Children for sale

THOUSANDS of Romanian children have been sold into brothels and industrial slavery since the EU ban on international adoptions.

Romanian couples, who cannot afford to feed their children, have been offering them for sale as cheap labour.

Some children end up working as slave labour on farms or in sweatshops, many more are used to supply the rapidly growing sex industry sweeping westwards across Europe.

In the ‘60s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, determined to create a large workforce, decreed every married woman bear at least four children. He later decided this number should be five.

The trend continued long after Ceausescu’s demise.

Today, an estimated one million children have been abandoned in post-Communist nations across Eastern Europe, and 10% of them are Romanians.

In excess of 2,500 Romanian children are living in the streets and sewers, and 100,000 are wards of state orphanages or private shelters.

But in recent times orphanages are being closed, due largely to the EU ban on international adoptions, and this is placing parents under even greater financial pressure.

There are reported cases of pimps paying parents to be allowed to take away their daughters, and other cases of parents initiating the contact in order to sell their offspring.

Cut off from the chance to give up children they can no longer afford to feed, desperate parents are left with no option but to sell their children as cheap labour.

A British freelance journalist, Michael Leidig, who tried to buy children over the weekend, claims he was offered seven in the space of a few hours in a poor suburb of Bucharest.

The EU has demanded laws banning such buying and selling of children are enforced, but since they were introduced several years ago only two people have been prosecuted, and fined just €25.

In a poor district of Bucharest, Mr Leidig says he was offered children for as little as €100 with no checks on who he was or what the fate of the children would be.

A moratorium on international adoptions was introduced in 2002 after criticism from the EU that the system was corrupt and Romanian children were being sold to foreign families.