Nobody Ever Listened to Me - Chapter 10 'Conclusion'

CHAPTER 10 - BRINGING ABOUT A REAL CHANGE

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 27
1) State Parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.
2) The parent(s) or others responsible for the child have the primary responsibility to secure, within their abilities and financial capacities, the conditions of living necessary for the child’s development.
3) State parties, in accordance with national conditions and within their means, shall take appropriate measures to assist parents and others responsible for the child to implement this right and shall in case of need provide material assistance and support programmes, particularly with regard to nutrition, clothing and housing.

There are no simple solutions. Governments have tried treating street children as delinquents, police have rounded them up, they have been sent to orphanages and other institutions. Children have been sent home, they have been moved on from locations where they have been embarrassments to traders and tourists. And the number of such children has steadily risen. Children taken from the street soon return when the opportunity exists - they run from institutions, they run from continued abuse, they run from misguided attempts to help by people who lack understanding. They run back to the only friends they knew - the other children on the street. Each street child is an individual with their own history and circumstance, their own personality, fears and hopes. If a real change is to be effected, that fact has to be acknowledged and options found that are appropriate for each child.

Children are on streets for different reasons and need appropriate options and opportunities if any change is to be lasting. Government programmes - when they exist at all - tend to be blunt instruments and often limited to institutional solutions. This is acknowledged by some governments as outdated practice, but too often is still the only state intervention as other solutions are perceived to be complex or require resources that are not available from state agencies. Governments have the duty to create the infrastructure of society that minimises the chances of children needing to turn to the street - or to put it more positively, to create the opportunities for children to develop fully within their families and communities through good health care, education and upholding at least the minimum standard of living as stated in the UN Convention, article 27. Indeed, states have the responsibility of ensuring children are protected, supported and encouraged to reach their potential by ensuring the implementation of all the UN Convention’s articles.

A few years ago a British Secretary of State for International Development (Clare Short) met a couple of Board Members and the Director of the Consortium for Street Children and discussed the role of governments vis à vis street children and gave her opinion that only government agencies could provide the community health, education and family support services required for children generally. This meant that governments were in the key role of ‘prevention’. Clare Short identified the role of NGOs working with street children to be twofold - the provision of welfare and development services for children who ‘had fallen through the safety net’; and the implementation and evaluation of innovative programmes to support such children that were capable of more widespread replication, possibly with the assistance of state resources.

Most street children still live in their communities for the majority of the time. By definition they spend a considerable portion of the day on the street, unable for various reasons to go to school. They may be neglected, their parents may be away from the home at work or seeking income, they themselves may be looking to earn a few pence by scavenging or other informal activity. They could be labelled as ‘children in need of care and protection’. Most children of this ilk are found in the world’s city slums. They may be as many as 90% of the world’s undetermined number of street children. Whilst, as stated earlier, the prime responsibility for supporting such communities and affording proper health and education facilities falls to the state, many NGOs, including some members of the CSC, work with such children and their communities, providing the facilities they can that the state has failed to provide. A number run small slum based non formal schools, sometimes in partnership with large international NGOs like UNICEF or Save the Children. Many have built relationships with medical staff who will visit such communities on a regular basis to offer their skills to the children free of charge. Some NGOs will develop income generation schemes for the adults and older youth to provide the necessary support to the children; others will help the poorest families by providing school fees or books or uniforms. Some interesting programmes are being developed to work jointly with parents and local communities where such children are at risk, seeking agreed solutions together with all the stakeholders in the area.

Other children at risk, but not yet on the street, are found in rural villages the world over. They may have no opportunity for education; they may be employed in agriculture; they may be existing in families so poor that the children become easy victims of traffickers who offer parents a payment they find hard to refuse and the promise of a job and good future for the child, which is of course a mirage. Again, the chief responsibility for protecting and developing the opportunities for such children belongs to the state. However, increasingly NGOs are developing programmes that raise the awareness of such risks in these rural communities and seek to strengthen the local health and education facilities. A number of NGOs in Northern India are supporting local women’s groups or community elders in providing additional school facilities for village children - awareness of their rights and the dangers of street life and trafficking, and recreational facilities that will retain the interest of such children and deter them from seeking adventure on the city streets.

Of course, children of families living in the city slums or even on the street itself, face the dangers of being lured into domestic work or the sex trade or other hazardous occupations. Some NGOs provide drop-in centres for such children so that they are occupied during the day, off the street, receiving basic education, health care and recreation and at least one nutritious meal a day. One social worker from an NGO in Patna, in the Indian state of Bihar, told me that she found many young girls hanging round the railway station, children of street living families in the area - but hardly any over the age of ten or so. Were they trafficked ? Retained at home for household chores or looking after younger siblings ? Or victims of child marriage ?

