TV Portrait of City 'Sewer Kids' Shames Romania

“Deep under the streets of Bucharest - in Europe, in the 21st century - there is a network of tunnels and sewers that is home to hundreds of men, women and children stricken by drug abuse HIV and TB,” a recently released Channel 4 News film (see it below) says.

The sewers, and their underworld king, nicknamed Bruce Lee, reveal a horrific and complicated world in which people inhale drugs and steal but also dream of a normal life.

An orphan and former street-fighter, Bruce Lee keeps this underworld under strict control, suppling people with a metallic glue that they inhale to get high, but also offering protection to those who have fallen through the cracks of society.

While the film has attracted attention worldwide, it has passed almost noticed in the Romanian media.

“This is nothing new to me. These social categories are not uncommon around the world. Bucharest has 2 million inhabitants, so we're talking about a very small percentage of the population. The problem is that these people don’t belong to anybody, nobody has responsibility for their fate,”  a comment on a Romanian news portal read.

The plight of homeless and abandoned people leading a pitiful existence in sewers is not new for Romania, which is still haunted by the ghostly figures of forgotten “tunnel children”, living in manholes only yards away from shops filled with items that they can only dream of.

Many are orphans who grow up in the grim orphanages of the era of the former Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. As they became young adults, they were not able to slot into mainstream lives.

Estimates of the number of children living in the city tunnels vary from 500 to 2,000. The municipal authorities put it at 750 and have...