(19 Dec 2017) Shocking accounts of thousands of children beaten, starved and humiliated in a network of overcrowded, underfunded state-run orphanages emerged quickly after the 1989 toppling of Romania's Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
In Bucharest today, Romania's orphanage nightmares seem far away.
One of the old-style orphanages still operating in Bucharest, the Robin Hood centre, is due to close next year.
Children who can't be reunited with their families or placed in foster care will move into state-supervised family-style homes.
Elena Ionita, Robin Hood's director, says 21 of the 49 children living there in January 2017 had been housed with foster families or in family-style apartments within the next 10 months.
Ionita hopes that the modernisation process helps solve the issues of children who lack the one-on-one care of a foster parent.
The Robin Hood centre is now building two family-style residences in conjuction with the UK-based organisation Hope and Homes for Children, which has worked to dismantle orphanages in 30 countries.
The charity's chief executive, Mark Waddington, says the number of residents living in Romania's children's homes has plummeted from more than 100,000 to about 7,000 since the late 1990s.
"Romania remains critically important to us because it's likely to be the first country we demonstrate that eradication of orphanages, and their replacement with alternative family care, is possible at scale nationally," Waddington says.
Mihaela Ungureanu, a child welfare official in Bucharest, says there are still "80 old-style children's homes that are part of a national plan to be decommissioned" by around 2023.
Across the globe, intensive efforts are underway to get children out of orphanages.
Like Romania, neighbouring Bulgaria and the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova have made strides in reducing the number of children in orphanages, while China says it is now able to provide care for three-quarters of its orphans and abandoned children via foster homes or adoption.
Rwanda is set to soon become the first African country to eliminate orphanages.
It's a goal that remains elusive in many other countries - in India, for example, with many privately run, poorly regulated orphanages, or in Nepal and Haiti, where unscrupulous orphanage operators sometimes pay parents to relinquish their children and then make a profit off donations from sympathetic foreigners.
But leaders of charities working to phase out orphanages in Romania believe momentum is on their side.
Waddington says his organisation hopes for the completion of Romania's orphanage reforms to be complete within the next 10 years, adding that the European Union is providing 120 million euros (142 million US dollars) in funding over that period.
"We will put in somewhere between 35 and 40 million euros, and we're working alongside other national NGOs that will put in a similar amount. So we're talking a very substantial sum of money to ensure the completion of eradication," he adds.
Romania's reforms have been aided by tens of millions of dollars in EU funds and, in sheer numbers, Romania is eastern Europe's paramount success story - especially in light of the Ceausescu era abuses.
While there's no precise global tally of children living in orphanages, UNICEF's latest estimate is 2.7 million, but the agency says many countries don't have a way to accurately count children in privately run orphanages.
Yet research suggests orphanage life often harms a child in lasting ways.
"You can never do enough to try and supplement the need for affection from a parent," says Ungreanu.
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