Nobody ever listened to me - Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3 - VIOLENCE

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 19: “State Parties shall take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has care of the child.”

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Street children accumulate numerous experiences of violence from an early age and in a range of environments. Their experiences in countries across the world are strikingly similar - including those in rich countries with child protection systems, as well as those in poorer countries which may have weaker support systems. 25 years after street children first made the international headlines, governments around the world continue to use violent tactics with street children, which contravene their rights, exacerbate their experience of violence and scapegoat them and their families.

The world of violence and street children is complex. Street children accumulate a range of experiences of violence: children survive abuse at home in fragile families and this is often the cause of the first push towards street living; they live in poverty-afflicted, chaotic neighbourhoods; their access to educational and health services is erratic, discriminatory and exclusionary; they confront risks in the street, experiencing violence in their premature entry into the world of work; they are subjected to abuse and neglect in detention centres and welfare homes designed to protect them; they are stigmatised and shunned by mainstream society. The World Report on Violence against Children presented to the United Nations in 2006 recognised children who work or live on the streets as being particularly at risk of violence.

Combined and compounded effects of abuse and deprivation undermine their chances of developing into healthy young people and adults. However, each street child has a unique story of violence and a different strategy and ability to cope with it, often with surprising resilience. Gender, age, ethnicity and disability influence the risks of violence to which they are exposed and their response. For example, street boys tend more to replicate violence as aggressors and report more physical violence while girls tend to internalise violence and may be more vulnerable to on-going abuse and victimisation. Girls also tend to be vulnerable to additional forms of violence in crisis situations when compared with boys and more likely - although by no means exclusively - subjected to sexual violence, often with limited access to preventative measures and health services. Younger children’s relative physical weakness can expose them to abuse from older children and adults, although they can also attract protection.
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Tyler has never met his father as he left before Tyler’s birth and didn’t leave a forwarding address. His mother struggled to provide financially and was often unhappy; Tyler has early memories of his mother crying and spending a lot of time in bed. Tyler did his best to comfort her and make her laugh. When Tyler was six, his mother met a man and the close relationship previously shared with his mother changed and Tyler felt rejected. Tyler’s stepfather treated him with indifference at best and with violence when he was drunk. He was also violent to Tyler’s mother. Tyler hated to see his mother being hurt and tried to defend her, only to be met with more violence. Tyler asked his mother to tell his stepfather to go but his mother said she couldn’t do that and seemed resigned to accepting that both Tyler and her were harmed by her partner.

Tyler began to stay out on the streets after school to avoid going home. He got to know a group of young males older than him who invited him to join their gang. At eleven, Tyler was introduced to cannabis and petty crime and started to stay out all night. He began to miss school and was excluded for the first time when he was twelve. By the time he was thirteen he had left school completely. Whilst Tyler enjoyed being with his friends, he often felt sad and lonely. His mother’s depression worsened and she spent most of her time in bed. After an argument with his stepfather that turned into a fight, Tyler’s stepfather told Tyler’s mother to choose: either Tyler went or he would leave. Tyler’s mother said she couldn’t make that choice and Tyler left.

At first he stayed with different friends, stealing to survive and spending the odd night out of the streets when there was no offer of a bed. He started to drink alcohol regularly and became aggressive when he was drunk. By the time he was fifteen, the offers of a place to sleep became less frequent and Tyler spent more time on the streets, becoming a familiar face on the homeless scene. Sometimes Tyler gets into fights and has been beaten up a number of times. Tyler knows he has a problem with alcohol and anger but doesn’t want to access any of the support available to him, preferring to keep his problems to himself. Tyler hasn’t seen his mother for over a year and has started to view his homeless friends as family and the streets as home. Tyler doesn’t plan for the future but takes each day as it comes; of which some are harder than others. If he gets a drink, has enough food to eat and stays out of the way of the police, that’s a good day.

