GRIFFITHS: This is one of the last old-style institutions left in Romania. Officials call it a placement centre for children with deficiencies. These kids call it home. Their so-called deficiencies are unclear, even to the officials who keep them here and most of them aren’t orphans at all. They’ve been abandoned.

Today there are still two hundred and twenty large children’s homes in Romania and thousands of kids living in the care of the state.

STEFAN DERABUS: Every day counts, every day they are in an institution counts so it is a matter of life and death.

GRIFFITHS: This place in the country’s north is slated to shut down, possibly later this year. Romania wants to close the door on its dark past and its grim institutions. Now the thinking is that children should be reunited with their natural family, put into foster care or into smaller centres. It’s a massive cultural shift for children, parents and the entire society.

Romania’s reputation for the terrible treatment of its children is largely the fault of former Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Back in the 1950’s he urged women to have at least five children and outlawed contraception and abortion. Children were deemed the property of the state and those with disabilities were often given up by their families. Thousands were packed into rooms filled with cots with just one worker for every forty babies.

STEFAN DERABUS: This place was an institution for children with severe special needs.

GRIFFITHS: Aid worker Stefan Derabus returns to a place that haunts him to this day.

STEFAN DERABUS: If you came to the building, through the bars of the windows you’d hear the shouts, you’d hear the screams, you’d see the hands being tied to the bars.

GRIFFITHS: This home, in the northern village of Sighet, was known as the institution for the incurable. Two hundred and seventy children with mental and physical disabilities were kept here.

STEFAN DERABUS: The kids who were self-aggressive were simply being tied and they were left in their cot like that for days on end.

GRIFFITHS: Four years ago Stefan Derabus shut it down. Closing these institutions has become his life’s passion.

What’s so wrong with institutionalisation?

STEFAN DERABUS: Nobody pays attention to them individually because they’re always a mass. Nobody cares if they are alone. Nobody will look, will try to find out why they’re sad. There will hardly be anybody asking why they are ill and what happens and why they suffer.

GRIFFITHS: And this is what’s become of the children. Stefan Derabus has moved them to a smaller home, just a few kids and their carers. It’s a model for what the Romanian Government wants across the country.

STEFAN DERABUS: Everything was a new experience to them – getting them out – seeing the grass, touching the leaves. It was unbelievable to see how every single sensation was extraordinary, was something fascinating to them.

GRIFFITHS: Monica is twenty-two years old. She cannot see and doesn’t talk. Her disabilities were almost certainly made worse by her time in the old home.

STEFAN DERABUS: Before she was packed like a sandwich. Her position was more or less this one and that’s how she was tied. She was basically tied like a sandwich and whenever she was let loose, she would hit her head with her feet very, very strongly.

GRIFFITHS: After two years in these more humane surroundings, Monica has finally stopped hitting herself but she, like Dani here, has never had the chance to develop properly. Dani is nineteen years old but looks much younger. He can’t walk because he too was tied to his bed in the old institution.

STEFAN DERABUS: They both were simply stuck in their cots or stuck in their chairs. They were sat without doing activities, without having any sort of inter relationship with people. They couldn’t eat solid food. They were basically being fed from the bucket and all they did was suck food. That was all they did. That was the way in which they were eating - drinking basically, drinking their food.

GRIFFITHS: For all of Romania’s good intentions, twenty-seven thousand children are still living in state-run homes. Some centres have merely changed their names and functions to survive under the new system. At the Codlea home, north of Bucharest, the social workers asked us not to show the girls’ faces. Conditions have improved. Once eight girls lived to a room, now only two share. It’s called the Centre for Girls with Psychological Disabilities but officials had trouble telling me exactly what was wrong with the girls.

LIANA BRANISTE: [Child Protection Officer] I’m not a specialist but... just a kind of retard, a kind of other mental disease so... but this is not, I haven’t.... I don’t know all the diagnostics, but mainly mental disease.

GRIFFITHS: Staff here say the girls have extremely low IQ’s, but some of them were clearly bilingual – hardly a sign of a lack of intelligence. The girls at Codlea are not so much mentally disabled as socially impaired by their time at the centre, at least that’s the belief of Human Rights lawyer Georgiana Pascu.

GEORGIANA PASCU: And they were placed there and in that moment I assume that the door was closed, you know, ‘you are here you have mental disabilities’. And we saw many children in that... in that situation, especially teenager.

GRIFFITHS: The girls at Codlea are, it seems, smart enough to sew. The garments they make bring in money – not for them, but for the centre. It’s a likely breach of Romania’s own laws.

This country was only admitted to the European Union on the condition that it lifted its game on child welfare. Now it’s getting millions of dollars from abroad to support children, foster parents and single mothers but there are fears that joining the EU will cause more pain for the country’s young. Two million Romanians have already left to find better-paid jobs abroad. Many of them have left their children behind.

