The Other Railway Children - Chapter 3 "The Consortium for Street Children"

The Consortium for Street Children is the leading international network organisation for charities working with street children. It now has over 60 member non government organisations (NGOs) working in 130 countries, but initially there were initially around a dozen potential members, all UK based but supporting street children internationally.

It was in the latter part of 1992 that I, as the invited member from Amnesty’s Working Group for Children, attended my first meeting of the Consortium, while they were feeling their way and preparing the ground for registration as a UK charity. At one of the first meetings I attended I found that the then Prime Minister, John Major, had taken a personal interest, following a visit during the 1990 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro, where he had visited a street children project run by Aninha Capaldi, Brazilian wife of the songwriter and founder of ‘Traffic’, Jim Capaldi. Aninha and the UK NGO she was associated with, ‘Jubilee Action’ were founder members of the Consortium and the Prime Minister had offered to host a reception at 10 Downing Street for the launch of the organisation. During 1993 several meetings were taken up with the arrangements for the launch as well as the registration of the charity and debate took place about the provision of a press release to accompany the launch.

In the couple of years since the publication of the inquiry report by Mr Justice Hidden on the Clapham Junction train accident and the earlier report on the London Underground fire at Kings Cross, I had been appointed as Head of British Rail’s Safety Policy Unit, a new post to oversee the transformation of BR’s safety management system from a traditional reactive approach to a more proactive system, taking into cognisance developments in the high tech industries and academia. Among the systems I had introduced as a basis for prioritising investment in safety and in remedial action was the technique of risk assessment, which I had applied comprehensively to British Rail’s engineering and operating activities throughout 1991 and 1992.

It was with this background that I listened to the ongoing debate at the Consortium about how to utilise the opportunities presented by the Downing Street launch and reception, and as the discussion meandered on, I started to doodle a risk assessment of being a street child on the back of an old envelope. When the consensus of the discussion began to emerge around the theme of the causes of children being on the street, I produced my scribbled ‘Fault Tree’ and we began to debate it further and, encouraged by the other members present, I developed a ‘Cause and Consequence Tree’ using the risk assessment techniques of Fault and Event Tree Analysis.

A Fault Tree seeks to trace back and uncover root causes of the main event - in this case the emergence of children onto the street. The oversimplified analysis that I did with the other members present identified three immediate causes for children coming to street life - searching for income and work, escaping from destitute families; running away from physical or sexual abuse; and abandonment, neglect or rejection by the family. In nearly all cases this pointed to a breakdown of the traditional family, in some cases through illness and death from AIDS or from involvement in armed conflict zones, sometimes because of the stresses caused by economic hardship, with a prevalence of parental drug abuse or alcoholism, sometimes the disruption to families caused by natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes.

I then developed an Event Tree which analysed the consequences and their probability - starting with the immediate needs of a child when first confronted with surviving on the street. The obvious need for food or money with which to buy it; the need for shelter and somewhere safe to sleep; and the need for companionship, usually with other children in the same situation as themselves. The analysis then explored the actions that street children took to meet these needs and the consequent unravelling of their lives as they faced ostracism and rejection by society who often saw their means of survival as anti-social - at best a nuisance, and all too often criminal and fear-provoking.

When I had completed this basic risk assessment, I passed it to each of the members present and asked them to insert their own organisation’s intervention strategy on the appropriate root or branch of the ‘tree’ that I had drafted. Some NGOs present were able to do this easily. Large NGOs like UNICEF and Save the Children did little direct work with children already on the street, but in partnership with many other local NGOs undertook much prevention work in slum and rural communities, especially in the areas of child health and education and emergency care after natural catastrophes.

The organisation that I represented, Amnesty International, worked at the opposite end of the spectrum, in tackling the extreme consequences when the street children faced physical abuse, torture and murder because society condoned the often brutal actions of the authorities to rid themselves of these children and the supposed petty crimes they were thought to have committed. It was harder to pinpoint the focus of some of the other member NGOs. Some ran residential homes for these children, health clinics, drug de-addiction centres. Some ran vocational training schemes for street children to enable them to become self-sufficient. Some worked in slum areas with children who were not attending school but scavenging or begging, and offered informal education and emergency health care.

