The first desegregation efforts in the marginalised and segregated communities in the Pata-Rât area were carried out within the frames of two social housing projects (between 2014–2017 and ...2020–2023). Although a housing first methodology would have been more adequate in the context of a marginalised community, given the shortcomings of the Romanian social assistance system, implementation was impossible. In this context, it was necessary to develop a system to access social housing but also to create a reasonably ‘fair process’ at the community level. Thus, in both interventions, the starting point for developing the social housing criteria was to survey the community in order to explore the community members’ preferences regarding the criteria to be considered in the selection of the beneficiary families for the social houses. The surveys covered all the inhabitants of the Pata-Rât area, that is 219 households in the first survey and 282 households in the second. The survey results served as the basis for the development of the criteria for accessing social housing. In this article, we present and discuss the results of the community surveys from 2016 and from 2020, the year of the pandemic outbreak. Differences were found in the prioritisation of criteria, with an increasing preference for those reflecting vulnerability/needs (e.g., number of children, years spent in the community, disability) and decreasing preference for the ones indicating family resources (e.g., employment, income, education). These differences reflect the increase in poverty and loss of resources occurring in the community during this period, due both to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the relocation of the 35 better-off families in the first Pata-Cluj project.
Children's exposure to violence is a major public health issue. The Balkan epidemiological study on Child Abuse and Neglect project aimed to collect internationally comparable data on violence ...exposures in childhood.
A three stage stratified random sample of 42,194 school-attending children (response rate: 66.7%) in three grades (aged 11, 13 and 16 years) was drawn from schools in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Greece, Romania, Serbia and Turkey. Children completed the ICAST-C questionnaire, which measures children's exposure to violence by any perpetrator.
Exposure rates for psychological violence were between 64.6% (FYROM) and 83.2% (Greece) for lifetime and 59.62% (Serbia) and 70.0% (Greece) for past-year prevalence. Physical violence exposure varied between 50.6% (FYROM) and 76.3% (Greece) for lifetime and 42.5% (FYROM) and 51.0% (Bosnia) for past-year prevalence. Sexual violence figures were highest for lifetime prevalence in Bosnia (18.6%) and lowest in FYROM (7.6%). Lifetime contact sexual violence was highest in Bosnia (9.8%) and lowest in Romania (3.6%). Past-year sexual violence and contact sexual violence prevalence was lowest in Romania (5.0 and 2.1%) and highest in Bosnia (13.6 and 7.7% respectively). Self-reported neglect was highest for both past-year and lifetime prevalence in Bosnia (48.0 and 20.3%) and lowest in Romania (22.6 and 16.7%). Experiences of positive parental practices were reported by most participating children in all countries.
Where significant differences in violence exposure by sex were observed, males reported higher exposure to past-year and lifetime sexual violence and females higher exposure to neglect. Children in Balkan countries experience a high burden of violence victimization and national-level programming and child protection policy making is urgently needed to address this.
Based on the principles of United Nations Children's Rights Convention (CRC) and the data collected by the Balkan Epidemiologic Study on CAN (BECAN, an EU's FP7 funded project, http://www.becan.eu), ...we argue that similar to adults, children should be granted the right to decide on their participation in research on violence. We have a human rights approach: in the first part of the paper we discuss children's competence, their right to privacy and to give informed consent, as well as their need to be protected against any harm possibly caused by their participation in research. The second part of the paper is focused on the specific ethical considerations and the procedures of consent followed in the BECAN project. Along this research project the Romanian team has been confronted with a large number of parental refusals, which resulted in the exclusion of 29.39% of 5th graders and 24.56% of 7th graders, due to parental gate-keeping. However, less than 1% of the children have refused to participate. In the third part we present children's views on their involvement in research that asks about their exposure to violence. We set up focus-groups with children same age as those involved in the BECAN research. Responses generally favor the opinion that children from all three age-groups should decide on their own if they want or not to take part in a survey on such a subject. We conclude that in order to understand the multiple facets of children's victimization we cannot avoid involving children in research.
Criminal justice interventions are important to reduce domestic violence and protect women. In this study we will tackle the unwillingness of women in two regions of Romania to press charges and the ...failure of the criminal justice system in providing them protection and justice. “Why don’t women press charges?” was the main question that stood at the basis of the international research WOSAFEJUS , where Babeş-Bolyai University (UBB) was the main Romanian partner through its Faculty of Sociology and Social Work. In our paper we will analyse the studies relevant to the field of domestic violence and we will pay a special attention to those that take into consideration the functioning of the criminal justice system. We will present a preliminary analysis of the women's perception of the criminal justice system in Romania. Our results are based on 76 semi-structured interviews with women in a situation of domestic violence. Atlas.ti was used to aid a thematic analysis of the qualitative data. The results will highlight women’s expectations regarding the justice system, the perceived usefulness of the legal intervention as well as the main factors that come into play when they decide to stay or to leave the criminal justice process. Even though in most of the cases police intervention can’t or doesn’t provide safety and the rapid elimination of danger, the importance of non-legislative factors of intervention has nevertheless been emphasized.
Violence against children is a global public health concern. Researchers are increasingly using self-report measures of physical, psychological, and sexual violence and neglect for population-based ...surveys. The current gold-standard measure, the 45-item ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tool has been used across the world. This study assesses its adequacy for measuring abuse across countries.
Multiple group confirmatory factor analyses were used to assess the configural, metric and scalar invariance of the measure across nine Balkan countries. Data were collected using a three-stage stratified random sampling frame of 42,194 school-attending children in three grades (aged 11,13 and 16 years) from schools in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. Children completed the ICAST-C, which measures children’s exposure to physical, psychological, and sexual violence, neglect and witnessing household violence in the past year and across the lifespan.