In the village of Negresti Oas in the country’s northwest, at least one member of every household has gone. The Poptile family is missing a generation. The parents of young Alina and Razvan have left to work abroad, leaving them with their grandparents. Grandfather Ion Poptile maintains the children don’t miss out on anything.

ION POPTILE: They have a telephone. They can call…Daddy send me this… Mother send me that... So they don’t lack anything.

GRIFFITHS: His thirteen-year old granddaughter, Alina Poptile, hasn’t lived with her parents since she was a toddler and she misses them.

ALINA POPTILE: I can’t tell my grandmother everything because she’s old and she doesn’t understand what’s happening in this world right now, of teenagers and all of this stuff.

GRIFFITHS: What’s it like when Razvan misses your parents? What happens?

ALINA POPTILE: He comes and tells me and then I hug him and I tell him that my mother is going to come home soon.

GRIFFITHS: Do you feel like you’re a bit of a mother to him as well?

ALINA POPTILE: Of course, yes because my mother told me when she left that I should take care of him.

GRIFFITHS: Alina Poptile and her brother are lucky in one sense – they have a home and people who care about them. Other children have been left to fend for themselves.

MARIAN ZAHARIYA: They steal, they get involved in prostitution, they beg and the big ones, they have.... they organise gangs of young people, of young kids.

GRIFFITHS: Aid worker Marian Zahariya is my guide to Romania’s hidden world in the capital city of Bucharest. This is a service shaft for the city’s heating system and a doorway to suffering. Child welfare in this country is suppose to have improved but some kids are still ending up on the streets.

This concrete bunker is home for about twenty children. The youngest is just twelve. Some of them have run away from abusive families or children’s homes. The new system has failed them.

Ricardo is high from sniffing glue – as are most of the teenagers down here. The fifteen year old ran away from home after his family sent him out to beg. His friend George was left homeless when his mother went to work in Germany.

So who takes care of you?

GEORGE: Me… you… him… we’re all friends. Friends… friends.

GRIFFITHS: It’s warm down here but this is no place for children.

MARIAN ZAHARIYA: [Aid Worker] We received a lot of money from everywhere in the world and obviously people expect now to see some changes and the fact that these kids, these people, are still here... it is sad.

GRIFFITHS: There’s no question that overall Romania’s children are better off now than before but as we discovered, some are still falling through the cracks. A new law says that children under the age of two can no longer live in institutions and yet here they are.

This is a paediatric unit complete with a doctor and nurses but there’s nothing wrong with these babies except for the misfortune of being abandoned. In modern Romania maternity wards have become the new orphanages. Dr Monica Nicoara is in charge.

DR NICOARA: Okay Emma I present you Emmanuel Bizgan, Emmanuel.

GRIFFITHS: This little boy was given up by his family when he was 10 days old. He had no name then and he still has no identity papers – that means officially he hasn’t even been born.

DR NICOARA: [Ward supervisor] With no ID he doesn’t exist. He has no rights. You don’t exist you have no rights. And now we’re working on his ID papers.

GRIFFITHS: There are twenty-three abandoned babies in this hospital ward. Many of them are strangely quiet. They’ve learned that crying doesn’t get them anywhere so they don’t bother. They are babies who have never known a mother’s love.

DR NICOARA: They have no affiliation, no stability. That’s my mummy, I go to my mummy – I am safe with my mummy. I have many mummies. Anyone, it’s okay, but which is mine? It’s not their place in the hospital, no matter the condition there. It’s simple.

STEFAN DERABUS: They shouldn’t be in a cot with another ten babies around them just waiting to be fed. There isn’t staff to work with them. The medical staff is not specialised in working with children. They are medical staff. They are nurses and a baby’s place is not in a hospital.

GRIFFITHS: But for now these babies have nowhere else to go. Many Romanians are just too poor to take them in and foreigners are no longer allowed to adopt them.

STEFAN DERABUS: I think that the issue of international adoptions was at the core of not doing reform in Romania until 2001-2002 because people thought generally that by sending kids abroad, you would sort out the issue of childcare in Romania. It was totally wrong.

GRIFFITHS: The adoption system had become a corrupt business. Babies were changing hands for tens of thousands of dollars.

STEFAN DERABUS: I think that money was being made by a whole network formed of lawyers, people involved in social services, politicians, doctors. You’d have I think that nearly everybody who was involved in this kind of scheme had his or her own cut.

GRIFFITHS: Now the baby trade has been stopped but it hasn’t changed a culture that for half a century encouraged parents to hand over their unwanted babies to the state.

Has it made your job harder?

DR NICOARA: My job is the same but my soul is crying.

GRIFFITHS: Romania genuinely wants to improve the lives of its children and repair its image but some aid agencies suggest that children are still being abandoned at the same rate as in the communist years. The legacy of that era lives on in the neglect of children. It’s a cycle that could take decades to break.