When I assembled all the responses and looked at the tree I had drawn and the insertions made, I realised that there was a glaring gap. No-one had identified the first few days - or even hours - when a child first came to the street as a crucial intervention opportunity. My risk assessment had pinpointed this particular time in a street child’s career as one of both high risk and great opportunity. My railway safety management role, involving train, passenger, staff and general public safety, required me on many occasions to work closely with the British Transport Police (BTP). In conversations with senior officers I had mentioned my voluntary work with Amnesty International and my interest in street children and they told me of their concern for many British children whom they found on our own railway stations.

I was introduced to two Salvation Army captains - a man and his wife - who, in the company of a BTP officer, would patrol a number of main line railway termini in London every evening looking for lone children at risk. These two stalwarts had been doing this for some ten years, since the early 1980s and they told me that they had picked up 3,600 children under the age of 16 during that period, an average of one every night. The youngest was a girl of six from Crewe whom they’d found sleeping on platform 12 at Euston after sneaking out of her home while her parents thought her banished to her bedroom after some family squabble. Even more alarmingly, these Salvation Army officers told me that a lone child or teenager, at any of the main London stations, or Victoria coach station or a West End amusement arcade, had on average around twenty minutes before they’d be targeted by a pimp, paedophile or drug addict or dealer, appearing to offer help, but in fact ensnaring them into the world of sexual abuse and drug addiction.

In 1992 I’d attended a Railway Safety Conference organised by Tranzrail, the New Zealand privatised railway company. As my flight back from New Zealand came via Singapore and Bombay once again, I’d taken the opportunity for a further visit to my sponsored family in India and this time, because of my earlier experience, I’d been introduced to Father ‘Plassy’ Fonseca, a Jesuit priest working for a street children charity in that city called ‘Snehasadan’. He took me to a small shelter, Amchi Kholi, that the Central Railway of India management had permitted within the huge Victoria Terminus station (now renamed Shivaji Chhatrapati Terminus - CST - where much of ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was filmed). While we were talking to a social worker there, a small filthy dirty girl of about eight years of age walked in off a mainline train that had just arrived from Calcutta. The social worker obviously knew her and I was horrified to understand that girls and boys of this age wandered unsupervised around India’s vast railway system, surviving as best they could, moving on when the whim took them, always at risk of abusers and traffickers.

I mentioned to Father Fonseca the situation I’d learned in Britain about the risk to children on London’s stations and the short time before they’d be approached by undesirables. “Oh,” said the Father, “it’s minus two hours here!” He explained that the brothel owners employed women to travel a couple of hours outside Bombay on the routes converging from the north, and then board trains headed for the city, scouring through the train looking for unaccompanied and runaway children whose trust they could obtain. Instead of finding them safe havens in Bombay as they’d promise, they’d sell them on commission to the sex industry - boys and girls of eight, nine, ten years of age even. Father Fonseca’s organisation had social workers on the station to try to intercept such children and offer real safety and rehabilitation in a series of small children’s homes run by foster parents many of whom had been street children themselves.

With this in mind as I assimilated the responses from the Consortium members in the House of Lords Committee room that afternoon, I began to press my colleagues about their focus and the existence of any projects funded by UK charities that targeted early intervention when the children first ran away or were abandoned. We discussed opportunities for such intervention and quickly established that the transport systems were an obvious location. Not only were they the point of entry for many children to the city where their street life began, but they were also places where they could find informal employment or where they could scavenge or beg. They were places of many opportunities and dangers and many children stayed there initially until they found other street children and moved on. Many would stay at the station and join gangs of other children they found there. In India and the countries of Eastern Europe, the railway station was key for early intervention. In most parts of Latin America and Africa, the bus station was a more likely location.

Not only were these places a danger to new children arriving there because of the easy prey the children were for drug dealers, sex exploiters and other criminal gangs, but they were also the locations where there was a short opportunity for people of goodwill to offer a child a positive way out before they became traumatised by their experiences and adapted and often corrupted to street life. Later I was told that if a child was supported within the first month of living on the street, there was an 80% chance of helping that child find a positive outcome to their predicament - reconciliation with their family, or moving to an educational or vocational training programme or as a last resort, a place in a residential home. After six months living on the street that chance had fallen to 20%, as the child became streetwise, found a new family in the ‘gang’, and often by that time had become addicted to some form of inhalant or drug.

