Nobody Ever Listened to Me - Chapter 5 "Work"

CHAPTER 5 - WORK

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 32: “State parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.”

I encountered a six year old street girl on Churchgate railway station, Mumbai. She was lashing her back with a home-made whip to provoke sympathy from gullible tourists like me and entice me to give generously money which I realised would go straight to the pockets of the unscrupulous adult running her. This was, for this girl, her work. This scene was the catalyst for my involvement with children’s rights and, in particular, with organisations campaigning for the millions of exploited, abused and corrupted street children found in virtually every continent.

In the early days of the Consortium for Street Children (CSC) - in 1993 - I undertook a simple risk assessment of being a street child. A Fault Tree identified root causes. Being sent to the city to earn money for the family, then becoming detached from family contact; running away from physical or sexual abuse; being abandoned, neglected or orphaned; these stem from family stresses and breakdowns which are the consequences of natural catastrophes, urban migration, civil conflicts, economic collapse and the AIDS pandemic and the inability of governments to support such families and protect such children.

A simple Event Tree identified the immediate needs of a child thrust into the confusing and dangerous world of an unknown city - the need for food or money to buy food, the need for shelter and the need for affection and the company of others. A child’s response is to survive one day at a time, and an obvious way for a child to seek to survive is through trying to find work on the street - casual and informal trade.

Some 5-10% of street children in most cities are abandoned, orphaned or runaway children with, at best, sporadic contact with their families. In fact, for them their families consist of other street children loosely formed in gangs or small groups which demonstrate considerable loyalty to their members These children sleep where they can - in shop doorways, covered bus and railway stations, under market stalls, in parks and on beaches. Unless such children can find a non government organization (NGO) to provide food and shelter, they will be dependent on their own efforts or those of other street children in their ‘family’ to find food, or the means to pay for it.

Such children gather round locations where the possibility of casual labour exists. They seek out adults who can provide them with some activity in return for which they receive food and possibly some protection. Such activities include running errands, helping out at street vending, scavenging for refuse that can be sorted and recycled, collecting empty water bottles, refilling and selling. Many of these activities are dangerous, especially for younger children. Most will involve exposure to road accident risks, darting into traffic to ply their trade. Indian street children cluster round railway stations, jumping on and off moving trains or jumping down onto the track to scavenge, acquire seats for passengers, carry luggage and clean train compartments, and many children are injured, some severely or fatally.

One Indian NGO in Andhra Pradesh, which had a grant specifically allocated for hospital and medical expenses incurred by street children in road and rail accidents, used the fund for 48 children in a twelve month period. A further risk to these children is that they are dependent on relationships they forge with the adults for whom they operate, and whilst some are sympathetic and protective, many adults exploit the children treating them as cheap labour and expendable, often reacting with violence towards the child if he or she incurs their temporary displeasure. Others - and this will often include older street youth who lead the gangs - will sexually abuse the younger children as part of the price for their protection - survival sex.

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Peter is 16 years old and lives alone in a shack in Uganda. He has been a double orphan since the age of 13. He works as a charcoal carrier on the lake shore in order to survive. One bag of charcoal weighs approximately 12 kg and has to be carried roughly 500 metres, struggling through deep shingle, negotiating the hazards and bustle of the lake shores, to reach the warehouses above the port. For each bag carried, Peter gets paid 1,000 Ugandan shillings - just 30 pence. It is unbearably hard physical labour for a young boy, still grieving for his parents, completely alone in the world. Through remarkable tenacity Peter pays his own school fees and rent, and even scrounges scraps for two small pigs he keeps. He is a determined young man who makes difficult choices. He chooses to do a backbreaking job in order to survive. He chooses to pay his fees and go to school because he hopes that education will lead him out of poverty. He chooses to survive.