Recently (2007) the Indian government enacted a law banning children under the age of 14 from employment in 79 trades, including domestic service. In theory, that state should then ensure children are returned to their families and given educational opportunities. There is a danger that such children, girls in particular, will find their way to even more hazardous occupations such as the sex trade. NGOs are vigilant and monitoring this situation carefully. At present the Act is not being vigorously enforced partly because of the lack of state resources to follow it up properly.

A quite different situation exists for children who have left their home for any reason - to seek work, to escape abuse, drifting from neglect or even enticed by the illusory promises of fame and fortune gleaned from TV or an older youth. These children become easy prey for the unscrupulous when they first come to the cities and many NGOs employ street workers to reach out to such children - some around the bus and railway stations where such children first arrive, others in parks and markets where such children congregate. These NGOs offer such facilities as drop-in centres, emergency night shelters, first aid, food and a counselling service seeking to offer the child a way out of his or her situation to a more positive and permanent solution, either reuniting the child with its family and community where this is both practicable and desirable or finding an educational or residential solution where returning home is not an acceptable option. If intervention takes place in the first month of a child coming to the street experience indicates that there is around an 80% chance of a successful positive intervention being made. After six months on the street, this can have fallen to as low as 20%.

A much more difficult group to work with are children who have lived for a number of years on the street and have completely lost contact with their families. These children have formed gangs for their own protection and mutual support; they have developed ways of earning sufficient money for their needs, albeit often at the limits of legality. They are perceived by both the public and the police as feral or delinquent children and are frequently harassed and rejected. They are often high on drugs, inhalants or alcohol. Their future is uncertain - many will succumb to accident injuries or illnesses contracted because of their exposure on the streets. Others will drift into crime, initially as a means of survival, later because they find it brings them a certain status or respect denied to them by the rest of society.

Girls and young women in this situation rarely escape from the habits acquired of survival sex and drift into prostitution from which it is hard to escape. Even if they are helped and rehabilitated, there are few communities that will accept them back again because of the stigma attached to their former existence.

NGOs working with such children will usually support them where they are - bringing such children into any sort of institution is rarely successful. Key is to provide them with legitimate means of supporting themselves, through vocational training. Many of these children have developed of necessity considerable entrepreneurial skills and these need to be channelled into positive opportunities. The children need help in escaping from their drug and alcohol addictions, they need a mentor whom they can trust and respect, they need an outlet for their energies - often some form of organised sport can be a motivation for these children and young people. Working with such children needs professional skills and considerable perseverance and follow up. But unless the effort is made, society will be the poorer. Crime will increase, more children will be born to children on the street who’ve little experience of successful parenting and the cycle of neglect, abuse and dysfunction will continue.

Many of these children get arrested by the police for a variety of reasons - petty stealing, fighting, drug related crime - or just loitering and being therefore under suspicion. A number of countries have laws which allow the arrest of children and adults begging, sleeping or loitering in public places. Such children in conflict with the law find themselves frequently as victims of inadequate juvenile justice systems, imprisoned with adults or sent to remand or similar institutions where all too frequently they meet further abuse and violence. Many street children are found to have run from children’s homes, orphanages and remand homes - there is evidence that as many as 50% of children found on the streets of Russia and the UK have absconded from such institutions. An increasing number of NGOs are finding ways of getting involved in the management of government homes to monitor the implementation of the children’s rights in such circumstances. Some are allowed to take education and recreation into these institutions. Others take the most vulnerable children into their residential accommodation. A few NGOs have legal expertise and either work closely with lawyers prepared to work for such children or even establish a legal advocacy section within their own organisation to represent them and also campaign for justice when children have been abused by the authorities. Other NGOs will campaign for children abused by non government agencies, privately run institutions and religious abuses.

An increasing number of street children are exposed to the HIV/AIDS infection - not just in Africa, but also in Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Asia, because of the risks they run with drug use and their voluntary or involuntary involvement in sexual relationships. In many cases, the infection will not be recognised as these children rarely have health checks, so the infection spreads. Most HIV/AIDS programmes, when they address the vulnerability of children, work through schools and communities, thus missing the most vulnerable children of all - the street children. A few NGOs have obtained funding to run awareness programmes for these children, one or two have even established treatment centres and hospices, especially where the children would otherwise be stigmatised and left to die on the street. The CSC has campaigned at international conferences for street children to be included as a priority group within government and international NGO AIDS programmes.

A number of individuals from NGOs working for street children felt the need to combine forces and speak with one voice on behalf of this very marginalised and vulnerable group of children and formed the Consortium for Street Children (CSC) in 1993. The then Prime Minister launched the new ‘umbrella’ organisation in the same year and the original twenty or so members appointed their first full time Director, Anita Schrader, a couple of years later.