Tyler, England - Railway Children
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Family relationships form a vital development pathway for children. Domestic violence - whether to a parent or a child - affects each child’s development differently, but increases the risk of danger for children in other environments too. Evidence that street children have experienced violence in the home - from active physical, sexual or emotional abuse through to neglect - is overwhelming across the world. However, it is important to understand that socio-economic, cultural and community circumstances can undermine the potential of families to care for children.

In countries as diverse as Bangladesh and the UK, children, service providers and researchers point to family violence as a key factor in pushing children onto the streets. Recent research in Bangladesh found: ‘moves to the street are closely associated with violence to, and abuse of, children within the household and local community.’ In the UK, family conflict and problems at home were found to be the most common factors leading to an under 16-year-old’s decision to run away and/or live on the streets. Research in the 1990s in Brazil found that most street living boys left home for street life because of changes in family structure within the context of poverty and a wider culture accepting of violent child-rearing practices. Sexual abuse, violence and emotional neglect exist at all levels of society, but children who live in material deprivation and in fragmented communities may feel that they have nowhere to turn but to the street.
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The nine year old boy was trafficked from another State by a middle class man who was unmarried at the time. He did send the child to school. The project had undertaken a huge school awareness programme on child labour and the teachers were worried about the boy’s situation. Then the man married and the situation went downhill fast - the boy was tortured and beaten with iron rods and wire. He was rescued by the police and placed in the project’s half-way house. He had to be hospitalised to treat his wounds, but managed to go back to school after he’d recovered. He’s now doing well and the school are waiving his fees.

Young boy, Darjeeling - Edith Wilkins Street Children Foundation
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“He used to beat me and he tried to stab me… It was over a bean sandwich…Just the tiniest wee things used to set him off; so it did. Even if I went to the toilet, he used to crack up with me … He wrapped the telephone chord around my neck, pulled it so hard he thought I wasn’t breathing and put me in a cold bath so I’d start breathing again… And my daddy broke two of my fingers; he tried to boot my face and I put up my hands to protect my face and he kicked my fingers and broke them… I had a cat and I really loved my cat and he used to make me choose between me getting it or the cat and I always used to say me ’cos I couldn’t bear my cat getting hurt…

12 year old girl, Scotland - Railway Children
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Poor neighbourhoods tend to have weak infrastructure with fewer linkages between community based organisations such as schools, health centres, day-care options and grass-roots organisations. Street children are commonly excluded from schools as a result of fights, aggressive reaction to teachers, or threats of violence to other children, or withdrawn by families unable to pay school fees, buy uniforms or school materials. Truancy is also common by children who feel intimidated, unable to keep up or feel misunderstood. Children who experience violence at home and are excluded from school are cut off from a potentially important source of neighbourhood connection and support. The use of corporal punishment in schools humiliates children while reinforcing the cultural acceptance of violence as a form of control.

Violence against children in the street plays out in public places and so receives more attention than the many other environments in which street children experience abuse. Much of this violence is attributed to police, although abuse also comes from other street inhabitants - older youths and adults and from members of the public who may feel harassed by, or contemptuous of, street children. Public hostility and stigmatisation on the basis of their appearance and activities are a common form of violence - revealed in the local words used to label street children: In Rwanda the term ‘Mayibobos’ harbours connotations of ‘filth’ and ‘criminality’; in Egypt a street-living child is a ‘Sewas’, an Arabic word for a small insect which destroys crops; ‘Throwaways’ is a common term in the USA for child runaways; ‘Chokara’ meaning ‘scavenger’ in Kenya; ‘Borco’ in Ethiopia is an adulteration of the Italian words ‘sporco’ meaning ‘filthy’ and ‘porco’ meaning ‘pig’. In December 2006, Egyptian society was shocked out of complacency: a 26 year-old man, known as ‘El Torbino’, made headlines after his arrest for raping and murdering more than thirty street children, throwing them off the top of the ‘Torbini’ Cairo-Alexandria express train.

