Child Trafficking; Romania Cleans Up It’s Act
At the top of the stairs stood a solitary figure, a young man. He watched as I approached. My baby, by now nearly six months old, that I was in the process of adopting from a Romanian orphanage, slept soundly. Snuggled safely in the baby pouch I was wearing in front of me.
” Buy your baby?” The stranger asked me, speaking with difficulty in English.
Pretending that I hadn’t heard, I ignored him, clutched my baby even more tightly and carried on to the safety of the foyer in downtown Bucharest.
This incident happened to me on two occassions. The same man in exactly the same spot. Watching. Waiting. It is twenty-five years later but I can still picture him.
Juxtaposed aginst the dramatically beautiful rural landscapes of Romania is the kind of generational poverty which grinds people into the dust. It is this poverty which enables human trafficking to exist. Mothers have been heard to say, ” I sold my baby”, rather than, ” I adopted my baby out to a nice couple from overseas”.
I carried my memories of human trafficking back with me to Australia and wrote about them in my Memoir- ”The Promise I Kept”. Back then, the going rate for a baby, more commonly a gypsy baby, bought and sold on the black market was $20,000 U.S I wonder how inflation has affected that figure over the years.
You can imagine my shock when, several months ago, during the course of a conversation with a member of the public, a complete stranger, she informed me that her friend in Sweden organised adoptions of babies from Romania to Sweden. ” That’s illegal”, I told her. ” Not if they are gypsy babies’, she replied.
This conversation triggered my memories and flashbacks, but, eventually, I reached out for help and got the support and advice I needed in order to make a complaint through the right channels.
Human trafficking of babies from Romania is no secret, yet few are willing to talk about it openly. How is justice best served if we are unwilling to tackle the issue? As members of the public, no matter what part of this global community we live in, we have a moral obligation to uphold and protect the innocence, the lives of these vulnerable babies.
If you, or anyone you know has any information, you can make an anonymous complaint to Interpol via the following link; http://www.interpol.int/Contact-INTERPOL
The Romanian government needs to be seen to be doing something about the human trafficking. Currently, investigations are underway in Romania as a result of complaints from members of the public and gathering of information by the appropriate Intelligence Agencies. The driving force behind these investigations is Dragos Pislaru, Minister of Labour, Family, Social Protection and the Elderly. I, like many others, have pinned my hopes on this dedicated, hard-working and much respected Labour Minister to finally shine a light into the darkness that is human trafficking.
