Bulgaria said Thursday it had shut all of its communist-era institutions for disabled children, which for years had been plagued by scandals of negligence and abuse cases resulting in deaths. The closure of the 25 homes marks the end of painful reforms launched in 2010, when the scandal first broke.
Only a handful of children had remained in the institutions by the end of last year. "This is the end of a step-by-step process of moving the children from the former homes into smaller community-based centres," Georgy Terziyski of the national agency for social assistance told AFP. Bulgarian rights groups cautiously welcomed the move, but said much remained to be done to ensure children's welfare. During communism, Bulgarian authorities had encouraged the abandonment of children with mental and physical disabilities to state care in huge homes that were deliberately located in some of Bulgaria's most remote regions.
The case unravelled six years ago, when an investigation by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) rights group revealed that hundreds of children had died from malnutrition and abuse in the state-run homes over the previous decade. Most of the deaths were never reported to police or authorities, the report found. Moreover, three-quarters of the 238 deaths could have been prevented, according to the BHC. Following the shock revelations, the Bulgarian government launched a sweeping overhaul of its social care system.
Agency figures showed that the number of children placed in the old homes went down to just seven at the end of 2015 from 1,185 in 2012. Children in state care were instead accommodated in 154 smaller community centres that have the capacity to host 2,099 children and offer substantially better care, the government agency says. Speaking to AFP on Thursday, BHC chairman Krasimir Kanev said the closures marked "some progress". But he criticised the fact that the majority of children were transferred into centres branded "family-like" by authorities. They were initially supposed to host between six and eight children each, but they finally ended up with 14.
"These alternative centres, despite offering somewhat better conditions, are again institutions. They are not really family-like. There are no families with 14 members. So in practice they are just smaller institutions," Kanev said. UNICEF Bulgaria's child protection expert Milena Harizanova also highlighted the centres' insufficient staffing, with up to 14 children sometimes relying on just two or three assistants to help them move around or go out.
She acknowledged that the "overall conditions are categorically much better". "The process of shutting the big institutions has indeed succeeded in taking the children out of their isolation," Harizanova told AFP. The centres, she said, were "close to the regions where the children came from and close to healthcare, education, transport services and above all, other people." But "their actual social inclusion is still a problem", she said.
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