Tuesday, May 18 2004

A profitable labor market where underage children are exploited is developing in the underground, firstly because valid legislation is not applied. Among direct consequences: all these children will turn into uneducated and untrained adults, who will have to be supported by the state and the community. Most of these children will turn into delinquents to survive.

STEFAN CANDEA , stefancandea@crji.org
SORIN OZON, sorinozon@crji.org
Photo: Mihai Vasile

Tasty tomatoes in the market places, fresh pork and meatloaf, freshly baked bread – would you still feel like eating them, if you knew that all these are the products of some children' efforts who had been obliged by their parents to work since they were very young? In order for all these products, and not only them, to keep their low prices, one million Romanian children are economically active, and there are few hundred thousands among them working even against their will, while few ten thousands of them are treated as slaves. These children are growing without having access to an education or to a certain professional training. At the age when they should get involved into the community's life, they get to be a social problem.

In the village of Ceplenita , the Iasi county, at the door of the Ciorneis, several important people coming from Iasi or form Bucharest accompanied by an army of journalists showed up last year. They were all interested in one single thing: how could the parents of Gheorghita, 13 years old, and of Mihai, 12 years old, rent the two boys to some unknown people from a hundreds of kilometers away village, in the Giurgiu county.

Gheorghita was working as a swineherd at the age when he was supposed to go to school, and his parents will get the money for his work. The boy climbed up a high voltage pillar, he got electrocuted and he was brought to Bucharest in a very severe condition. Hell broke loose here, since the boy's master from Gostiu came to get back his servant. The case was taken over by the Child Protection Services and by the Police. The following weeks, all sorts of investigations and penalties were promised to be granted in similar cases of renting children, suddenly discovered in Iasi county villages. The”storm” calmed down in no time.

But six months after the scandal burst out, none of the one implicated in the case knew what the problem was. Maria Ciornei, Gheorghita's mother, believes that the only problem was the child himself. “He was naughty and bad”. “I come here from Giurgiu every spring to take children to work for me, and there are also other parents sending their children to work”, goes on a puzzled Maria Ciornei. Gheorghita's father was denied his parental rights, which doesn't mean that much to him anyway. The Ciorneis stopped knowing from Gheorghita and Mihai from the time they sent them to Giurgiu . Nothing happened to Gheorghita's parents for having trafficked their own children.

500 kilometers from Ceplenita, in the village of Gostinu , we wanted to talk to the families that had rented the two brothers. We got to Mihai's masters, the Calceas. Marin Calcea is not at home, but his wife answers us: “The one having fried himself didn't stay with us, but I am telling you he was out of his minds. His brother worked for us and he was very good and hard working. He didn't need to go to school, because he wasn't going to school in his home village.” The woman doesn't understand where she did wrong: “I didn't do anything wrong, and Police said nothing either. We paid the boy all the money. And you have to know that there are plenty of Moldavians in the village, even children. They come here to work for us since Ceausescu's time.” Vasile Tarca's wife, where Gheorghita used to work, was also puzzled headed: “We didn't do anything wrong, because we didn't take the boy by force. And who made him climb that pillar? The Devil!” The woman told us that she made declarations to all sorts of police officers, but for a few months it was quiet. Nobody called them to the station anymore and they weren't given even a fine.

Nobody was indeed called to Court, even if what the swineherds in Gostinu and Gheorghita's parents did was truly “human trafficking”.

More than that, at the beginning of February, the same swineherds from Gostinu returned to Ceplenita to take on more children for work. Three underage children accompanied them after a short search. Nobody was interested in the case, apart from the social workers of the Child Protection Department and World Vision. Due to their insisting appeals to the Giurgiu county police, the children were tracked down and brought back to Ceplenita several weeks after. But the police didn't bother to open an investigation. “If anything happened to Ciornei, it would be an example for the community. Nothing happened to him, and people use this case as a row model” believes Madalina Galben, social worker with the Ceplenita Major House.

