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Street
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Background
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The early years of the 21st Century gvnet.com/streetchildren/ CAUTION: There
is always a risk in posting links to external websites. Some of the following links may possibly
lead to websites that present information that is unsubstantiated, misleading
or even false. Their authenticity has
not been verified and their content has not been validated. A Video Playlist from a Global perspective www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EA135C2867F5EE91 There are an increasing number of
street children videos now available that constitute a supplementary source
of information for researchers, especially for those who may not have
experienced the reality of street children. -- Playlist
developed by Brian Horne of almudo.com & streetkidnews.blogsome.com And Now My Soul Is Hardened - Abandoned Children in Soviet
Ball, Alan M. And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned
Children in Soviet ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft700007p9/ [accessed 23 August 2011] PREFACE - No spectacle in Soviet cities
more troubled Russian and foreign observers during the first postrevolutionary decade than the millions of orphaned
and abandoned children known as besprizornye. Whether portrayed as pitiable victims of
war and famine or as devious wolf-children preying on the surrounding
population to support cocaine and gambling habits, they haunted the works of
journalists, travelers, and Party members alike. “Every visitor sees it
first,” noted an American correspondent, “and is so shocked by the sight that
the most widely known Russian youth are the…homeless children flapping along
the main streets of cities and the main routes of travel like ragged flocks
of animated scarecrows.” Brian Horne of almudo.com suggests
this book because so much of what we have on street children is very recent
in historical terms and this book gives a fascinating account of Russian
street children of seventy or eighty years ago. XVII. The Street Arab Jacob A. Riis. How the Other Half Lives. 1890 [accessed 23 August 2011] The Street Arab has all the faults
and all the virtues of the lawless life he leads. Vagabond that he is,
acknowledging no authority and owing no allegiance to anybody or anything,
with his grimy fist raised against society whenever it tries to coerce him,
he is as bright and sharp as the weasel, which, among all the predatory
beasts, he most resembles. His sturdy independence, love of freedom and
absolute self-reliance, together with his rude sense of justice that enables
him to govern his little community, not always in accordance with municipal
law or city ordinances, but often a good deal closer to the saving line of
“doing to others as one would be done by”. Brian Horne of almudo.com also
recommends this book to us, commenting that “aside from its period style,
[it] reads like something that could have been written yesterday”. Starting a new life in the New World David Charters, [accessed 23 August 2011] Most judgments about how life
should be for other people depend on where you are sitting at the time. Then
up spring two writers with a book about an extraordinary period in our
history and how it affected poor children.
Yet, despite all the facts and statistics, it is difficult to know now
whether what happened to those children was good or bad. This is the almost forgotten story
about thousands of children sent to the British colonies of [NEW Lives for Old: The Story of
Britain’s Child Migrants, by Roger Kershaw and Janet Sacks] What does it mean to be a street
kid? Shine a Light SAL www.shinealight.org/Onthestreet.html [accessed 23 August 2011] Imagine you are eight years old.
Maybe your parents beat you, and you ran away. Maybe they didn't have the
money to support you, or maybe it just seemed that way, so you decided to
leave home so there would be more food for your little sister. If you live in
Shine a Light Annual Report [PDF] Shine a Light SAL, 2010 www.shinealight.org/Annual.pdf [accessed 23 August 2011] SHINE A LIGHT ACHIEVEMENTS, 2010 - Shine a Light’s model depends
on two major components: direct work with marginalized children to help them
document the best ways to change the world, and publishing this information
so that people and organizations can use it. In 2010, we advanced in both of
these fields, developing important new projects while publishing important
Digital workshops, websites, books, and academic papers. Uphold Children's Dignity Philani Nyatsanza,
The Herald, allafrica.com/stories/200904080118.html [partially accessed 18 August 2011 - access restricted] It has become common parlance, so
much that we have ignored the consequences of such labels as "street
children" and "Aids orphans".
