Fostering new hope

THE memory of a little boy's gift brings tears to JK Rowling's eyes. At a children's home in Romania, the world's richest author was presented with paintings and a story more poignant than any found in the pages of a Harry Potter novel.

The author tells how, on a fact-finding visit to a children's institution, she met one young boy who presented her with the paintings which had won him first prize in a talent competition. The child, one of Romania's 32,000 children in care, also explained that he had met his birth mother last year, but that she had died just three months later.

Another sad sight to greet Rowling, who was conducting a two-day visit to Romania to launch a new children's charity, the Children's High Level Group, was six abandoned babies in a local maternity hospital in Bucharest. Rowling, herself a mother of three children, the youngest of which is just a year old, says: "I have a baby at home and again that is something that touches you. It's shocking, although I understand the reasons these children have been abandoned are not the simple reasons that many people in Western Europe may assume. This is a complex social issue and it will need complex social solutions."

Solutions which Rowling, who flew from Edinburgh to Romania on Wednesday, is determined to help deliver. The author, reported to be richer than the Queen, is ready for business. On Wednesday night she helped raise £170,000 as the guest of honour at a charity banquet in Romania's national palace, whose high-vaulted rooms were previously home to Nicolae Ceausescu, the country's infamous Communist former dictator.

In an effort to boost Romania's population of 23 million, Ceausescu banned both birth control and abortion, which led to thousands of infants being left in state institutions. Following his execution, televised pictures of malnourished orphans living in squalor, many suffering from Aids, were broadcast around the world.

Since then the Romanian authorities have begun to tackle the problem of institutionalised children, the numbers of whom have been reduced from 100,000 at the time of Ceausescu's execution to 32,000 today, two-thirds of whom are teenagers. In the last four years 22,044 children have been removed from government orphanages; the number of foster families has risen from almost zero to 15,000, and new laws now make it impossible to institutionalise a child under the age of two.

The new charity, Children's High Level Group, of which Rowling is a founder member along with Baroness Emma Nicholson, a British MEP, assists children in Romania and promotes the nation's reforms in other European countries. Rowling explains that she was moved to become involved in tackling the issue of institutionalised children after seeing shocking pictures in a Sunday newspaper magazine of children in the Czech Republic who were kept in beds like cages: "I was pregnant and vulnerable in the way that a pregnant woman is to those kind of issues regarding children. It was an awful image and I almost didn't want to let it into my head. The next second I thought 'well you just need to read this article and if it's as bad as it looks, you have to do something about it,' and that's why I am doing it."

Prior to her visit, Rowling released a statement on her website explaining how she had become involved. She explains: "I started writing letters, first to all the Scottish MEPs and then to the Czech ambassador, Czech prime minister and Czech president. This flurry of activity led me to a meeting with Baroness Emma Nicholson, who has been working on similar issues in Romania for many years. She asked me to join the Children's High Level Group, which will work on a much wider scale to enforce children's rights. The social problems that lead to the placing of children in institutions will not be resolved quickly. However, that is a good reason for making a start as soon as possible."

She started with a meeting with Radek Pech, the Czech Republic's ambassador, and criticised the country's continued practice of locking young children in caged beds, stating: "I am horrified by this situation. The Czech Republic is not a country where I would expect to find these outdated practices, and I have joined the Children's High Level Group to tackle these issues. What disturbs me most is that children in the Czech Republic are being caged purely for others' convenience. The Czech Republic, unlike the other countries which have acknowledged and are facing up to this problem, are indifferent to our concerns. You must open the door and let us help you."

Professor Kevin Browne, a World Health Organisation consultant at the University of Birmingham and a founder member of the new charity, says that in the Czech Republic six per cent of all children under the age of three years old are in institutional care, the highest proportion in the whole of Europe and Central Asia At the meeting, in the British Council offices in Bucharest, Pech said he acknowledged the group's concerns and promised to inform his government.

He also invited Rowling and the Children's High Level Group to visit the Czech Republic in order to lobby for change. The prime minister of the Republic of Moldova has also invited the charity to assist in the reform of their child institutions.

Rowling, who has sold more than 300 million books, admits that fame has its advantages: "You can parlay that kind of interest in you personally into awareness of issues you'd like to raise."

Before focusing on the plight of children, Rowling has worked with programs to fight multiple sclerosis, the disease that killed her mother, and charities for one-parent families - she herself having been a single mother.

"With this issue it was something that really shocked and touched me," she says, before explaining how much progress Romania has already made: "The image that the world had ten years ago of Romanian orphanages is not an accurate picture of the overall state of institutionalised children in Romania any more. Romania is a model for other countries hoping to reform. Romania was the state that acknowledged there was a problem and set out to do something about it. So, by launching the group here we are trying to establish the progress that is possible."