P3 : 13 a Summary of Street Children

PG02 : Learning cycle 03

Communication Design

RAVENSBOURNE

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Theme : Time and Space

Negotiated Individual Project & Learning Log Summary 

A Summary of Street Children

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ISSUE

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Street children

There are an estimated 100 million children living in the streets in the world today.

Children living on the streets are especially vulnerable to victimization, exploitation, and the abuse of their civil and economic rights.

International indifference to the problem has led to continual neglect and abuse of these children.

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Four Categories of Street Children

• A ‘Child of the Streets': Children who have no home but the streets, and no family support. They move from place to place, living in shelters and abandoned buildings.
• A ‘Child on the street': Children who visit their families regularly and might even return every night to sleep at home, but spends most days and some nights on the street because of poverty, overcrowding, sexual or physical abuse at home.
• Part of a Street Family: These children live on sidewalks or city squares with the rest of their families. They may be displaced due to poverty, wars, or natural disasters. The families often live a nomadic life, carrying their possessions with them. Children in this case often work on the streets with other members of their families.
• In Institutionalized Care: Children in this situation come from a situation of homelessness and are at risk of returning to a life on the street.

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Street Children Statistics

The hidden and isolated nature of street children makes accurate statistics difficult to gather; however, UNICEF estimates there are approximately 100 million street children worldwide with that number constantly growing.

There are up to 40 million street children in Latin America , and at least 18 million in India. Many studies have determined that street children are most often boys aged 10 to 14, with increasingly younger children being affected (Amnesty International, 1999). Many girls live on the streets as well, although smaller numbers are reported due to their being more “useful” in the home, taking care of younger siblings and cooking. Girls also have a greater vulnerability to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation or other forms of child labour.

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Vulnerability and Homeless and Street Children

Children who are vulnerable to street life include those who have been abandoned by their families or sent into cities because of a family's intense poverty, often with hopes that a child will be able to earn money for the family and send it home. Children who run away from home or children's institutions frequently end up on the street since they rarely return home due to dysfunctional families, or physical, mental, and/or sexual abuse. In several areas of the world, disabled children are commonly abandoned, particularly in developing countries. In addition, refugee children of armed conflict areas, children separated from their families for long periods of time, and AIDS orphans, repeatedly find nowhere to go but the streets.

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The Effects of Street and Homeless Life

Homelessness and street life have extremely detrimental effects on children. Their unstable lifestyles, lack of medical care, and inadequate living conditions increase young people's susceptibility to chronic illnesses such as respiratory or ear infections, gastrointestinal disorders, and sexually-transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS. Children fending for themselves must find ways to eat; some scavenge or find exploitative physical work. Many homeless children are enticed by adults and older youth into selling drugs, stealing, and prostitution.

Drug use by children on the streets is common as they look for means to numb the pain and deal with the hardships associated with street life. Studies have found that up to 90 percent of street children use psychoactive substances, including medicines, alcohol, cigarettes, heroin, cannabis, and readily available industrial products such as shoe glue.

The mental, social and emotional growth of children are affected by their nomadic lifestyles and the way in which they are chastised by authorities who constantly expel them from their temporary homes such as doorways, park benches, and railway platforms. Street children lack security, protection, and hope, and continue to face a deep-rooted negative stigma about homelessness. And, more than anything else, they lack love.

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Increasingly, these children are the defenceless

• Victims of brutal violence
• Sexual exploitation
• Abject neglect
• Chemical addiction
• Human rights violations.

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Charity Programmes

They are usually financed by philanthropists and individual Samaritans who had invested their unwavering commitment and attend to this marginalised sector of our society. At any rate, they need to be supported all the way for their noble gesture and good programmes they envisioned towards the general welfare of these children. The main objective of their programmes is aimed to provide education, health care and counselling which can obviously give a meaningful difference into the lives of these children.

Counselling give the children the moral revival and renewal to think about on how they shall lead their lives for a better future.

Health care provides them the physical and mental conditioning necessary for their well being in order to be productive.

Through education they are rebuilding their lives again not only on how to be an asset to society but how they can manage to be the prime contributor to the country’s economic growth, development and prosperity as well. Sad to say, that the problem of street children is still far from over though.

Transforming the developing economies into a fully develop ones is one of the key to eradicate them. After all, poverty is still the main cause as to why the bulk of these children are still on the streets.

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PROBLEM

Street children are denied many of life’s basic needs. They depend entirely on their own ability to fend for themselves. To ignore them means admitting to have failed the responsibility to protect and provide a decent future for them.

Unfortunately, most governments in developing economies neither cannot afford to house them nor provide their basic needs due to lack of funds and budgetary constrains.

Even though, some developing economies where there are non governmental organizations (NGO) and charitable institutions who are attending to this kind of situation, it still have lack of fund to be eradicated.

Also, International indifference to the problem has led to continual neglect and abuse of these children.