Prevalence,
Abuse & Exploitation of Street Children In the first decade of the 21st Century
gvnet.com/streetchildren/Argentina.htm
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CAUTION: The following links
and accompanying text have been culled from the web to illuminate the
situation in HOW TO USE THIS WEBPAGE Students If you are looking
for material to use in a term-paper, you are advised to scan the postings on this
page and others to see which aspect(s) of street life are of particular
interest to you. You might be
interested in exploring how children got there, how they survive, and how
some manage to leave the street.
Perhaps your paper could focus on how some street children abuse the
public and how they are abused by the public … and how they abuse each
other. Would you like to write about
market children? homeless children? Sexual and labor exploitation? begging? violence? addiction? hunger? neglect? etc. There is a lot to the subject of Street
Children. Scan other countries as well
as this one. Draw comparisons between
activity in adjacent countries and/or regions. Meanwhile, check out some of the Term-Paper resources
that are available on-line. Teachers Check out some of
the Resources
for Teachers attached to this website. ***
FEATURED ARTICLE *** Thousands of kids struggle
on the streets of Buenos Aires Alejandra Labanca, business.highbeam.com/6033/article-1G1-155361127/thousands-kids-struggle-streets-buenos-aires [partially accessed
29 March 2011] courses.wcupa.edu/rbove/eco343/060compecon/LatinAmerica/Argentina/061127kids.txt [partially accessed
21 November 2016] A slim, red burn crosses the left side of Víctor's face from cheekbone to forehead. His eyelid is burnt. His lower eyelashes are gone, charred to the rim of his eye. Only 3 ½ months old, Víctor faces a tough life. ''He got burnt with a pipe,'' says his 16-year-old mother, Marta, referring matter of factly to the pipe she uses to smoke paco, a cheap, highly toxic byproduct of cocaine refining. With her baby in
tow, Marta lives on the streets, begging and stealing, seeking shelter in
dark porches or under trees. They rarely spend two nights in the same place.
Many times they don't even spend them together. They eat what she can get,
when she can get it. Marta and Víctor
embody the plight of the most vulnerable of Argentines, the street children
of Buenos Aires, a city struggling to come to grips with in-your-face misery
since the 2001 economic meltdown led the country to the largest debt default
in history and plunged more than half of all Argentines into poverty ***
ARCHIVES *** The Department of Labor’s 2004 Findings on
the Worst Forms of Child Labor www.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/tda2004/argentina.htm [accessed 19 January
2011] CURRENT
GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND PROGRAMS TO ELIMINATE THE WORST FORMS OF CHILD LABOR - The National
Council for Childhood, Adolescence, and Family (CONNAF), a federal government
agency, works with local governments and NGOs to provide services for and
protect the rights of children who have been sexually exploited or are at
risk of exploitation. In Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61713.htm [accessed 4 February
2020] CHILDREN
-
Education is free and compulsory for 10 years, beginning at age 5. Although a
2001 government survey reported school attendance rates between 92 percent
(at age 5) to 97 percent (ages 13 to 14), an appraisal by the International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development stated that of 100 students entering
primary school, 84 would enter the seventh grade, and 40 would enter the last
year of secondary school. Attendance rates were lowest among children from
low-income households. Access to schooling was limited in some rural areas of
the country. SECTION
6 WORKER RIGHTS
– [d] In 2004 the National Commission for the Eradication of Child Labor
(CONAETI) estimated that up to 1.5 million children, or 22 percent of the
children under the age of 15, worked in some capacity. Most illegal child
labor took place in the informal sector, where inspectors had limited ability
to enforce the law. Child labor in urban zones included such work as
small-scale garment production, trash recycling, street sales, domestic
service, and food preparation. Children also were involved in prostitution,
sex tourism, and drug trafficking. Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child, April 10, 2002 sim.law.uu.nl/SIM/CaseLaw/uncom.nsf/0/3567bf5c062c819e41256c5d0043aa0b?OpenDocument [accessed 19 January
2011] [29] The Committee
is concerned that the principle of non-discrimination is not fully
implemented for children living in poverty, indigenous children, children of
migrant workers, primarily those from neighboring countries, street children,
children with disabilities and marginalized adolescents who are neither
studying nor working, especially with regard to their access to adequate
health care and educational facilities. In B. Olidort, Lubavitch News Service
LNS, [accessed 29 March
2011] When Eduardo was
six years old, he couldn’t tell you that. He didn’t know what you to do with
a fork or spoon. He’d never eaten at a table. He’d never eaten a cooked meal.
