This article appears in Child Maltreatment in Residential Care: History, Research, and Current Practice, a volume of research examining the institutionalization of children, child abuse and neglect in residential care, and interventions preventing and responding to violence against children living in out-of-home care settings around the world.
Abstract
Children exposed to institutional care have been shown to suffer from a variety of disruptions of their physical, hormonal, cognitive, and emotional development, with the most affected being children institutionalized from a very early age. Growth deficiency is one of the most severe consequences of this experience. Research on the magnitude and factors that are associated with growth deficiency is valuable because it helps practitioners to design the best policies and actions needed to protect children experiencing maltreatment. The present study investigated the growth disturbances of Romanian institutionalized children in the1990s, including relating this phenomenon to a very complex historical and sociopolitical context. Specifically, we assessed the prevalence of children’s growth stunting and compared its magnitude across four institutional settings which were organized according to children’s age and health status. This study is a secondary analysis of data collected in 1999 by the Survey on Child Abuse in Residential Care Institutions in Romania (SCARCIR). From this original survey (N = 3164), we selected 1178 (651 boys and 527 girls) children with ages between 0 and 19 years (M = 6.61; SD = 5.17; Mdn = 5.0) and living at the time in 57 long-term residential centers (i.e., nurseries, centers for pre-, school-aged, and disabled children). For our current study, we selected only participants whose height data was recorded in 1999. Overall, the descriptive analyses revealed that stunting was very prevalent, averaging 46.4% among Romanian institutionalized children. Most affected were children in centers for disabled (80.6%) and nurseries (52.7%), followed by children placed in centers for preschool-aged (46.9%) and school aged (30.3%). The results of the study highlight the need to implement adequate policies and treatment models for the stunting of institutionalized children that take into account their need for an emotionally secure environment, especially for those placed in long-term residential institutions from a young age.