Children for rent in any village

We wandered through the villages near Ceplenita to see if we could find that easily children for rent. We pretended to be the owners of some animal farms in Alexandria and we claimed to need children to work for us an entire season. In every village there are families well known to send their children to work. Even if April is late to look for workers, there were plenty of cases when we were offered children at least 12-13 years old. Many families regretted not to have more children for rent, because most of their children were already working for farms in Giurgiu . In Hodora, for instance, we were directed to Ion Poiana, who offered to gather more children from the village so that we wouldn't have wasted our time. ‘We put it all on paper, the money stay with the parents and you also pay us in advance. 700,000 per month is fine, if you feed and dress them” Ion lets us know. The discussion takes place in the front of his house, where his wife asks us to come back after a week, when returns home one of her children, 13 years of age, because she would like to rent us the kid. “We are at home almost all the time, you can phone our neighbors anytime and we can talk about it” Ion assures us. It appears that at the Poianas, as it happens with many families we talked to, children are the only one working.

“In many families living at the edge of poverty, children are the only income source” explains us Eugen Borlea, the manager of World Vision Iasi. “There can not be any issue of contracts; after all it is all about barter, which is not even complied with in the end. In many cases we dealt with, children wanted to go back to work so that they could support their families”.

Using children for different works seems like a natural thing to do, especially for the farmers. In our trip to the Moldavian counties, most of the agricultural works were done by children. We have found children looking after sheep, cattle, and swine; we have found children doing agricultural work and children doing wine-growing work. Most of them should have been in school. Many of the children we talked to didn't think they were working and they didn't have any idea about the money they were paid.

NGO's experiment solutions

There are some shy attempts to change this mentality. The International Labor Office (ILO) has developed a project together with the Ministry of Education and the “Step by Step” Association. The project aimed at getting back to school all the children used by their parents at farming. The program was developed in Galati , Vaslui and Botosani. Gabriela Ionescu, the principal of the elementary school in the village of Zorleni , near Barlad, was one of the beneficiaries of this program: “50% of the elementary students were used for farming and they abandoned school in no time. We have implicated in this program 50 children, but there was no continuity assured to the program.” Costica Sandulache is one of the children brought back to school and now he is attending the 7 th grade classes. Costica has got left only his father and another two brothers that are also in school. His family is very poor. His father won't admit he was sending his child to work: “He wasn't going to school because I had no money to buy him clothes and food. But now he is going to school and he even gets high grades. He would even get a scholarship, but he is discriminated because he is a gipsy.”

In the village of Calarasi of the Botosani county, the school's principal was no where to be found, and no one from the Major House or among the peasants remembered of such a program. We finally managed to locate the former social worker with the Major House. Liliana Anton is working as a bartender with the local tavern, because there was no more money to pay her at the Major House. She vaguely remembers the”Step by Step” program, but she is not convinced of its efficiency: “There weren't that many children to be brought back in schools and, anyway it wasn't their fault that they were working and skipped classes.”

The Matca Slaves Market

During our investigation we have come to the conclusion that even the most prosperous farms in the country use children as labor force. We have reached Matca, near Tecuci, a village well known for its vegetables green houses and its fruits farms. A very prosperous area soon to be given the name of agro-industrial park. Matca supplies the largest part of the country good quality vegetables and even exports them. The place attracts day-laborers workers from all Romania and even from Moldova . In all articles published by the local press farmers brag on their hard working, stating that Matca offers jobs for every one, young or old: “Our children play in green houses and they help us, even the 3-4 old ones have something to do” declares one of the farmers for a national newspaper. And indeed, in Matca even children work and no one seems to be bothered by this.

Hundreds of people that came in Matca in search for work gather at the village entrance at early hours in the morning. Peasants arrive by car and hire day laborers. A day laborer gets maximum ROL 200,000 per day. And he works 12 hours a day. Among the ones looking for work in the so-called “salves market” we also saw few children. “Children are not so good at farming, you have to take your time to teach them, but they are hard working and we use them for works that don't require special skills” declares a peasant. For example, cutting and tying wine. A tractor passes by in front of us and its trailer is full of workers, among them also some children. We follow the tractor and we reach a vineyard belonging to the village's farm, which is about to be privatized. At least eight children get off the trailer, all being about 13 and 14 years old. The team leader divides them into groups and they all start working. “We have been working since we were ten” brags Marin while carrying a pile of sticks, as big as him, used for tying the wine. As Marin, his fellow companions work hard all day long. They get ROL 125,000 a day, out of which the food and the transportation cost is taken. The trip is tiring, because the kids come by tractor from the village of Corni , 30 kilometers away. We also find out that these kids work based on contracts concluded with their parents who stopped coming to work and send them as replacements.

