(photo by MDRI 06/2005)
Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI), has found children with disabilities hidden and wasting away, near death, in Romania's adult psychiatric facilities. A report released by MDRI, Hidden Suffering: Romania's Segregation and Abuse of Infants and Children with Disabilities, describes teenagers weighing no more than 27 pounds. Some children are tied down with bedsheets, their arms and legs twisted and left to atrophy.
Despite Romanian government claims that it has ended the placement of babies in institutions, MDRI found infants languishing in a medical facility so poorly staffed that the children never leave their cribs. Many of these children have no identity papers. Officially, they do not exist.