Human Trafficking in [Egypt] [other countries]Street Children in [Egypt Child Prostitution in [Egypt] [other countries] |
Prevalence, Abuse & Exploitation of Street Children The Arab Republic of Egypt [map], located NE
Africa and SW Asia, is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea (N), |
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FEATURED ARTICLES *** A new approach to Egypt’s street children Among the swirling crowds of Cairo, one hardly notices the small figures of children who call the streets their home. Adel is one of them. He left home at nine to escape a life of misery and violence. But the life he found on the streets was no better, Adel admits. Now after four years of a rootless, vulnerable existence, he longs to return home. “When I see other children on their way to school, I wish I could be like them. Here on the streets, I have no future,” Adel adds with a helpless shrug. Mass Arrests of Street Children in Egypt with Beatings
& Sexual Abuse Common www.hrw.org/press/2003/02/egypt021903.htm The Egyptian government conducts
mass arrest campaigns of children whose "crime" is that they are in
need of protection, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.
Children in police custody face beatings, sexual
abuse and extortion by police and adult criminal suspects, and police
routinely deny them access to food, bedding and medical care. FEATURE-Young
girls learn ABC of Cairo street life Nora, a mother at just 14, jingled
keys above her infant daughter's head, drawing smiles from the baby she
conceived while living on the streets of Cairo. She was one of hundreds of thousands of
children who the United Nations says may be living on Egypt's streets,
including a growing number of girls arriving as young as four or five years
old fleeing poverty, abuse or broken homes.
While baby Shaimaa played with slippers at
Nora's feet, the young mother described how she traded beatings by her
brothers at the age of six or seven for a life of early forced sexuality on
streets where she became pregnant soon after puberty. ***
ARCHIVES *** UNICEF - The Big Picture U.S. Dept
of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs INCIDENCE
AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - Urban areas are also host to large numbers of street children who
have left their homes in the countryside to find work, and often to flee
hostile conditions at home. Street
children work shining shoes, collecting rubbish, begging, cleaning and
directing cars into parking spaces, and selling food and trinkets. Street children are particularly vulnerable
to becoming involved in illicit activities, including stealing, smuggling,
pornography, and prostitution. In
particular, the commercial sexual exploitation of children is greatly
under-acknowledged given that Egyptian cities ( Bur of Democracy,
Human Rights & Labor - Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005 CHILDREN - The government remained
committed to the protection of children's welfare; in practice, the
government made some progress in eliminating FGM and in affording rights to
children with foreign fathers. However, the government made little progress in
addressing the plight of street children, which remained a significant
problem. Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2001 [47] In light of its previous
concluding observations and taking note of significant efforts by the State
party to improve education coverage, enrolment and retention levels and the
inclusion of the Convention in the school curricula, the Committee remains
concerned at the poor quality of education in general. The Committee is
further concerned at the lack of success of literacy programs for school
dropouts. [49] In light of its previous
concluding observations, and taking note of efforts by the State party to
address child labor, the Committee remains concerned about this problem. Its
main concerns are: (a) There are insufficient comprehensive and accurate data
available on children working in Egypt
child labour a sombre
reality While the situation is difficult
for the children who work while living at home, it is dire for those living
on city streets who are vulnerable to protection
rackets, prostitution and AIDS.
"Their situation is worse. Reintegrating the children living at
home into school is relatively easy. Those on the street are so traumatised that psychological help is the
priority," says Nevine Osman,
coordinator of the state-run National Council for Motherhood and
Childhood. Authorities, protective of
the country's reputation for reform and modernity, are eager to keep the
problem of street children as quiet as possible, with few officials willing
to speak on the subject. According to
UNICEF, a few encouraging signs are emerging such as NGOs like the Hope
Village Society, which takes in street children and teaches them to mentor
others in tougher circumstances. In
Egypt, child workers a growing problem as food prices rise In large cities like Cairo, it is
common to see children as young as age 5 dodging cars to try sell gum,
flowers, tissue paper or trinkets to cars waiting at red lights. Many of
those working children, in contrast with the factory child workers, have no
families or have run away and live on the streets. An official at the National Center for
Criminal and Social Research said the country has fewer than 30 public
shelters for street children or other poor children and about 160 private
shelters. Police often arrest those trying to sell on the streets, if they
are considered vulnerable to delinquencym and put
them in shelters, where they often again run away The official spoke on
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. In Cairo, hordes
of street kids, but no longer ignored Kareem and Mustapha were little
more than toddlers when their parents sent them onto Cairo's streets to sell
mints and tissues. They had begun on
the path trod by Cairo's growing thousands of street kids – sleeping on
streets, joining gangs for protection, underfed and covered with the filth of
a city packed with 18 million people. FEATURE-Young
girls learn ABC of Cairo street life Nora, a mother at just 14, jingled
keys above her infant daughter's head, drawing smiles from the baby she
conceived while living on the streets of Cairo. She was one of hundreds of thousands of
children who the United Nations says may be living on Egypt's streets,
including a growing number of girls arriving as young as four or five years
old fleeing poverty, abuse or broken homes.