A British NGO worker met Peter during a trip to Uganda. He had severely injured a muscle in his back through carrying too heavy a load. He could hardly breathe from the pain. Unable to work, he now faces the prospect of not being able to pay the rent for his tiny shack and being evicted. School fees will not be possible. He will become a full time street child. Suddenly, at the turn of one small event, Peter has no choices. No money means no home or school, no food or water and in the end, no option for survival. We should be under no illusions; street children who find themselves with no options can and do die. Funeral costs are a common place request when partner NGOs apply for grants.
Peter, Street Child Africa, Jinja, Uganda
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If children cannot find any activity that will provide money for food, they scavenge for left-overs in trains, dustbins, around restaurants and market places, risking disease. Children unable to work, through age, disability or sickness, beg or become dependent on an exploitative adult or group of older children. In extremis children get involved in illegal activities in order to survive. If rejected by their peers or other members of society, they turn to activities that put them at greater risk from the authorities. They start by stealing trivial bits of food or money for food. They may get involved with a gang that forces them to steal more systematically. They may get involved with errands for drug dealers and / or in commercial sex . Interviews with 1,000 street children by a Mumbai based NGO in 1993 found children had a strong sense of hierarchy of activities ranged by desirability, and would resort to begging, stealing, drug activities and sex-selling in that order - and only if they could survive in no other way.

These children, especially those without some protective structure, are at constant risk of losing whatever cash or food they’ve managed to acquire, so this breeds a culture that does not look beyond the immediate present. If a child has money left over after buying immediate food needs, he or she will spend it on some cheap entertainment or even gamble it away. A nine year old on Ahmedabad station in India, when asked how he stopped older boys stealing his money, said “I buy food and eat it straight away - they can’t steal it from my belly.” Many children who have acquired money through illicit activities will find they have to pay protection money or provide sex in lieu of cash to police or criminal gangs, who would otherwise arrest them or beat them up.

The majority of children included in estimated numbers of street children spend most of the day (8-16 hours) on the street, but return to some sort of adult family situation overnight. It is almost impossible to verify such numbers as the situations of these children are difficult to define and identify. They include the children of street living families, children who commute to city centres from the suburban slums to earn money through informal trading, and the largest group, children from the city shanty towns and slums who remain in their neighbourhoods who spend the day assisting their families to augment their income, often dropping out of school as a result.

Children of street living families and slum children are heavily involved in activities such as scavenging for refuse that is capable of being sold for recycling. Rag-picking is a variation of this activity that occupies many young children. The environment of such activity is particularly dangerous for children - the filth and open sewers, plus the dangers from infected items discarded expose these children to diseases, both chronic and acute. In some slum areas children are removed from schools to provide income for families where no breadwinner exists or the adults are unemployed or sick. Children are employed in small factories, tea stalls, petty vending activities, often for excessively long hours and for a pittance. The margin between classifying such children as child labourers and street children is ill defined, for such children will spend time on the streets seeking to augment the family income further in addition to any informal employment off the street.

Such children are frequently abused both sexually and physically as a result of failure to meet the performance required by their taskmasters. Street living children often cite a beating by someone for whom they worked as the catalyst for their leaving home. Others blame violence from a father or stepfather when they fail to make enough money from their activities as a cause of their running away. Children on the street are rarely supervised and are open to pressures detrimental to both their health and morals. Seen as a nuisance at best by much of society, their self-worth perception is low and they can be easy prey for unscrupulous adults who both exploit and often criminalise them. Their parents can be easily seduced into allowing them to be taken to alleged jobs in hotels, restaurants, bars and private domestic work, whereas in reality they are introduced into the commercial sex trade or trafficked to other cities.

