “After Being Raped by Her Father, Zoya Is Sent to a Men’s Psychiatric Hospital”

“Incest in Chernomorets: Sex with Your Own Kids is Quite Common Here”

These are two headlines from the last two weeks in May 2011. The shocking facts described in these stories, however, are nothing new to the people who have met with these young rape victims, looked in their eyes and spoken with them – at home, at school, in the doctor’s office, on the street… In both cases, the girls repeatedly turned to their relatives and friends for help; one even turned to her own mother (your average, ordinary Bulgarian woman), to teachers… And while one gathered the courage to fight on her own and to send the rapist to prison after four infinitely long years of being subjected to his perversions, the other retreated inside herself and after three years was sent to a men’s psychiatric clinic by the regional court. “The absurd thing is that a child who runs from men and doesn’t even want to hear about men… has been sent to heal her soul amongst mentally ill men.”

There are rapists in every society, but the shocking thing is that in our society, they have their way with children undisturbed by the rest of us who know that they are out there, yet are doing nothing to stop them. What has changed since last February, when the media exploded with reports about three-year-old Sashko, who was rushed to Pirogov Emergency Room in critical condition for life-saving surgery with a punctured bladder, torn rectum and massive hemorrhaging? Over the course of two years before that, the viciously raped little boy had been in and out of the hospital numerous times… At the time, Nadya Shabani, director of the State Agency for Child Protection, said about the case: “We need many more caseworkers. And we need for them to be more qualified, i.e. to have the proper training. At the moment, a social worker works on 100 cases at a time. This is difficult work with people. Caseworkers are overloaded, threatened, their work is not prestigious, the salaries are low. Unfortunately, statistics indicate that violence against children is escalating. For the first half of 2009 alone, the cases were as numerous as for all of 2008. Eighty percent are cases of domestic violence. For all of 2009, there were 40,000 open cases of children at risk.”

Who heard her? What changed? Just open up yesterday’s newspaper and you’ll see for yourself. Nothing!

Our society’s apathy, the lack of conscious belonging, of a feeling of community, a sense of commitment, must be compensated for by timely state protection and adequate help for defenseless children at risk. Unfortunately, society’s level of development at this time is such that state intervention is the only chance for these children – without it, most of them are doomed. It is necessary to have a well-founded and well-maintained social infrastructure that will guarantee security for the vulnerable.

Obviously (see yesterday’s newspaper) the current system of specialized state care, which includes Child Protection Departments within the 147 Directorates for Social Assistance in the Agency for Social Assistance, is not in any condition to defend children at risk. The question of why this is so and what should be changed provoked the BHC to conduct a research study into the system of crisis centers, where Directorates for Social Assistance should place children who have been the victims of trafficking and violence as a last-case scenario. The study looked at normative acts, the placement procedure, life in the crisis centers as well as what happens to children after their stays there. A report with the results will be published on the BHC’s website.