In simple terms, this is not just naming, but naming and shaming in
the same breathe. The power of life and death is in the tongue (Proverbs
18:21). Why should a child be made to
pay the price of something over which they had neither power, say, like losing
a parent to an HIV-related illness?
The tragedy is that such shaming has a very high price because,
whether we see it or not, it will always haunt the child, looming over them like some spectre of evil. Every time you call them
"street children" or "Aids orphans" you are prophesying
into their lives (words are carriers of spiritual power) and at the end of
the day, they act and behave in a manner consistent with what you have labelled them.
So, instead of getting answers to the problem of children making a
"home" in the streets, we exacerbate this socio-economic ill by
condemnation through labelling. "Street children" seems
to have become almost like a trade name, because it is drawn directly from
the disadvantaged children's characteristically grimy lifestyles in the
streets. But whether they live and
work in streets, in families and communities, they are just children. Kids
struggle to survive - Prefer homelessness to cruel treatment in shelters Douglas Birch, www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/6032-7.cfm [accessed 14 July 2011] They flutter through the Kursky railway station like flocks of dirt-smudged
pigeons, sniffing glue fumes out of plastic bags, begging for money from
strangers and scattering as police approach waving nightsticks. These are Neglecting a massive problem: drug abuse among street
children Indo-Asian News Service IANS, www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=d7832bed-ac1f-4858-904a-4b47f0d95530 [accessed 23 August 2011] Very little data is available on
street children living with HIV/AIDS in Background Information on Street
Children [PDF] Arms of love Nicaragua Missions Guide www.armsoflove.org/images/uploads/documents/Short-term_Teams_Manual.pdf [accessed 23 August 2011] Street
children live in abandoned buildings, back alleys, parks, garbage dumps, cemeteries,
and other public places. During the
day, they will tend to congregate in places with significant pedestrian
traffic, such as street corners, markets, bus terminals, and ferry buildings. When they are young, street children are
often able to survive by begging or selling trinkets. As they grow older, however, people tend to
have less compassion on them, and they will typically resort to petty theft
and prostitution to survive. How Do Kids End Up On The Street? povertyignoranceinafrica.blogspot.com/2007/09/street-children.html [accessed 23 August 2011] Some
children end up on the street because they have been orphaned or abandoned by
their parents. The HIV/AIDS crisis means that there are increasing numbers of
orphaned children who have nobody to look after them. Others have left their families because of
poverty to look for work in the city. Others are escaping family violence or
breakdown, which may spring from the stresses of poverty leading to
alcoholism or abuse. V. Family Environment And Alternative Care [DOC] Committee on the Rights of the Child CRC -- NGO
Commentaries to the Initial Report of the Kyrgyz Republic on the UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child, January 03, 2000 www.crin.org/docs/resources/treaties/crc.24/kyrgystanNGOreport.doc [accessed 12 June 2011] [page 13] g) CHILDREN DEPRIVED OF
FAMILY ENVIRONMENT - There
are 600-800 street children in Bishkek.
The main reasons are alcoholism of parents, poverty, abuse and home
violence. Street children are excluded
from education. They work at bazaars,
petrol stations or commit petty theft, pocket stealing, car
robbery, quite often they are doing it under leadership of adults. They are often arrested by militia, beaten
and humiliated, have to give bribes to get
free. Many street children live in the
town heating systems, abandoned buildings, etc. In some towns (Bishkek, Kara-Balta) the shelters run by NGOs for such children can
accept only a limited number of children. Preamble
To The Problematic Of Street Children Extracts from the "Little treaty to the
teachers" written for the teachers of "Enfants
du Soleil" (Children
of the Sun) in www.enfantsdesrues-reper.org/151-Preamble-to-the-problematic-of-street-children [accessed 24 August 2011] THE STREET CHILD - Children can be seen
everywhere, at all times. Thus, we
tend somewhat hastily to apply the label of "street children" to
these children that invade the streets.
