Nobody Ever Listened to Me - Chapter 2 - "Where?"

CHAPTER 2 - WHERE?

In some places street children are very obvious, in others you have to search for them. If you go on to a large Indian railway station or into the slums of Kibera or Mathera in Nairobi, you will find them only too easily - they will probably find you first. If you go onto the streets of Edinburgh with the local NGO ‘Streetwork’, as I did recently, they will show you the haunts where the runaways congregate and sleep at night, but during the day the bus shelters or the graveyard above the tunnel over the railway lines cutting through the Princes Street gardens will show little evidence other than the detritus of discarded food wrappings and spent needles. In other locations the children will melt into the background and hide when police appear or other adults whom they fear or are suspicious of.

Where are the children then? Street children from the slum communities will be scavenging around their neighbourhood, rag-picking or collecting recyclable materials; they will be on the nearby crossroads at traffic lights or road junctions, dashing out between the traffic to sell you some cheap trinket or beg for the odd coin; they will have travelled into the city centre to seek casual employment, run errands, shine shoes, anything to earn something from the tourists around the posh hotels and restaurants, or carry bags at the bus or railway station, scavenge through the city rubbish dumps.

The children ‘of the street’, as sometimes the lone runaway and rejected children are called, will be harder to find. Most will have learned to make themselves inconspicuous, fearful of authority in all its guises, whether a policeman, a railway official, an angry shop-keeper or hotel doorman. They are busy during the day, on the move constantly, little entrepreneurs, never missing a trick, going where they see the opportunity to earn, or searching out the best places to get a free meal - from the dustbins of the hotels and restaurants, the left-overs in the otherwise empty coaches of a train that has completed its journey or a quick bite from an indulgent stall holder who they’ve just run an errand for.

Some children will have a greater need to hide because they know their activity is frowned on by society, is probably illegal or they will be working under the threats of some manipulative adult, corrupting their childhood, forcing them to beg and steal as Fagin did, or worse, enticing them into the underworld of drugs and the sex trade. Yet when questioned in one of the projects I visited many years ago, the children explained they have a hierarchy of acceptable activity - to work for themselves is top, then to find a job, any sort of legal informal casual activity, then scavenging, then begging and only then the illegal activities of pilfering to survive, or buying and selling drugs and last and lowest of all, selling their bodies for sex in order to survive.

They are in the mega cities of the world. This is where the activity is, where they can find the resources to survive. Many do not belong to the city, they are running from rural areas where their parents cannot cope or they have been beaten or bullied or have gone hungry for too long. They may start by being children from the city peripheral slums, hopping on trains and buses to the locations where they can make money, then gradually losing touch with home, staying to spend money they have earned on food and entertainment for themselves. Others may run to a local town where they meet with other children, then older youths tell them about the money they can make in the cities, so they try their luck and cadge a lift on a lorry or slip unseen onto a crowded bus or hide from the ticket inspector on a long distance train.

And it has become a familiar scene in cities in most countries of the world. For decades children have migrated to the streets in Central and South America. Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Mexico: these and many other Latin American countries have had an obvious street children presence for twenty or thirty years and now see second and third generations of street children. Cities like Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Guatemala City and Mexico City have street children too many to be numbered. The problem is so well established that gangs of street children are commonplace; they swarm from the slums and favellas and join gangs of other street children. All too often the police and other citizens cannot distinguish them from the young criminals in the gangs and they are caught up in the cross-fire of the efforts to cleanse the streets of crime.

Street children have been a common sight in South and South East Asia nearly as long. In Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, but especially in India where estimated numbers range from 12 to 18 million. Of the latter, some 110,000+ are arriving new every year at 50 or so of the major Indian railway stations, some like New Delhi, CST station in Mumbai and Howrah in Calcutta used to receive an average of 20-30 new children every day. As in Latin America, grinding poverty coupled with other childhood abuses render street children in this part of the world to be an endemic problem that no government action has yet been able to stem, let alone solve.

In Africa, the extended family culture kept the number of street children down to reasonable proportions until the spread of AIDS and the subsequent breakdown of communities under the scourge of the disease which has removed a generation of parents in many countries. The incidence of children orphaned by AIDS and unable to be supported by adult relatives has been exacerbated by the number of armed conflicts in several parts of Africa, particularly in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Northern Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. Former conflicts in Angola and Mozambique have also left a legacy of detached and vulnerable children, as have the years of apartheid and consequent poverty and abuse of human rights in South Africa.

