Incarcerated children are ‘Europe’s guilty secret,’ she says

Writing in the [UK] Times, Rosa Monckton documents the horrors of eight Bulgarian institutions in which children are routinely starved, neglected, abused and imprisoned. Many of these children have no human contact and have “given up hope of ever being consoled, cuddled or comforted.”

Many of these children have disabilities, and their parents have been forced by the government to hand them over at birth because “there is still a widely held belief that disabled children are best dealt with by being removed from their families and separated from society.” An excerpt:

It is too late to help many of the children incarcerated in institutions — their lives are already irreparably damaged. But we can stop the flow of children into these places. We need early intervention programs in hospitals and maternity wards; we need to make people care. If you are one of those people who hunts through the supermarket to avoid buying a battery-raised chicken, think for a moment about these children, who are treated no better.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Down syndrome, intellectual/developmental disabilities, international, NOT2BEMISSED. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.