"Documentary Exposes Horrors of Bulgarian Children's Home", news article in Balkan Insight, from September 14, 2007

Source:

Documentary Exposes Horrors of Bulgarian Children's Home, dated 14 September 2007, Balkan Insight

https://balkaninsight.com/2007/09/14/documentary-exposes-horrors-of-bulgarian-children-s-home/

The article:

Documentary Exposes Horrors of Bulgarian Children's Home

BIRN

September 14, 2007

London — The British media gave extensive coverage on Friday to a ground-breaking BBC 4 documentary on the appalling conditions in an institution for deaf or blind children in Bulgaria.

Shock was the overwhelming response from newspapers and public alike at the desperate conditions and institutionalised cruelty shown to vulnerable and in some cases desperately ill children by staff and management at Mogilino in northern Bulgaria.

The programme, “Bulgaria's Abandoned Children”, by Kate Blewett, well known for the programme “The Dying Rooms” about orphanages in China and for exposing similar conditions in Romanian orphanages in the early 1990s, followed events at Mogilino for nine months.

During the programme, children were shown wasting away over a period of months from malnutrition and being left on beds in exquisite pain with broken limbs. Evidence of the routine physical abuse of at least two children by one staff member, subsequently removed, was uncovered.

Photographic evidence of the often relatively healthy state of the children when they arrived, and their massive deterioration under the “care” of the Bulgarian nurses, was provided.

At the end of the programme, at least two of the children tracked over the period of filming appeared close to death, mainly as a result of neglect. The institution's director, however, was shown praising her work and blaming any problems at the institution on negligent staff.

In a written reply, also shown at the end of the programme, the Bulgarian government rebutted all the programme-makers' claims concerning the ill-treatment of children in institutions in Bulgaria.

The programme was “90 minutes of undiluted horror”, Britain's Daily Telegraph remarked. “Anyone familiar with the Romanian orphanage scandals of the early Nineties will have stared in shocked disbelief that nearly 20 years on precisely the same pattern of appalling cruelty and neglect is being repeated in another former Communist state. The chief difference is that Bulgaria is already a member of the European Union.”