Street children - because of neglect or rejection by others - get involved with street and criminal gangs and drug use, initially using intoxicating inhalants and often leading onto hard drugs with an escalation in violence to obtain the drugs and police action; this often fails to discriminate between the criminal gang leaders and children who hang around the same environments.

There have been many reports across the world of police violence against street children in public places. Periodic round-ups, extortion, threats, physical abuse, victimisation, rape and murder by police officers have been documented time and again by street children, service providers, the media, lawyers and researchers. Police violence is sometimes associated with a street-sweeping campaign in anticipation of some major high profile world political or sporting event. Possibly the most notorious police atrocity against street children was what became known as the Candelaria Massacre in Rio de Janeiro, when six street children were murdered by gunfire on 25th July 1993 as they slept on the steps of the Candelaria Church. Three years later a member of the Brazilian Military Police was convicted for his part in the massacre. Another rare victory for street children in the battle against violence was an Inter-American Court on Human Rights ruling in 2001, which ordered the State of Guatemala to pay more than half a million dollars to the families of five street children who were brutally tortured and murdered by two National Policemen in 1990. Such police violence may be state-sponsored or attributed to ‘rogue elements’ in the police force who sometimes join community vigilante groups formed by local business or community interests to rid themselves of those they consider undesirable or a threat to the appearance of their businesses or neighbourhoods.

Children are regularly subjected to violence by gangs of older street children who exercise fierce control over available informal work. A 13 year-old boy in Nigeria reported being unable to find work in the local market without paying a bribe to older boys. Unable to earn and therefore eat, younger boys would try to sneak into the market but would get a serious beating if they were caught. Many gangs of older street youth control rigidly various income raising activities - at some railway stations in India different gangs control the scavenging of recyclable materials from specific groups of platforms and children attempting to infiltrate these will be warned off with threats of violence. In Harare, Zimbabwe, street children live in gangs and sleep in one place they call their ‘base’. This base is fiercely protected from outsiders including other street children. Each gang has a leader who is feared and respected by other gang members - he is usually the best fighter and may have a violent character. Drug use is regularly reported as a source of violent flare-ups between street children in many countries.

Street children are often removed from the street or encouraged to leave public spaces ostensibly for ‘reform’, ‘rehabilitation’, or ‘protection’. But their reports of abuse and neglect in detention centres and welfare shelters are received from countries across the world. Research with runaways on the railway platforms of Moscow’s largest termini suggests that a high proportion are running away from state run orphanages and a substantial number of the 100,000 under 16-year-old runaways reported in the UK every year are running from children’s homes. Accounts of violence against street children are commonly recorded in juvenile detention centres and adult prisons. Physical, sexual and psychological abuses are perpetrated by guards, adult detainees and other child detainees. Violence in government institutions reflects, at best, continuing stigmatisation and neglect of street children and, at worst, state encouragement of violence against children. This normalizes violence for street children and can exacerbate the effects of previous violence, whether as victims or perpetrators. Even NGO shelters and other residential services for street children can perpetuate abuse, if only by concentrating children accustomed to violence in overcrowded, poorly conditioned, under-managed and under-staffed conditions. Child protection systems are in force for many NGOs but on their own they are not enough if supervision is flimsy or unregulated.

When social institutions are stressed and community cohesion breaks down in times of war, natural disasters, health epidemics or rapid urbanisation, children’s risk of violence grows as protective barriers crumble. Violence at large is reflected especially in the situation for children, many being forced on to the streets as a result of reduced protection and collapse of normal family environments. Once on the streets they may be faced by higher levels of violence where the capacity of protection systems has broken down or become swamped by the large number of children at risk.

In view of the fact that so many street children experience violence, it is a tribute to many of them that they frequently cope with their situation and even show remarkable resilience. Low self-esteem, depression and self-hatred has been found to be characteristics of street-homeless children in some settings, but many children cope in dangerous street conditions and some show well-developed abilities to navigate street risks. A child who copes with violence by running away may be more resilient than the sibling who stays at home, if the flight denotes a healthy response in being unwilling to be a passive victim.