Not all of them should be considered as street children. Although most of these children go back
home at night, some of them do not have any contact with their family, with
the adults. They are the real street
children. Backward and forward linkages that strengthen primary
education Vimala Ramachandran,
17 August 2006 -- This is an overview of a collection of 10 case
studies. ‘Getting Children Back to
School: Case Studies in Primary Education’ will be published by Sage
Publications India in 2003 archive.oneworld.net/article/view/137887 [accessed 23 August 2011] IV CHILDREN, WORK AND EDUCATION - Primary education in There is, formally, a widespread
consensus about ending child labour and establishing compulsory universal
primary education for all children up to the age of 14, a commitment that can
be traced back to Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s
efforts at the turn of the last century. Yet, numerous commissions, reports,
plans and experiments notwithstanding, more than five decades after
independence, the situation remains dismal. Not only do many children never
enter school, there are many of those who do drop out before completing basic
education. And scores of children from the most deprived strata are or become
part of the workforce. The
Children On Our Streets - Part I: The Problem Prof. Michael Bourdillon, www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-1201-bourdillon-I.html [accessed 24 August 2011] For the children and their
families, being on the street is not a problem. It is their solution to a
number of problems. The
Children On Our Streets - Part II The Situation Prof. Michael Bourdillon, www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0102-bourdilon-II.html [accessed 24 August 2011] When we try to understand the
problems faced by street children, we quickly find that we need to know something
about the home background of the children.
We need to look at their families and what they are leaving in order
to be on the streets. Street Children, Human Rights,
And Public Health: A Critique And Future Directions Catherine Panter-Brick, Department
of Anthropology, www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085359?journalCode=anthro [accessed 24 August 2011] INTRODUCTION: A SHIFT OF
PERSPECTIVE - What
has been called the global or "worldwide phenomenon of street
children" (le Roux 1996) has neither vanished from sight nor effectively
been solved. However, current perspectives tend not to demarcate street
children so radically from other poor children in urban centers or to
conceptualize the homeless in isolation from other groups of children facing
adversity. Welfare agencies now talk of "urban children at risk" (Kapadia 1997), which conceptualizes street children as one of a number of groups
most at risk and requiring urgent attention. Violence against Children Women's nasilie.net/home.php?mode=article&article_id=360&lang=en [accessed 24 August 2011] Street children are especially
easy targets. They may be beaten by police who extort money from them
or forced to provide sex to avoid arrest or be released from police custody.
Seen as vagrants or criminals, street children have been tortured, mutilated,
and subjected to death threats and extrajudicial execution. Children’s Rights Human Rights Watch World Report 2000 www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k/Crd.htm#TopOfPage [accessed 24 August 2011] Every country in the world except
for the Assessment Mission To St
Petersburg [DOC] -- Time frame: February 7th -12th
2001, Locations: Hugh Griffiths, Médecins du Monde www.lakareivarlden.org/files/St%20Petersburg%20rapport%20eng.doc At one time this article had been archived and may
possibly also be accessible [here] [accessed 24 August 2011] HUMAN RIGHTS, LEGAL ISSUES &
LAW ENFORCEMENT - One
of the principle barriers standing in the way of street children accessing
their right under the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child to
medical care is the fact that many of them lack the correct documentation.
The "Propiska" is the stamp in the
internal Russian passport which notifies doctors, nurses, police and the
health authorities that the holder of the stamp is registered in a certain
city, town or village. If the person seeks state medical care in a region outside
his or her "Propiska" area, then he or
she will be denied it. An ever increasing number of the
children living on the streets of Similarly, both street children
and heroin users are subject to beatings and illegal detentions by certain
police officers. Heroin users are often actively persecuted by police
officers. Such persecution can be lawful when heroin users break Russian
legal codes. However, drug users are subject to arbitrary arrest, police
break new syringes and females are often exposed to sexual misconduct on the
part of the police. Children for whom the street more than their family has
become their real home Human Rights Watch At one time this article had been archived and may
possibly also be accessible [here] [accessed 24 August 2011] Street children throughout the world are subjected to
physical abuse by police or have been murdered outright, as governments treat
them as a blight to be eradicated-rather than as children to be nurtured and
protected. They are frequently detained arbitrarily by police simply because
they are homeless, or criminally charged with vague offenses such as
loitering, vagrancy, or petty theft. They are tortured or beaten by police
and often held for long periods in poor conditions. Girls are sometimes
sexually abused, coerced into sexual acts, or raped by police. Street
children also make up a large proportion of the children who enter criminal
justice systems and are committed finally to correctional institutions
(prisons) that are euphemistically called schools, often without due process.