Communist governments in Eastern Europe controlled the street tightly and social policies put full employment as a high priority. In the last fifteen years such policies have been overturned and many cities in Russia, for example, now have over 50% unemployment especially where the workforce previously relied on the vast state industries and the defence budget. The Russian government categorises as ‘social orphans’ children of drug addicts, alcoholics and those whose parents are in prison, and usually places such children in one of the state orphanages. The Russian government admit to identifying 800,000 such children; many of these children flee from these institutions and 50% or more of runaways arriving in Moscow from the provinces are alleged to come from such situations. Russian NGOs estimate the real number of street children to be somewhere between 2 and 5 million. Roma children in many Eastern European countries suffer discrimination and poor access to education and health care and form a high proportion of street children.

Lastly, the number of runaway children in the developed world must not be overlooked. The USA is estimated to have over a million runaway children and youth each year and the UK figure of 100,000 under 16 year olds omits children whose absence has not been reported by their carers. These children, estimated by the UK police as at least another 50,000, are probably at greatest risk. Once such children in the UK could be found concentrated in London, around the railway termini, Victoria coach station and the West End amusement arcades. The extra presence of police and surveillance cameras, plus the tightening of railway ticket barrier control, has meant that it’s now harder to find such children, and many are dispersed over other cities - Leeds, Reading, Nottingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow. It is said that Bristol now has the second highest number of runaway young people in the UK, and many can be found hanging around the city’s bus terminal. Other places that become the home of such rejected children and young people are less expected. Superficially prosperous towns and cities like Bath and Cheltenham have their ‘sink estates’ and vulnerable children escaping from dysfunctional families.
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Father Patrick Shanahan, founder of Street Child Africa, was visiting partner agency ‘Meninos de Mozambique’ in 2005, when he met a little girl called ‘Mariama’. She was making her living on the pickings of a rubbish dump – as do many of the poorest children in Maputo, the capital city. At the age of 8, Mariama was the sole carer for three younger siblings - a 5 year old boy, a 3 year old and a baby. She was well known to the adults of the slums but nobody had realised her situation - they simply assumed that somebody, somewhere, was looking after them. She had slipped through the net. She was frightened that if the authorities discovered her they would separate her little family and place them in foster care. Having lost both her parents, the thought of losing her siblings was unbearable. Just imagine - an 8 year old caring for a baby, with no help. The extraordinary thing for Father Shanahan was not only her predicament, but her resourcefulness and resilience. We underestimate children, and what they are capable of, when we try to make interventions without consulting them first. Meninos worked with Mariama and her siblings to find ways of keeping the children together. Now, they are safe and well, and still have each other and a carer.
Mariama, Street Child Africa - Mozambique _______________________________________________________________________

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A street child’s greatest wish is to belong, and be loved as part of a family. Sadly, for many this is only a dream. Street children often come from difficult family backgrounds, with a history of abuse or family breakdown. Gaston, from Cochabamba, Bolivia, had a very difficult start in life. His parents separated when his father abandoned the family and went to live with another woman. When his mother committed a minor crime, she was sent to San Sebastian prison, and her children all moved into the jail with her. Whole families often live in prison in Bolivia, especially those with only one parent. There is simply nowhere else for the children to go. However, during the day Gaston is able to come out of the prison and he became part of a local project where he gets food, education, a place to play, friends and adults to care for him.
Gaston, Bolivia – Toybox
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Rose was born in Romania, is a Roma child and second youngest in a family of eight. When she was thirteen, her parents sent her to England as her brother was there, and thought she could get a job. She was smuggled there in a lorry, but when she arrived she found her brother had been sent back to Romania. She was given a room with other 14-16 year old girls, but she was lonely, frightened and intimidated by the behaviour of the other girls. At fourteen years of age she started spending time on the streets. She said:
“I slept one day here, one day there, sometimes I had to sleep at the railway station, in the park, at the bus station. I had to go out of London; I tried staying in Manchester… People will give me a bed for the night but they always want me to pay my share and I haven’t got any money. I couldn’t speak English; I couldn’t communicate with people.”
Rose, UK, Railway Children
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Ten year old Victor was abandoned by his parents who split and went abroad leaving him in the care of an alcoholic relative. The scared boy left his village, Kishinev, and began to tramp. For two years he lived in fear of being caught by the police after he stole a wallet to find money to survive. He arrived at a children’s home in 2006 - although initially very obstinate and finding it difficult to mix with the other children, eventually he began to smile. He likes drawing and singing Moldovian national songs and dreams one day of being a car salesman.
Victor, Moldova, World Jewish Relief
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In conclusion therefore, it is easy to say that large numbers exist in most countries of the world, but often much harder to get firm statistics of the number of children ‘of the street’ or children out of school or in informal labour. It is easy for members of the general public to miss such children, especially if they become ingrained to seeing such children as the norm. It is not easy to distinguish between those children who spend the majority of the day on the street but are still strongly linked with their families and those particularly vulnerable children who are seeking to survive alone or without adult support of a positive nature.