Children across the Prut

It is common for all farms in Eastern Romania to hire children from Moldova . Recently, two children were caught by the Border Police while illegally crossing the border to get to work in Vaslui county. But such arrangements can also be very well organized. For example, in Iasi , 400 Moldavian children crossed the border in only one week in September last year, while going to harvest fruits. Children from Ungheni and Sarca were attending their compulsory internship and the farms from Bucium and Sarca concluded a contract with the high schools and elementary schools the children were attending, as well as with intermediary companies in Moldova . The Labor Territorial Inspectorate fined the two farms because none of the Moldavian children had previously concluded a work contract, and all children were sent back to Moldova . “I think we have survived a sabotage, because we were doing this for years, and there was no problem at all” tells us the technical manager of the farm in Bucium, near Iasi . The manager is convinced that someone working with the competition manufactured the scandal so that Bucium remained without laborers when the crops had to be harvested.

Human Trafficking

The Law No 678/2001 – “Recruiting, transporting, transferring, accommodating anyone by threats, violence or other constraint, by kidnapping, fraud or misleading, authority abuse or taking advantage of that person's impossibility to defense himself or to express will, or by offering, giving, accepting or receiving money or other profits to gain the consent of someone with authority on that person, with the purpose of exploiting somebody”. Law punishes these felonies against anyone less than 15 years of age with 5 to 15 years in prison.

Economic reasons for preferring children

They do not drink, they do not smoke, they do not create problems – they do not need documents (work contract, insurance, worksheet) – they work without pause – they consume little (food, accommodation, clothes) – they are much cheaper than qualified laborers – they do not know their rights and can not complain about being abused – there were no major repercussions on the employers who had broken the law.

Negative Consequences

Children do not benefit from education anymore – they suffer physical and psychical abuses – they are not qualified in any profession – the state does not cash taxes for the illegal work made by the children – they do not contribute to the public pension found – the state and the community will have to look after them – they will increase criminality.

The Romanian Constitution – The Family Code – Law No 678/2001 regarding the prevention and the fight against human trafficking – the Labor Code (Law No 53/2003) – the Government Ordinance No 26/1997 regarding the protection of children in difficulty – General Norms for Labor Protection, 2002 – The OIM Convention no 138 regarding the minimal age for working, 1957 – The UN Convention concerning the children rights, 1990 – the OIM Convention concerning the forbidding of the most severe forms of child labor and immediate action to be taken in order to eliminate them, 2000.

All children with ages under 13 – all children with ages between 13 and 14 working more than 10 hours a week – all children with ages between 15 and 17 working more than 30 hours a week – all children implicated in the most severe forms of children labor (trafficking, forced labor, prostitution and pornography, illicit activities).

The Phenomenon in figures and statistics

The National Institute for Statistics considers that at the beginning of the year only 40,000 Romanian children were exploited through severe forms of child labor, almost 20,000 of them having ages between 10 and 14. At the same time, a recently published study of UNICEF, the Labor Ministry and the International Labor Office, entitled “Child Labor in Romania ”, identified 900,000 economically active children from almost 5 million underage persons living in Romania . 300,000 children are put to work even against their will. 70,000 children are victims of some of the most severe forms of child exploitation through work, including exploitation by prostitution networks or drugs trafficking. They are constantly working under difficult, and even dangerous, conditions. Most of them are analphabets, dropping school so that they “could do their work”. Dr. Catalin Ghinarau, the initiator of the above-mentioned study, explained that the enormous difference between the figures given by the National Institute for Statistics and the ones of his own study comes from interpreting the definitions with regard to child exploitation through work.

Investigation lead by CRJI (The Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism) and financed by FUJ (The Association of the Danish Investigative Journalists). www.crji.org