Few advocates speak up for these children, and few street children have
family members or concerned individuals willing and able to intervene on
their behalf. Severe Chill - As winter
deepens in the valley, street children find their daily life deteriorating At one time this article had been archived and may
possibly also be accessible [here] [accessed 24 August 2011] As winter deepens in the valley,
street children find their daily life deteriorating Countering a Culture of Death Michael Johnstone (Pastoral
Assistant at www.salesians.org.uk/html/street_child.html [accessed 24 August 2011] How do they eat? Why, they pilfer,
they shoplift. They become muggers. These are no angels these boys. They are
filthy dirty. They are foul mouthed. They are aggressive, with one another no
less than with those they meet. They smell. They are not popular. City
worthies want to get rid of them. There are campaigns to 'street cleanse'
them. They are the victims of violence. They disappear. Hooligans shoot them Ricardo:
‘The only thing I hate in the world is the police’ Jenny Smith, New Internationalist Magazine, Issue 366,
April 1, 2004 www.newint.org/features/2004/04/01/uruguay/ [accessed 24 August 2011] Ricardo’s scarred hands are always
busy – wiping the faces of smaller children, opening doors for others,
picking up dropped items and returning them. He is desperately trying to give
to others that which he has never had on Changing Paradigms for Working
with Street Youth: The Experience of Street Kids International [PDF] Sauvé, Stephanie, Children, Youth and Environments 13(1),
Spring 2003 www.streetkids.org/assets/pdf/2003/SKI_paradigms.pdf [accessed 24 August 2011] ABSTRACT - The United Nations estimates
100 million street youth across the globe. They are products of poverty, war,
urbanization, political instability, family breakdown, and HIV/AIDS, among
others. Many are not homeless, but primary income earners for their extended
families. Many participate in the sex
and drug trade because of limited income generation alternatives. How can we
support these youth and increase their opportunities while respecting them as
independent actors in their own lives?
Street Kids International suggests a critical paradigm shift as the
basis for being responsive and effective and describes its approaches for
working with street youth as participants and assets within their present
communities Police Abuse And Arbitrary Detention Of Street Children Human Rights Watch, PROMISES BROKEN: An Assessment of
Children's Rights on the 10th Anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of
the Child, November 1999 www.hrw.org/legacy/press/1999/nov/children.htm#_1_5 [accessed 24 August 2011] Attention to street children has
focused largely on their pressing economic and social plight – poverty, lack of
shelter, denial of education, AIDS, prostitution, and substance abuse. But
with the exception of killings of street children in Street Outreach Stand Up for Kids www.standupforkids.org/streetoutreach.html [accessed 24 August 2011] In the An Outside Chance: Street
Children And Juvenile Justice Marie Wernham, Consortium for
Street Children CSC, May 2004 [accessed 24 August 2011] The document entitled, "An
Outside Chance: Street Children and Juvenile Justice - An International
Perspective", was published by the Consortium for Street Children (CSC),
in 2004. It aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the causes and consequences
of street children’s involvement in criminal justice systems in a wide range
of countries. This report, is based on the findings from a two-year research
and advocacy project run by CSC with partners in Street Children - Community
Children Worldwide Resource Library Pangaea, 6 January 2010 pangaea.org/street_children/kids.htm [accessed 24 August 2011] The United Nations has been
attributed as estimating the population of street children worldwide at 150 million,
with the number rising daily. These young people are more appropriately known
as community children, as they are the offspring of our communal world.
