What is Human Trafficking and what is modern day slavery? HT and contemporary slavery include debt
bondage, serfdom, forced labor, forced marriage, transferring of wives,
inheritance of wives, and transfer of a child for purposes of
exploitation. Also forced prostitution,
child prostitution, sale of children, and trafficking in children.
Street
Children
The Prevalence, Abuse
& Exploitation of Street Children
[ Country-by-Country Reports | Additional Teacher Resources ]
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The UN has been attributed as estimating the population
of street children worldwide at 150 million, with the number rising
daily. Ranging in age from three to
eighteen, about 40% are homeless. As
a percentage of world population, this is unprecedented in the history of
civilization. The other 60% work on
the streets to support their families.
Some are sent out by their impoverished parents to work or to
beg. They are unable to attend school
and are considered to live in "especially difficult circumstances”. Increasingly, these children are the
defenseless victims of brutal violence, sexual exploitation, abject neglect,
chemical addiction, and human rights violations1. In a report from Afghanistan2,
we learn of Samir, an 8-year-old boy who lost his father in the war and now
lives with his mother and three siblings.
As women are forbidden to work in Afghanistan, he, the oldest boy, is
now responsible for feeding the family.
Through begging and polishing shoes, he tries to earn enough money to
keep his family from starving. We
also meet Safi, 11-years-old, the only child left of eight in his family, and
Absal, 9- years-old, whose father has been a political prisoner for years and
whose mother is struggling to keep her family alive. And then there is Aruso, 4-years-old and
an orphan. Every day she is taken
into the streets by the older girls to beg with them. UNICEF has defined three types of street children: Street-Living,
Street-Working, and Street-Family. Children from street families are children who live on
the streets with their families, while street working children are
children who spend most of their time working in the streets and markets of
cities, selling or begging, fending for themselves but
returning home on a regular basis.
They are sometimes referred to as market children3. Street
living children are children who may have lost their families
through war or illness, or have been abandoned because they had become too
much of a burden, or else ran away from their abusive, dysfunctional,
poverty-stricken families and now live alone on the streets. There they are further traumatized by the
abuse, rejection and indifference of the societies in which they live. They work, living and sleeping in the
streets, often lacking any contact with their families. It is not unusual to see children as young
as four or five years old working in the street, selling chewing gum, matches
or trinkets. These children are at
highest risk of murder, constant abuse and inhumane treatment. They often resort to petty theft and
prostitution for survival. They are
extremely vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS. Most of them are addicted to inhalants
such as shoe glue and paint thinner, which cause kidney failure, irreversible
brain damage and, in some cases, death3. Without
education they have little hope of getting a decent job or building a better
life in the future. Children may be
lured by the prospect of a more exciting life in the city or a chance to earn
money. The reality is that they usually live in terrible conditions with no
one to protect them and often no record that they even exist. They can easily end up working for little
pay in dangerous conditions. They are at risk of sexual abuse and exposure to
sexually transmitted infections. Some
turn to drugs as a way of coping, or crime as a means to survive, which
involves them with the police. While many police are just doing their jobs,
others harass or take advantage of vulnerable street children. There are cases in Latin America where
street children have been murdered by police who are ‘cleansing’ what they
see as a social nuisance4. In a
poor developing country, a child with learning disabilities is often
abandoned and ends up living on the streets and likely to be targeted for abuse and
exploitation. In one
report, a teenager with Down's Syndrome was observed living alone on a
building site, in a half-built house, with four stray dogs for company. He
slept on a filthy mattress and used an empty tin can as a cup. He was surviving completely on his own,
without the help of the local authorities.
He survived by begging for food in a nearby bus station. Other scenarios leading to abandonment are
domestic violence, family breakup, and economic migration of the parents5. Most of
the children come from difficult situations, and the majority of the kids are
not the cute, innocent children used on the covers of sponsorship brochures. A few kids are cute, but most street kids are
thankless, rude, dirty, diseased, scar-faced, shifty-eyed, lice infested,
suspicious, smelly, and have rotten teeth8. They
live on the street and they absorb the filth of the gutter. Within days they are on drugs - glue as a
minimum. They put the glue into
bottles, and hide it under their tee shirts, guarding it with their
lives. They sniff it constantly
because it gets them high and masks their loneliness and gives them
security. Soon they are on to harder
drugs. City officials initiate
campaigns to get rid of them. They
are the victims of violence. They disappear. Hooligans shoot them.
Their bodies are found on dumps and in the gutter9 In the
central area of Mexico City there are 11,172 street children. 1,020 live in
the street and 10,152 work there7. In Nepal, it is estimated there are over 900 street children in
Katmandu alone, and over 5,000 in Nepal as a whole. While on the street, the children suffer hunger, disease and
emotional scars, and are at risk of falling victim to sexual exploitation8. They beg, steal, and sell themselves for a
hot meal, a hot shower, a clean bed.
Living on the edge of survival, they are often swept up in an undertow
of beatings, illegal detentions, torture, sexual abuse, rape, and murder10. ===================================================== 1. P A N G A E A - Street Children
- Community Children Worldwide Resource Library 2. Street
Children’s Project
3. http://www.mexico-child-link.org/street-children-definition-statistics.htm 4. http://www.worldvision.com.au/onebigvillage/print.asp?topicID=73 5. http://www.mexico-child-link.org/street-children.htm 6. Countering a
Culture of Death, by Michael Johnstone 7. City
of Mexico/Fideicomiso, Report, 1991 9. Spotlight
On Saathi - Helping Street Children In Nepal 10. Casa
Alianza |