Now began a period of contemplation. John Major duly hosted the launch of the Consortium on the 18th November 1993, the Consortium was registered with the Charity Commission and more British non-governmental organisations (NGOs) began to join. I became one of the initial trustees (I did not retire from this until 2008) and I kept talking to colleagues there about the risk assessment I’d undertaken and the need for a focus on early intervention. No-one disagreed, but no organisation had set this focus as their purpose and if any such project took place, it was not part of any overall strategy. My mind kept coming back to the need for a charity that would seize this opportunity for contacting street children as soon as they came to the street. It was apparent that the railway and bus stations of the world offered a unique opportunity to make this contact, just as the Salvation Army couple had done in England and Snehasadan was doing at one station in India.

I began to talk to colleagues I knew in the railway industry. More and more I felt an inner compunction to do something about it myself. The image of the small girl I’d encountered on Churchgate station in 1989 kept coming back to me. But it seemed a huge step to take and I worried about sharing my vision with colleagues in case they ridiculed my ideas as naïve. I started to talk to other members of the Consortium (CSC) and they encouraged me. I saw the link between the opportunity to help these children on the stations and the industry in which I worked.

I took my courage in both hands and began to talk about my ideas to my colleagues at BR’s headquarter offices. My own boss, a BR Board Member, was interested and didn’t dismiss it out of hand. He suggested I discuss it with other members of the British Railways Board. Not all were enthusiastic. One drew attention to the enormous task of starting a new charity amid the competition of so many other charitable organisations. Another Board member put me in touch with a group of railway people in Sheffield who were raising money for children being discovered in deplorable conditions in Romanian orphanages and suggested I met them and perhaps joined my ideas with theirs. I duly met their committee as had been suggested but discovered that their vision did not marry easily with my own and that there was a reluctance to broaden their scope from the Romanian orphans which at that time were receiving a lot of media coverage. Even among people who were keen to help vulnerable children, I found a resistance to the idea of working for street children, as they were already stigmatised in many minds as delinquent children whose plight would not draw public sympathy or entice sufficient funds to develop worthwhile projects.

The railway ran its own charity which had funded two children’s orphanages in Derby and Woking for many years. The Woking home had closed and had been converted into a residential home for elderly railway people as the need for residential institutions for children had diminished. The purpose of these two homes had been to make provision for the orphans of railway workers who had either been killed or had died in service. Some 400 men a year were killed in accidents on the system immediately after the First World War, but thankfully this tragic slaughter had been reduced to around twenty fatalities a year - still a bad industrial record - by the 1980s. This reduction of need and the effect of the 1989 Children’s Act meant that a charity running orphanages in the UK after the 1990s was inappropriate. Many employees of the railway industry had given generously to this charity over the years and I felt that there was an opportunity for railway people to widen their interest and maintain their generosity for vulnerable and destitute children associated with railways internationally as well as on home territory.

Having tested the alternatives suggested and established that I was not conflicting with the railway’s own children’s charity, I continued serious discussions with members of the Consortium for Street Children. One option would have been to merge my ideas with an existing organisation belonging to the CSC, but there was no obvious partner and I was encouraged to found a new charity, given the potential support from the railway industry that I had uncovered. In any case, it was obvious to me and my colleagues at the CSC that I would be reliant on some of them to identify potential project opportunities where the focus of early intervention could be developed with the financial support that I thought I could generate.

And so, throughout the second half of 1993 and 1994 I was putting my thoughts together, and by the beginning of 1995 I had decided to take the plunge and, with the promised backing of the CSC and several colleagues in the railway industry, form a new charity to offer support to children as they first gravitated to the street. I sought advice from the Charity Commission and began to bring together a small committee of colleagues to help me with some of the practicalities. My boss was generous in support, offering the facilities of the railway administration in the first few months.

I had a name for the charity - in India I had heard these street children on the stations referred to variously as ‘railway’ or ‘platform’ children - so the name of the famous children’s novel and film, ‘The Railway Children’, long out of copyright, seemed entirely appropriate for what I had in mind. I had to check that no other organisation had registered this name and I found it was used by just one small pre-school playgroup in Kent whose premises backed onto a railway line. The Charity Commission foresaw no problem in duplicating a national charity name with that of a very local group, but as a courtesy I contacted the playgroup leader and got ready permission to go ahead with the name, so during the Spring of 1995, the ‘Railway Children’ was born.