Ranging in age from three to eighteen, about 40 percent of those are
homeless--as a percentage of world population, unprecedented in the history
of civilization. Demand & the child sex trade Presenter: Denise Ritchie, jahjah-org.blogspot.com/2006_01_29_archive.html [accessed 24 August 2011] The child sex trade, like all trades,
exists not because there is poverty but because there is demand and supply. The
demand for sex comes from adults, overwhelmingly men. The supply is that of
children, in particular their bodies and sexual parts. The goods taken and
destroyed however are much more than children’s bodies, but also their minds,
their hearts, their spirits, their hopes, their futures and frequently their
lives. Forced Labor: The Prostitution
of Children [PDF] Papers from a symposium held on September 29, 1995 at the
U.S. Department of Labor in www.childtrafficking.com/Docs/us_dep_labor_1996__forced_l.pdf [accessed 24 August 2011] [Part I: Overviews on Child
Prostitution] [2. “Child Prostitution
In Many of the girls who end up as child
prostitutes in Latin American countries have chosen a sexually exploitative
life on the streets, rather than suffer continued family violence and male
incest in their own homes. Again, this type of society supports and condones
such behavior as absolutely indigenous to the aggressive, predatory nature of
men and the passive and compliant nature of women. This is not only because of the
strong machismo culture in those societies, but is also due to the worldwide
trends of oppression of women. But the additional layer of machismo in Child Soldiers Ethics, Editor: John K. Roth, Samem Press, December 2004 · ISBN: 978-1-58765-170-0 salempress.com/Store/samples/ethics_revised/ethics_revised_child_soldiers.htm [accessed 24 August 2011] In 2003, an estimated 500,000
children under eighteen years of age served in the government armed forces,
paramilitary forces, civil militia, and armed groups of more than eighty-five
nations, and another 300,000 children were active in armed combat in more
than thirty countries. Some of the children were as young as seven years of
age UN Integrated Regional Information Networks IRIN, Mbanza www.irinnews.org/printreport.aspx?reportid=48287 [accessed 20 August 2011] In some areas of "My parents died during the
war. I moved to my sister's for a while, but they did not want me to stay
there. They threw me out on the street. I lived there a long time before I
came here," 12-year-old Manus told IRIN. He did not want to say why he was
forced onto the streets, but he knows that he and the other boys in the
orphanage are accused of being "wizards". Several of the boys, like Manus,
slept rough at the market or in derelict houses before being collected by the
orphanage. Most of them had also been abandoned by relatives after their
parents died. The
Killings Escalate In Caius Brandao,
International Child Resource Institute ICRI pangaea.org/street_children/latin/brazil.htm [accessed 24 August 2011] Clearly, there is a perceived
benefit to killing destitute children, not only to those who directly profit
from it, i.e., the hit-men. When street children die it also 'benefit' the
people who paid the professional killers to clean up the streets in the first
place. In 1994, 1221 minors were killed
in the State of A Lamp That Sheds No Light W. E. Gutman, www.hondurasweekly.com/a-lamp-that-sheds-no-light-201007312787/ [accessed 24 August 2011] Fiction also trivializes fact. There
is no romance in the life of street children, only pain and hopelessness,
hunger and fear, disease and death. Real street children do not sport
beguiling smiles. They are prone to misbehave. They often stink. All could
use a bath. But under the grime, the air of
defiance or the crushing indifference their feverish eyes convey, there is a
child, scared, vulnerable, far too young to taste life's bitter medicine, yet
incurably old before his time. In the ghostly twilight world of
street children, there are no magic lamps to rub, no benevolent, turbaned
genies, no flying carpets, no protective amulets, no healing philters; only
evil spirits lurking, stalking easy prey. Unlike Aladdin, street children do
not amass fame and fortune, and no fairy prince or princess will marry them
in the end. Most never leave the streets. Many don't reach adulthood.
