#traffic-light

[littlebobaraki]

[jwfa]

railway traffic light... by N.Batkhurel on Flickr.

[elladastinkardiamou]

The program for the protection of traffic-light children was introduced by Greek authorities on December 10, 1998. It entailed the police taking children caught begging to Aghia Varvara, which until then had served as a home for boys and girls. “Using the police was not the ideal way to collect these children but we couldn’t send psychologists to the places where they begged; it would have been too indirect an approach,” Theodoros Kotsonis, the man who came up with the plan while serving as deputy health and welfare minister at the time, told Kathimerini. According to Kathimerini’s archives, 34 children were taken to the institution on the first day of the program. One was Bulgarian, four were Iraqi and the rest were Albanian. Of these, 17 escaped. In 2004, two years after the program ended, the Ombudsman said in a report that the number of children who vanished from Aghia Varvara was 502, arguing that the reason why they went missing was that the institution lacked the staff and failed to guard them. The issue of the disappeared children made it back into the headlines in August 2013, when a Democratic Left deputy, Maria Yiannaki, brought it up in Parliament. The investigation file was reopened on the orders of then Justice Minister Haralambos Athanasiou. Athens prosecutor Panayiota Fakou headed the new probe based on older findings that made a case for criminal charges to be brought against unknown suspects for multiple counts of abduction of a minor.

[sophiespeight]

[sakticleaver]

Perth

[frostskader-blog]