CHAPTER 5 VIEWS AND PERSPECTIVES OF CHILDREN DEPRIVED OF LIBERTY ‘I did not get any information about the duration of my stay in this place as everything was unclear and unknown, all information was incomprehensible for me because I am just a young girl’. (F/12-18/1:AFG) One child (M/14-17/1:WEOG) described the effect of not understanding legal terms. He said that he signed a paper that he did not understand and therefore did not know what he was signing. Others expressed frustration about not being heard. ‘They didn’t hear my point of view, instead the prosecutor was asking me questions and write down his own answers without listening to me’. (F/12-18/1:AFG) The lack of translators meant that children who did not speak the language were disempowered by their inability to understand the information shared with them. ‘There are a lot of children that do not speak Romanian and they know only Hungarian and they are put in a room where all the others know only Romanian, and they cannot understand each other’. (M/16/1:EEG) 4.4 Discrimination and Stigma Children described their experiences of discrimination and stigma as connected to different factors including ethnicity, economic status, (dis)ability, sex or sexual orientation. One group of children discussed how sentences for children were too harsh in general, and that these varied depending on the ethnicity of the young person: ‘Differences are made if someone is Roma’. (M/15-17/1:EEG) A group of children who participated in a focus group in one setting explained that the main factor that led to differences in the duration of pre-trial detention was the economic status of a child’s family: children from wealthy families were released quickly after only a few days. In a focus group amongst orphaned children living in a closed institution, one young person complained about differential treatment on the basis of their disability: ‘We had a special school inside the orphanage. Our teachers treated us not like the other children, from outside the orphanage. They did not think we could learn something. I wanted to learn to read. I felt inferior’. (MF/18+/4:EEG) 108