No Safe Place: How Hungary’s Child Care Abuse Scandal Betrays Romani Children
20 January 2026
By Judit Ignácz
“They made us strip down to our underwear and beat us.”
“He yells, uses bad words, and threatens to beat us.”
“I was going to my room, he hugged me, and he groped my breast.”
These are not words we should hear coming out of children’s mouths in a children’s home. They describe experiences no child should ever have, but they reflect lived realities for many.
Last year, Hungary was wracked with several scandals involving severe, systemic abuse and neglect in state-run children’s homes. Multiple investigations and reports showed a litany of physical, sexual, verbal, and emotional violence affecting many vulnerable children in care. Although there are no national disaggregated data in these cases, we know that Romani children are significantly overrepresented in Hungary’s child welfare system, making them particularly exposed to these forms of violence.
From protection to punishment: abuse inside Hungary’s children’s homes
In the Hűvösvölgy Children’s Home of Budapest, at least four 12-13-year-old children were physically and emotionally abused by their caregivers, including being screamed at, slapped, spat on, and forced to perform degrading tasks such as picking up crumbs one by one or massaging caregivers’ feet. One supervisor reportedly called a child “dog jizz,” and among other verbal abuses said, “If you don’t behave, I’ll make sure you end up in a closed institution where you’ll be fucked in the ass! You little shit!”
According to one of the care guardians whom a child turned to with his complaints, when confronting the institution’s director, his response was, “if the consequence of this incident is that the child supervisor gets suspended” and they “leave the children’s home because of it, everyone here will gang up” against the child, and “together they will make his life a living hell.” The Pest County Office of the National Directorate General for Social Affairs and Child Protection (SZGYF) provides support to the institution, including communication and anger management training, as well as a course called Children’s Rights and Children’s Yoga.
In Sopron’s (Cseresznyevirág) Children’s Home, law enforcement opened a criminal case after a staff member dragged kindergarten-aged children by the hair and locked them in a dark room “as discipline” for misbehaviour. The worker was dismissed. These are not the first cases in the institution. In 2024, authorities reviewed files documenting past abuses over the previous fifteen years, including children’s testimonies describing cold showers, being forced to kneel on the floor, and even an incident in which a child’s head was pressed against shards of glass.
In Szolnok’s reception home, footage and survivor testimonies revealed that a supervisor came to work drunk, beat the boys, groped the girls, and tied infants to radiators with cloths. Guardians and colleagues who reported problems faced retaliation. The abusive supervisor resigned but was later hired by another institution despite complaints.
Some of the most shocking cases came from the juvenile correctional institution located on Szőlő Street in Budapest. The Central Investigative Prosecutor’s Office has prosecuted seven people. Investigations show that abuses involved extreme mistreatment, including physical violence and sexual coercion, and exploitation through child prostitution and human trafficking. On 19th January, an interior ministerial decree effectively shut down the Szőlő Street institution with immediate effect. A new decree that entered into force the day after, states it is necessary to “restructure the organizational system of reformatory institutions,” and the first step in this process is “the termination of the operation of the Budapest Junvenile institution on Szőlő Street.”
Political and public reaction
Thousands of people protested in Budapest, demanding accountability and the resignation of political leaders over inaction and cover-ups related to child abuse cases. Opposition parties and some European-level actors have called for parliamentary investigations and an EU-level inspection of Hungary’s child protection system. Courts ordered the Interior Ministry to release inspection reports on children’s homes, including data on abuse incidents, which officials must now provide to journalists and the public.
In several recent cases, authorities launched investigations into endangering minors. So far, in 2023, one priest has been sentenced to 28 years in prison for raping, physically and sexually abusing, molesting and endangering the physical safety of multiple children between 2007 and 2017, while working at the Szent László Child Protection Centre in Tusnádfürdő and the Szent Katalin Home in Kászonimpér. In September 2019, János Vásárhelyi, former director of the Kossuth Zsuzsa Children’s Home in Bicske, was convicted of sexually abusing at least ten minors and sentenced to eight years in prison. His deputy, Endre Kónya, was convicted in 2021 of coercion for covering up the abuse, pressuring victims to withdraw their testimony, and was sentenced to over three years. However, in 2023, former Hungarian President Katalin Novák pardoned him. She later resigned in February 2024, along with the former minister of justice.
When the state enables abuse
These incidents of 2025 are not isolated but part of a broader pattern of historical, structural failures and dysfunction to protect children in children’s care institutions run by the state, the church, or charitable private organisations. Children in these institutions were supposed to be protected from abusive, unsafe family environments or given support for rebuilding their future, but instead, they have been subjected to abuse, sexual harassment, fear, violence, neglect, and left with the burden of severe trauma that accompanies them for the rest of their lives.
Over the past decade, many scandals have come to light across Hungary, including in Bicske, Kalocsa, and Göd. The Hungarian Helsinki Committee reviewed Hungary’s Commissioner for Fundamental Rights (Ombudsperson) investigations in closed institutions, including children’s homes, juvenile institutions, and disability care institutions. The focus of these investigations was the detection and prevention of torture, inhuman, and degrading treatment, as well as assessing how the state responds to such abuses. Based on these reports, approximately 40% of children in certain specialised children’s homes have been involved in prostitution in some way, while institutional workers mainly failed to fulfil their mandatory reporting obligations in these cases.
Even when severe abuse allegations and violations were uncovered and known to authorities for years, including physical and sexual violence against children, many times, police investigations were dropped due to a lack of evidence, the state’s response was largely ineffective or invisible, or often failed to file criminal complaints and provide meaningful protection for victims. This raises huge concerns about the adequacy and reliability of the Ombudsperson and prosecutorial oversight in Hungary.
Currently, around 24,000 children are in state care in Hungary. In an internal 2025 survey, child protection guardians claim widespread abuses in the child welfare system, with many children experiencing multiple forms of abuse, including physical, emotional, and sexual. Among the care guardians surveyed, 77% reported that children often experience two, three, or even four types of abuse simultaneously. Only 14% of them stated that none of the children under their care were affected by any form of abuse. Another sad irony is that the “family-friendly” Hungarian government, which bans Pride under the guise of child protection, maintains a deeply flawed child welfare system that effectively and actively harms thousands of vulnerable children.
Racialised child removal is racist violence
Social welfare and child protection are often missing from national integration strategies and EU Roma strategic frameworks as well, which narrows their focus on the situation of Romani children in education, skipping important issues such as violence and abuse in the children's welfare system and state care.
The European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC)’s research has long shown that Romani children are disproportionately overrepresented in Hungary’s state care system. This makes them multiply vulnerable to the very abuses documented above. Additionally, Romani children are removed from their families, often without sufficient legal or social justification, usually for cited reasons of inadequate housing, non-attendance at school, or poverty (illegally). A new Hungarian law allows the guardianship authority to decide to remove a child before they are born.
Instead of supporting families to access the full range of services they need, and the realisation and protection of their rights, the Hungarian state places children into seriously underfunded, rotten institutional care, combined in many cases with racist and often unqualified staff who continue to expose Romani children to severe risk of abuse, violence, exclusion, trafficking, and discrimination.
While the child welfare and health care system in Hungary is slowly dying, the state prioritises investment in much grander, high-profile projects, such as building stadiums for our talented, globally successful football team and even supporting neighbouring country football clubs. All while Romani children pay the price, caught in a vicious circle of trauma in the very places meant to protect them.
