JK Rowling's Tears For Disabled Girl Reunited With Her Family

JK Rowling's Tears For Disabled Girl Reunited With Her Family
LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 27: Author J.K. Rowling attends photocall ahead of her reading from 'The Casual Vacancy' at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on September 27, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images)
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LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 27: Author J.K. Rowling attends photocall ahead of her reading from 'The Casual Vacancy' at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on September 27, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Ben Pruchnie/Getty Images)

JK Rowling has told how she cried when she met a disabled girl she helped rescue from a care home in Moldova.

The Harry Potter author's children's charity, Lumos, reunited 14-year-old Dumitrita with her family last year after they had spent five years apart.

JK, who penned books about the boy wizard from an Edinburgh cafe, tweeted: "Many tears shed as a 14-year-old called Dumitrita shares her experience of life in an institution... She is now in mainstream education and back with her mother."

JK is committed to shutting down all orphanages and children's institutions because she says they do more harm than good.

Last week at a conference hosted by Lumos, she told government officials and diplomats from around the world: "Locking children away, often in atrocious conditions, has a Grimm's fairytale quality about it.

"It is my dream that by the time my life ends, the very concept of taking a child away from its family and locking it away will seem to belong to a cruel, fictional world."

Lumos, the charitable extension of the Harry Potter franchise, which transformed Rowling into a multi-millionaire, was founded a decade ago after she saw a harrowing picture of a caged child and a newspaper article about disabled children in the Czech Republic.

Since the start of last year, Lumos claims to have saved the lives of 646 children suffering from malnutrition and neglect, and to have trained thousands of social workers, health professionals, teachers and policy-makers.

In the past four years, it has helped 12,000 children move out of large institutions and orphanages into family and community care.

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