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In Rwanda boys and girls leave home at different times. Boys tend to be quicker separating from their families than girls. They have options; they can potentially find work in the market place or carrying goods for shopkeepers. They will have friends already living on the streets encouraging them to join. Girls don’t have these ‘opportunities’, so they wait it out a bit longer at home before finding work as house-girls (everyone in Rwanda has a house-girl). In return for working practically as a slave to her new family, the girl will be rewarded with a place to sleep and a few scraps from the family supper. She’s unlikely to be paid cash. In too many cases the girl will be subject to sexual abuse, often full rape, by the man of the house. He won’t use protection and he may well be HIV+. Soon the girl will be pregnant at which point she is kicked out of the house, unable to go home. She is then forced into prostitution to support herself and her new baby.

Not only does she have little education, less chance of getting one, she also has a child, no home, potentially an STI or two. She is universally reviled by the community that tacitly condones the behaviour of the man who put her in this situation. She has no idea how to look after herself adequately, let alone bring up a child. A generation of children born on the street knows nothing different.
World Jewish Relief, Rwanda
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Children and youths who commute into city centres from slum suburbs to work undertake a wide variety of jobs of an informal and unregulated nature - shoe-shining, vending activities, collecting and reselling bottles and recyclable materials, windscreen-washing, cleaning, hotel and restaurant casual labour. Many of these activities are ‘part-time’ leaving the children free to roam the streets and join with other street children. Some of the older children form their own territories and trades which they regulate carefully to avoid newer children competing. Often an adult criminal or gang leader will regulate the activities of such children and youths. Such children can earn sufficient income to spend on entertainment in addition to necessities, but they are operating at the margins of legality and under constant threat from adult operators and the police.

In a situational analysis undertaken by the Railway Children at New Delhi railway station, many children were found to be earning an average of 180-250 rupees a day, a sum greater than that of many of the voluntary sector workers seeking to help them. However, the children complained bitterly of police and gangster violence and the lack of facilities to help them escape from drug and alcohol addiction to which they had been exposed.

Because the public’s perception of street children is negative - they are seen as dirty, delinquent, at best a nuisance, at worst a danger especially when in a gang of other street children - the children are at risk of abuse by those in authority who should be protecting them. The children are often rounded up by the police under laws against vagrancy or loitering. They are arrested on suspicion of committing petty crimes. Those children who are thought to have cash from their various trading and other earning opportunities are open to protection rackets from adult criminals, street gang leaders and to police corruption, with threats of violence if they resist. Therefore these children have little opportunity to save money and find ways of bettering themselves and developing legitimate ways of getting themselves off the street in the longer term.

The risks the children take to earn any money, driven by their need to survive, and the environment in which they operate, means that many street children suffer injury and disease. As most street children have suffered rejection or abuse from their families and suffer further rejection from society, they easily form poor opinions of their own self-worth which can make the temptations of joining criminal activities all too easy. Street children are likely to have suffered violations of up to 50% of the articles of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, according to an analysis undertaken by the Children’s Human Rights Network of Amnesty International UK.

Yet many street children survive these abuses. It is often the strongest children, physically and mentally, who decide to opt for the streets to avoid worse fates. There they learn to fend for themselves, they become resilient or they do not survive. They bond together with others and develop loyalties and friendships. Many children demonstrate great potential and there are many examples of street children who have shown academic or sporting prowess when their potential has been recognised and encouraged. These children develop, of necessity, powers of problem solving and many become entrepreneurs in their own way, although all too often on the margins of legality. At risk is their capacity to gain formal employment (after losing out on schooling) and to parent successfully (after insufficient or unhappy family experiences).

Banning all child labour could in the short to medium term have a detrimental effect on street children, as alternative survival strategies may be far worse - begging, crime, sex-selling. Older street children need emotional support in caring environments and training to turn their entrepreneurial skills to flourish in legitimate areas. They need encouragement to plan for their lives and opportunities to save their earned money safely through such initiatives as the children’s bank movement. Police should be sensitized to the circumstances and rights of these children and trained to protect them, working in conjunction with NGOs. A priority for these children is the banning of activities which are most harmful and exploitative for children - and the vigorous implementation of such bans - and the protection of the children from those who force them to work excessive hours, deny their rights, or steal their meagre earnings.