Child and youth welfare in the wild
The Kinder- und Jugendhilfe Wildfang GmbH is a child and youth welfare institution founded in 1977 and based in Bothel in Lower Saxony .
The facility hit the headlines after it became known that difficult-to-educate children and adolescents were severely ill-treated in a facility in the Romanian town of Vişeu de Sus in Maramureş County . The Romanian public prosecutor's office is investigating, among others, the German head of the facility in Romania for deprivation of liberty and human trafficking .
history
On Tuesday, August 27, 2019, a special organized crime unit of the Romanian prosecutor's office raided the facility. Five people were arrested, including the German facility manager, and cash in the amount of 145,000 euros was seized. The investigation was initiated by a youth who fled the home and reported the case to the Romanian authorities.
According to media reports, the 23 children and young people from all over Germany who were housed there had to do extremely hard forced labor on farms; some of them were harnessed to carts like oxen , and violators were punished with flogging , deprivation of food and isolation. The structural conditions on site did not meet elementary minimum standards, and the children and adolescents did not receive any school education and were immobilized by forcible medication. In order to prevent them from escaping, the identity papers of the children and young people were taken away. As a result of the agony, there are said to have been several suicide attempts. The host families are said to have received up to 600 euros from Germany for each young person, a multiple of the monthly average wage in Romania.
The Celle Youth Welfare Office ended its cooperation with the facility as early as 2009 after a social worker who happened to be in the city as a tourist reported the abuses in the facility, but the report to the State Youth Welfare Office was ignored by the local authorities.
The federal government stated that in 20 years of cooperation with the institution in question there had been no complaints. The state of Lower Saxony announced that it would temporarily stop sending children and young people to Romania.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ In a German social program: German teenagers are said to have been abused as slaves in Romania - FOCUS Online
- ↑ Alleged abuse: German leader of social project in Romania arrested - Spiegel Online
- ↑ Abused children? Apparently hardly any information from Romania - NDR
- ↑ Accusations of abuse against Romanian social project: Children from Brandenburg lived in a controversial home - rbb24
- ↑ What happened to German children in care in Romania? - NDR panorama
- ↑ Controversial social project in Romania: 15 hours of work, beatings from the host father: Tim was for 2 years in the "Maramures slave camp" - FOCUS Online
- ↑ Deported to Romania - Brutal re-education of German teenagers? - German wave
- ^ Project Maramures: Difficult to educate German youths mistreated in Romania - Frankfurter Rundschau
- ^ Social project in Romania under suspicion: youth welfare office apparently ended cooperation in 2009 - Spiegel Online
- ↑ Abuse in Romania? Land prohibited stays - NDR