Children, including. Children and youth from poor families ‐ Some 320,000 children (0‐17 years) were living in extreme poverty in 2010. Children in rural areas and Roma children are the most affected. The urban child poverty rate in 2010 was only 3.5% but in rural areas was 12.4%. Rates are significantly higher for Roma children: 27.3% for Roma children in urban areas, compared with 2% for Romanian children, and 41.1% compared to 10.6% in rural areas. ‐ Children with parents working abroad ‐ At the end of 2011 there were 83,658 children in this situation. These children are generally well‐off. They are sometimes vulnerable to monetary poverty and continually suffer from emotional poverty that xxxxx their development. Lack of parental care and supervision has serious effects on the quality of nutrition and school results, some of them being likely to drop out. Local authorities lack human and material resources to address the phenomenon. They don’t have appropriate mechanisms in place to monitor and evaluate it, let alone do they manage to develop community‐based services. Where such services exist, they are confronted with poor staff training and practices. ‐ Children separated from their families ‐ those in (residential or family‐based) child care, children abandoned in hospital facilities and young people leaving child care at the age of 18. Romania has made significant progress with regard to the right of children to grow up in a family, by reducing the number of children in placement centres and by developing family‐based services. The number of children in residential care – public and private placement centres – has dropped more than twice (from a peak of 57,181 in December 2000 to 23,240 in December 2011). Still, at the end of 2011, for the first time in the past 15 years, the number of institutionalised children increased , this being a consequence of various social unbalances that are existing at family and community level. Law on the protection and promotion of children’s rights, passed in 2004, focuses on the fulfilment of every child’s rights and recognises the need for family support through community‐based services developed to prevent child abandonment, abuse and neglect. But, after almost four years, the National Strategy for Child Rights Protection and Promotion 2008‐2013 recognises that “primary services are practically inexistent at community level (according to the law, these were supposed to be developed as part of the welfare system), the network of speci...