Disease, hunger, drugs and bullets often cut their lives short. Ex–street kids thrive in doc Pieta Woolley, www.straight.com/article/ex-street-kids-thrive-in-doc-0 [accessed 24 August 2011] The film, Metamorphosis: The
Lives of Former Street Kids, has no distributor or broadcaster. Mervyn created it for a few thousand bucks on credit
card, with a volunteer sound editor and cameraman Ben Hoskyn,
a BCIT film grad. Too much research has focused on why youth stay on the
streets, she said. Her work looks at why some youth successfully launch
themselves off the streets. American musician takes on the system Nina Harvey, People's Post, 05/12/2007 At one time this article had been archived and may
possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 22 July 2011] "A lot of organisations
aimed at helping these kids simply come in and try and get them to conform
without first discovering what their needs are. But in order to really help
them you need to build a foundation first and not just go in and tell them
what to do. "People seem to either think
they are delinquents, or they pity them, thinking they must have come from an
abusive background. Yes, many of their previous circumstances may have been
tough, but what people don't realise is that the
street life is addictive. These kids have the freedom to move around as they
please. Many of them will choose to stay where they are, living by their own
rules." And that, Brown says, is the
greatest problem. "The structure in this country is flawed. Children
here are making decisions for themselves they are too young to make." Why Become a Rag-Picker or Street Child? Street Children Ministry www.abfindia.net/ragpickers.html [accessed 24 August 2011] THE
RAGPICKER'S DAILY ROUTINE - As a street child, between five
and eighteen years of age, these children earn their livelihood by polishing
shoes, washing cars, finding parking spaces, rag picking (recycling garbage),
selling lottery tickets and news papers, etc. They also work as coolies and
helpers in automobile repair shops, construction sites, and hotels. Their
average earnings vary between 15 Rupees to 20 per day, while the more
experienced ones earn 25 to 40 Rupees. However, these are the lucky ones. The
Girls are forced into prostitution at an early age. Arising at
dawn, the rag picker children start their rounds. With feet bare and backs
aching, they carry the heavy gunny bags that contain the day's pickings.
Sometimes on foot they travel over 20 kilometers each day for the best
pickings. Their clothing is filthy, tattered, ill fitting, and wholly
inadequate for protection especially, when the weather is wet and cold. Life is
very hard as they rummage (competing and fighting with stray dogs and cattle)
through every filthy garbage heap in the city and railway stations. All
recyclable garbage is collected and sorted: paper, plastic, bottles, bones,
metals and rotting discarded food thrown out by households and railway
passengers. With this they fill their bags and often their starving bellies.
If the day's collection is bad, they resort to stealing for survival. If
good, they rush to the nearest wayside shop to ease their hunger. All have
regular scrap dealers to buy their loot. They receive a meager pittance, and
sometimes this pittance is withheld to repay a previous enforced loan. Some
days they starve. If a better price is negotiated by another dealer, the
child is frequently beaten and tied up. However
the issue of greater concern is related to their pattern of spending, where a
major part of their income is spent on drugs, alcohol, solvent abuse
(sniffing solvents), and gambling. They frequently become involved in street
fights. With little money and too much freedom, they are vulnerable and fall
prey to any number of situations that threaten life and soul. Late in
the afternoon they resume their second round of collection. Then after
sorting and selling their loot, they spend their nights on the streets or in
graveyards, where they are exploited and abused. Older rag pickers and
perverted people give them drugs or threaten them for sexual purposes, thus
exposing them to A.I.D.S, and many more sexual and life threatening diseases. A rag
picker is not a beggar. He works hard and considers rag picking a profession
of choice. It enables him to earn money, daily, and offers him ample amounts
of free time. They are very loyal and protective of each other, sharing food
and money. The rag picker is proud and feels that he is master of his own
life. |