Nobody's Children

The Italian, as folk wisdom has it, is just crazy about kids. That may be true as far as his own offspring are concerned. But when 1,500 carabinieri and policemen staged surprise raids on 286 orphanages and other children's homes throughout Rome two weeks ago, they found plenty of evidence that some bambini are not exactly coddled.

Dozens of institutions were filthy or unheated or both; many provided inadequate food and clothing. One of the worst was the Institute of Jesus the Divine Worker, where the toilets and other plumbing were out of order and the children's bed sheets had not been changed for two months. The institute's director, a priest named Don Carlo Quadrucci. 30, protested: "We know that conditions are not perfect, but our critics should realize what sacrifices this work costs us. We consider our work a mission." Five days later, police arrested Quadrucci and accused him of making homosexual assaults on some of his young charges.

Blocking Adoptions. All told, there are 200,000 homeless children living in some 6,000 institutions throughout Italy. "Many of these children are thirty times worse off than in juvenile prisons," said Luciano Infelisi, 30, a reform-minded Rome district attorney who organized the surprise raids in the capital. "They would live better if they had committed crimes." The Dickensian situation is largely the result of inadequate government control. Though 90% of the institutions are related to church organizations, ultimate responsibility for their supervision rests with the notoriously inefficient National Organization for the Protection of Mothers and Children.

In theory, many of the children are in orphanages only temporarily, awaiting adoption. There are currently 2,000 applicants for children in Rome alone; yet only 155 infants from orphanages were adopted there last year. Some orphanages have been accused of actually blocking adoptions, since the children mean money in the form of subsidies ranging to $10 a day per child. Others are said to charge would-be adoptive parents an average of $500 per child--$150 in advance and "the rest on delivery."

Jolted into Action. Infelisi spent four months planning the operation. His aim: to jolt the government into taking corrective action or to scare the institutions themselves into making reforms. The young D.A. went along on three of the raids. After reading police reports on the 283 others, he concluded: "Seventy-five percent of these places should be closed at once."

By week's end, the directors of 18 orphanages (including twelve priests and three nuns) were advised that they would be charged this week with such offenses as abuse of office and ill treatment of children. But only two institutions were actually shuttered. The rest were still open, if only because there was nowhere else to put Italy's figli di nessuno--children of nobody.

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