Eduardo had a swollen, infected sore on his foot, but refused to remove his
shoe. When anyone approached him, he threw his hands up over his head as if
he was expecting a beating. Locked up at home
by a violent father and non-responsive mother, Eduardo’s life was on a
downward spiral from the moment of his birth. Sooner or later, social
services would find him, and place him in one of the city’s reform
institutions. Then, if things took their predictable course, Eduardo would
break out of there and join the other ragamuffins on the streets of Buenos
Aires. If he could learn the art of petty theft without getting caught,
Eduardo might even count himself lucky.
Eduardo was on his way to becoming another one among the thousands in
Argentina’s tragic statistics. The street children
of Buenos Aires Peter Andrew Bosch, streetchildrennews.wordpress.com/2006/11/27/the-street-children-of-buenos-aires/ [accessed 16 January
2017] • More than
3,000 children — twice as many as in 2001 — wander the streets begging,
scrounging through trash or opening cab doors for some change. Most have
somewhere to go at day’s end, but 700 sleep on the streets every night. • 75 percent
are boys, 25 percent are girls. • 30 percent
of their fathers and 70 percent of their mothers are out of work. • About 30 percent
to 40 percent say they left home to escape poverty or domestic abuse and
violence. Games
Roberto Belo, BBC in
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3731908.stm [accessed 29 March
2011] Street children in Felices Los Ninos Foundation www.obrapadregrassi.org/fundacion/en/nosotros/situacion.html [accessed 10 October
2012] STREET CHILDREN IN
THE CITY OF CHILD LABOR - Seventy-five
percent are children aged 6 – 12 and 70% collect garbage; others clean cars
or sell whatever they can. Forty percent drop out of school because they have
to work. Thousands of
Children Need Our Help Father Julio Cesar Grassi, Founder, Felices Los Ninos Foundation www.obrapadregrassi.org/fundacion/en/nosotros/bienvenida.html [accessed 10 October
2012] Cold official data
on the Argentine reality show a two-fold increase during the past two years
in the number of kids and teenagers who spend the day begging, working or
wasting their golden years of childhood in the street instead of studying,
playing with friends at home or practicing sports. One half of the Argentine
population is poor... and there they are, "the poorest among the
poor": the children. The problem of
these kids is manifold: they grow up too soon towards a kind of maturity they
are not yet ready to live, they compromise their future because they are
potentially illiterate, they will not study or will drop out of school, they
will be undernourished and have their physical and emotional development
reduced or impaired, they will starve and beg in the streets under the
indifference of others and they will be chronically unemployed. These
children are not aware of the fact that they have less possibilities and no
opportunities, and that their rights are encroached. Fear
For Safety/ Death Threats: Marcelino Altamirano Amnesty
International, Index Number: AMR 13/015/2003, 8 September 2003 www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR13/015/2003/en [accessed 29 March
2011] Amnesty
International is seriously concerned for the safety of Marcelino Altamirano, coordinator of the street children’s home La
Casita del Puente Afectivo (The Little House of the
Complaints
of Abuse in Police Custody Lutheran World
Information LWI, www.lutheranworld.org/News/LWI/EN/821.EN.html [accessed 29 March
2011] An order on police
to routinely round up street children and beggars in Training
in the Exercise and Recognition
of the Rights of Children [access information
unavailable] ACC provides
training to minors and young people about their rights, helping to protect
them particularly from abuse of authority and police violence within the
framework of articles 2, 4, and 6 of the International Convention on the
Rights of the Child (ICRC) and recognized by Argentine Legislation, Law
23.592. TOOLS OF HOPE:
Adding Leaven to Young Lives Church World
Service, Stories of Hope, February 26, 2007 At one time this article
had been archived and may possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 21
September 2011] At "La
Casita," abandoned or marginalized young people in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, are gaining not only self-acceptance, but are also learning bread
making, meal preparation, and catering -- skills that offer future employment
possibilities. Graduations
at Bruce Argentina Children's Centres, August 2004 Bruce Peru, August
2004 bruceperu.org/bpograduationsframe.html [accessed 29 March
2011] We graduated many
of our children already in school, to make way for the children we are beating
the back streets and hedgerows to find. The reasons the children we are
looking for are not in school are three: extreme poverty, abusive parents or
abandonment. All
material used herein reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107
for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use. PLEASE RESPECT COPYRIGHTS OF COMPONENT
ARTICLES. Cite this webpage as: Patt,
Prof. Martin, "Street Children - |