The analyses show partial scalar invariance for the ICAST-C constructs children’s exposure to physical and psychological violence, neglect and witnessing household violence across the nine countries and partial scalar invariance for the constructs of children’s exposure to physical, psychological and sexual violence, neglect and witnessing household violence across eight countries (Turkey did not measure sexual violence).
The ICAST-C can be used to validly compare levels of physical, psychological, and sexual violence, neglect and witnessing violence in school-aged children across countries. It can also be used to validly compare the relations between these forms of violence and their covariates, predictors, and outcomes across countries.
The gender factor influences the characteristics of the parental role and the parental social cognitions related to the child. In this way the discipline methods used by parents show special ...characteristics according to the gender of the parents and the child. The present study, using a sample of 3747 parents from Romania, follows the use of physically violent discipline methods by the gender of parents and children, in three different age groups of the child (12, 14 and 16 years old). The results show that both mothers and fathers use more often physical discipline methods, if their child is a boy. In the case of mothers, the use of physical discipline is decreasing as the child grows, while the fathers use most often physical discipline methods with their 13-14 years old children.
The aim of the research is to analyse the bullying suffered during school age, as well as the relationship between bullying experiences and young adult’s personality along the Big5 personality ...traits, as well as global self-esteem. The study involved 209 young adults between the ages of 17 and 34, with a mean age of 21 years. The tools used in the survey are a demographic questionnaire, a self-reporting bullying questionnaire, the Big Five Inventory (BFI), and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. The research uses a correlation strategy, the statistical tests used in the data processing are descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, Pearson’s correlation and analysis of variance (anova). According to our results, a large proportion (77.7%) of respondents experienced bullying in school as children, 23.8% every day or almost every. 23.1% admitted they harassed others during their school years. Regarding the personality traits, the results show that individuals who had experienced school bullying are significantly more neurotic and less extraverted than their than their unexperienced peers, and more frequently bullying is associated with lower extraversion, lower friendliness, and greater openness. Persons who had committed bullying are significantly less conscientious than their peers who have not. As for help-seeking behaviour, nearly half of young people did not tell anyone about what had happened, only 28% sought help from an adult and only 13% actually received help. These results clearly stress the importance of developing school policies against bullying, which specifically address prevention, but also intervention. Keywords: bullying, personality, self-esteem
The aim of the research is to analyse the bullying suffered during school age, as well as the relationship between bullying experiences and young adult’s personality along the Big5 personality ...traits, as well as global self-esteem. The study involved 209 young adults between the ages of 17 and 34, with a mean age of 21 years. The tools used in the survey are a demographic questionnaire, a self-reporting bullying questionnaire, the Big Five Inventory (BFI), and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. The research uses a correlation strategy, the statistical tests used in the data processing are descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, Pearson’s correlation and analysis of variance (anova). According to our results, a large proportion (77.7%) of respondents experienced bullying in school as children, 23.8% every day or almost every. 23.1% admitted they harassed others during their school years. Regarding the personality traits, the results show that individuals who had experienced school bullying are significantly more neurotic and less extraverted than their than their unexperienced peers, and more frequently bullying is associated with lower extraversion, lower friendliness, and greater openness. Persons who had committed bullying are significantly less conscientious than their peers who have not. As for help-seeking behaviour, nearly half of young people did not tell anyone about what had happened, only 28% sought help from an adult and only 13% actually received help. These results clearly stress the importance of developing school policies against bullying, which specifically address prevention, but also intervention.
Abstract
Since the reforms started in the Romanian child protection, and in spite of adopting children’s rights, and investing in the professionalization of the child protection staff, research has ...indicated that children continue to suffer violence in care settings.
This chapter contributes to the literature that documents children’s rights violations in Romanian residential care, before and after the political shift in 1989, including the period after the accession to the EU, by presenting and discussing interview data of 48 adults who spent parts of their childhoods in child protection settings.
The conceptual framework of this analysis is based on the human rights perspective and the transitional justice. The main body of the article presents the testimonials of adults who grew up in institutional care in Romania, as collected in the framework of the SASCA project, funded by the European Union.
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In the immediate aftermath of the war which threatened sovereignty, fractured geographical and political identities and cultures and left the land scarred and damaged, landscape became invested with ...deep and special significance. During this time, Romanticism unsurprisingly re-flourished and the first psychological accounts of the phenomenology of place and space started appearing. Landscape painting became a visual manifestation of national identity which had acquired a great meaning in these circumstances. Whilst relying on established notions of the British visual tradition, the introspective nature of wartime Neo-Romanticism ultimately allowed for the liberation of landscape painting from ideological constraints and the ease with which it assimilated modernism. War not only strengthened the idea of place and the landscape as a redemptive genre, but equally, in a counter direction, it encouraged the idea that art should set itself apart from society entirely, either as a perceptual investigation divorced from social enquiry, or as complete formalism. Modernism had brought a new emphasis on aesthetic appreciation and a reaction against mythical, historical and narrative tendencies in traditional landscapes. The work of Monet and Cézanne was redefined in a contemporary context and British artists, such as Lanyon, Heron and Frost, influenced by European and American postwar modernist models started experimenting with new approaches to landscape. In view of these foreign influences, the need to establish the existence of a strong, innovative home-grown avant-garde became imperative. As institutional support in the arts increased, regional cultural communities such as St Ives were rejuvenated and British art started being promoted abroad. This thesis demonstrates that landscape painting was an enduring and adaptable genre which significantly contributed to the integration of British art into modernism.
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