Children in an orphanage in Kazakhstan, 2009 they had been subjected to corporal punishment on a daily basis. Some of these boys were orphans or had been forcibly separated from their parents, others had been living on the streets before being brought there by the police. Some of the older children were addicted to drugs and others were detained for ‘educational purposes’ after having committed some kind of petty offence. They were all placed together and had been subjected to the same harsh regime. I still see the fear in their eyes when we asked them about their daily experiences. In fact, I had looked into many eyes of children in detention, full of fear and sadness. One of the saddest places was the children’s ward in the psychiatric hospital of Balti (Moldova), where even very young children had been subdued with sedatives. Many of them were lying in their beds all day, completely apathetic and sadly reminiscent of living corpses. In some countries, the minimum age of criminal responsibility was at the time of my visit still very low. This means that I found children, as young as 8 or 9 years, in pre-trial detention or even in prisons after having been sentenced by a criminal court. In the children’s prison in Lomé (Togo), some of the boys were even confined to their cells for most of the day. In the Kutuarjo juvenile prison in Java (Indonesia), girls were strictly separated from boys. However, since there was only one girl detained at the time of my visit, she in fact served 5