Three crisis centres for child victims of trafficking and violence will be opened by the end of the year

Three crisis centres for child victims of trafficking and violence will be opened by the end of the year. The centres will be in Pazardjik, Dragoman and Balvan, Deputy Labour and Social Policies Minister Ivanka Hristova told a news conference at the Council of Ministers Thursday.

The centres will be supported from the national budget and experts are currently being trained to work in them.

Twenty-five cases of child trafficking and violence against children became known last year. In some of the cases work is being done now to reintegrate the children into their families. In the greater part of the cases the families are the reason for the problem or have neglected it, Hristova also said.

Fourteen homes for children deprived of parental care have been closed down, Labour and Social Policy Minister Emilia Maslarova told the news conference after the Cabinet discussed a report on the implementation of the 2006 National Child Protection Programme in the first six months of the year.

Five social-pedagogical boarding schools have also been closed and one has been transformed and the procedure for the closing or transformation of two more is underway. The Ministry of Health has launched the decentralization of six medical and social care homes raising mainly healthy children. In the first half of 2006 the State Child Protection Agency issued licences for opening 32 social rehabilitation and integration, training, information, consulting and support centres, day-care centres, crisis centres, centres for homeless children, public support centres and "Mother and Baby" units. Eleven new social rehabilitation and integration centres, four day-care centres for children and adolescents with disabilities and a shelter for homeless children and orphans were opened in the first half of the year.

In the first six months of the year the number of institutionalized children decrease by approximately 900, according to preliminary data of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies. At the end of last year there were 9,776 children in social institutions in Bulgaria, Deputy Labour and Social Policies Minister Hristova said.

BTA