In the early years the Consortium developed sharing of information among its network and undertook research and produced booklets on such issues as street children and the law and also on girl street children. In the late 1990s the next Director, Sadia Mahmud-Marshall, spread knowledge of the organised beyond the UK NGO members and their partners through a series of international conferences in a number of key capital cities in most continents and obtained Comic Relief funding for its development. The next Director, Alex Dressler, appointed in 2004, grew the membership to its present 60 or so members working in over 90 countries and initiated a number of joint projects with its members, and funded what is intended as the first of a series of research reviews of street children on various relevant themes, starting with ‘The State of the World’s Street Children: Violence’, published in 2007.

The CSC has a small permanent staffing (currently a part time Director, Sally Shire, and three staff members) and details of its activities and all its current members can be found on its website, www.streetchildren.org.uk. Many of the CSC past and present member organisations have contributed to this draft book, by providing comments on the chapter content and relevant case histories. They are all working in the ways described to try to make a difference for the street children of the world - to prevent their numbers increasing through preventative measures, through early outreach and contact, through the provision of short term shelters and welfare, through long term development in education and training, through caring for the most vulnerable in family units and residential homes, seeking to give these children the opportunity they would otherwise never have.

I was involved as one of the founding trustees of the CSC in 1993, was a representative of Amnesty International’s Children’s Human Rights Network and as a result of knowledge and contacts made there, founded the Railway Children (www.railwaychildren.org.uk) in 1995 to make early intervention with runaway and abandoned children on railway and bus stations when they first arrive in cities. The objective is to offer immediate protection and welfare (food, health care, shelter, counselling) whilst seeking and offering longer term options for them, through education, vocational training or reconciling them with their families and getting them home.

What you can do to help:
The first essential, and costing little, is to raise awareness of the issue. Tell your friends. Contact NGOs and get them to talk to your schools, churches, clubs. If you are in the media, research and write articles for the general public, produce articles and documentaries for newspapers, magazines, radio and TV.

Secondly, the CSC and all the NGOs mentioned need money to carry out their work. It is not cheap, but doing nothing will be even more expensive in time for society, for rejected, bitter or angry children become alienated and open to anti-social activities that cost us all dear. Sometimes a programme to change a child’s life can seem remarkably inexpensive - some NGOs in India can provide protection, food, health care, education and a caring environment for not much over £100 per child a year. In the developed world, programmes cost much more - it can cost as much as £5 a call for every child helped on a telephone helpline in Western Europe. But that £5 might make all the difference… These NGOs need sustainable giving wherever possible. Once a programme is started it becomes essential to maintain it for as long as it is effective - for giving a vulnerable child hope and then withdrawing it is doubly damaging.

Thirdly, you can help the CSC and its members campaign to change the future for street children. The media needs to be stimulated, politicians lobbied. Individual injustices need to be highlighted and pursued until justice is done. Governments need to be challenged when they do not meet their commitments they’ve made when they signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. You can do this by supporting the CSC in its advocacy activities or one of its members with an advocacy objective. You can be aware of the situation by becoming a supporter of any of these organisations and using the knowledge you gain to press your local MP, write to your local press, give an interview on a local radio station to publicise a particular pertinent issue.

Finally, you may think the problem is too big. Several times hundreds of thousands of children, if not millions, have been quoted in this book. The problem may seem vast but the solution is child by child. Look at the face of one child helped and take heart from the beaming smile. Once Mother Teresa was asked how her organisation fed and cared for so many children. She answered “One at a time”.

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Postscript

Quotations from young people who’d lived for more than a month on the streets of the UK:

“Comfort them; talk to them; give them something to eat. Talk to them; see how they’re feeling. If you can’t do anything to help them, make them comfy and wish them luck…”

“There should be more support put in place for kids. Like, social workers and stuff need to realise that they’ve got to listen to the kids and not make judgments for them ‘cos every time I saw a social worker, they didn’t listen to what I wanted.”

“Kids need to be taught how to look after themselves and not how to put themselves at risk. They (social workers) always tell you ‘you’re putting yourself at risk’ but they never tell you how not to. They never ask you why you’re doing it and what’s causing it.”

“Just people, basically, to listen to them. I’ve basically learnt, right, over the years, that the best form of help is, when I’m angry or hurt, for someone to say ‘listen, I’m hear to listen to you and I’m not going to tell you what to do or what you cannae do. I’m not going to tell you if you’re in the wrong. I’m just here to listen to you. Do you know what I mean? I don’t think I’d have been so violent or angry if there had been someone like that for me.”

The researcher, after each session with a child on the street, tried to offer some suggestion or help. After one four hour interview with a teenager whose life seemed totally wrecked, the researcher could not think what to say and apologized profusely that she could offer no help.

The girl replied:
“You’ve already helped me. You’re the first person in my life who’s ever listened to me.”

UK - Railway Children
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