While baby Shaimaa played with slippers at
Nora's feet, the young mother described how she traded beatings by her
brothers at the age of six or seven for a life of early forced sexuality on
streets where she became pregnant soon after puberty. Egypt fights
ignorance on HIV/Aids TARGETING THE YOUNG - Meanwhile, HIV/Aids peer education programmes have
been introduced by a range of NGOs dealing with young people. Particular attention is given to those most
at risk, such as Egypt's estimated one million street children. At a reception centre run by the
Cairo-based Hope Village Society, HIV and the risks associated with the
disease are a regular topic of discussion with groups of street
children. "HIV is a very
dangerous disease, so because of the training, I'm more aware of risks, and
it's influenced my behaviour," says 15-year
old Emad. "I look after myself better now when
I'm on the streets than I ever did before." It is hard to tell how many
children are living on the streets of Egypt, but one thing is clear; the
numbers are huge and certainly growing. With the difficulty of quantifying
the phenomenon, studies estimate that there are anywhere between 200,000 and
two million homeless children in the country, most of them in Cairo and
Alexandria governorates. The children lead an unhealthy and often dangerous
life that leaves them deprived of their basic needs for protection, guidance,
and supervision and exposes them to various forms of exploitation and abuse. Zidane launches homeless children project in Cairo Besides setting up a home to take
in some of Cairo's thousands of streetchildren, the programme
will also look at the possibility of job-creating projects for their
families. Cairo has between 200,000 and one
million street children, according to the UN's children agency UNICEF. On this
trip to Egypt, the beggars were the ones who gave Being a veteran traveler as well
as having once lived in Egypt for a year, I was no stranger to children
begging or people asking me for help. But seldom had I been so moved by the
sincerity of the plea. In my broken
Arabic I asked when they had last eaten – about 16 hours ago, they said – and
then I turned to look through the window beside us. For the boys, to look
through this window was to gaze upon a world inaccessible to them; for me, it
was to see familiar ground. "I don't dream of anything in
particular. I just wish someone could take me off the street because I'm so
fed up with it." Thus Hoda, 20, a street
artist who paints whatever gives her "a feeling". She is one of
many contributors to On the Street, an art book composed entirely of the work
of street children. Nisrine, 13, speaks of the public garden
where she lived as her home -- a state of affairs constantly undermined by
undercover policemen who would take her in. "at night, when I am alone,
I sit and think what if I get sick? I do not know what I am doing on the
street, I don't know." According to a UNICEF study on
street children in Greater Cairo in 2007, out of 191 street boys and girls,
64 per cent of the boys and 39.3 per cent of the girls were abused at home by
their fathers; 78.9 per cent of the boys have sex with people of the same
sex; 61.7 per cent of boys and 58.6 per cent of girls sniff glue. Out of a
total of 167 children, 48.6 per cent of the girls work as prostitutes. Two
get death for killing street kids Two leaders of an Egyptian
children’s gang were sentenced to death yesterday for raping and killing at
least three, and possibly up to 26, street children in Cairo and northern
Egypt, a judicial source said. Five
other gang members were given prison terms. British
Airways staff visit street children centres in
Cairo Five British Airways Cabin Crew had the opportunity to visit centres that have been set up to help street children in
the city. The number of street children is a big issue in Egypt and is on the
rise. Estimates on the number of street children range from 200,000 to one
million, a quarter of the street child population is believed to be less than
12 years old. Accompanying "On the Street"
is a photographic exhibit by Hesham Labib. "Cut Short", a collection of portraits
of five street children, is inspired by Tahani Rached's 2006 documentary film El-Banat
Dol (Those Girls), which presented a harrowing
glimpse into the world of Cairo's street children. Despite their
vulnerability and the misery of their circumstances, Rached's
homeless girls demonstrate a resilience that defies pity; they are proud, and
it is a trait that defines Labib's photographs: the
cinematic quality of these images, their pared down simplicity and above all
their subjects combine to make something beautiful. Even the infuriating and
presumably deliberate absence of any kind of background information about the
photographs and their subjects only contributes to their enigma. Last month, al-Sadawi
published another article in Al Hayat, blaming male
society for the phenomenon of over two million street children in Egypt. She
relates that a poor woman whose husband abandoned
her and their two daughters, arrived at her Cairo clinic. Without any real
income, the woman had to leave her home in the middle class Al-Maadi neighborhood and move to the impoverished Shubra area. When she tried to transfer her
daughters to a school in the Shubra neighborhood,
she was told that she had to obtain her husband's approval to do so. She was
unable to locate the deadbeat husband and her connections to the education
minister were useless. In the end, she turned to her mother-in-law, who
managed to persuade her son to submit the paperwork and permits needed to
transfer the girls. However the husband set one condition: that his wife waive her monthly alimony payments in court. NGOs marked a national day for
street children, but, asks Amira El-Noshokaty, what about the rest of the year? UNICEF Executive Director commends Egypt’s progress towards Millennium Development Goals The need to provide protection to
more vulnerable children – including those living on the streets and girls
subjected to female genital cutting -- were high on the agenda of the UNICEF
Executive Director’s meetings with senior government officials. WHY, ASKS AMIRA EL-NOSHOKATY, ARE NUMEROUS EGYPTIAN CHILDREN
LIVING ON THE STREETS?
- According to Fadia Abu Shehba,
professor at the National Centre for Social and Criminal Research, "the
factors are numerous, including fragile families, broken homes and the
absence of one of the two pillars of the family. Lack of compatibility within
homes gives way to domestic violence, forcing children to run away. And this
is not to mention the complete lack of any form of parental guidance.
Besides, crammed into little apartments with as little as one room for 10
people, children often see their parents having sex and want to copy them,
initially with siblings, hence rape and harassment. Children choose the
street, where there is enough room, only to be exploited by street gangs,
whether sexually, in the drug trade or, more recently, trading
internationally in their body parts." They admitted that they had lured
street children onto the tops of trains en route from Cairo to Alexandria,
where they then raped them and tossed the naked bodies onto the opposite
tracks. Other victims were drowned in the Nile or dumped in sewers; others
still were buried alive. As the tragic circumstances of the
rape and killing of street children unfolded, one would have expected the
government to form a committee to look into the phenomenon and find
appropriate solutions. The recent atrocity, attributed to
a gang led by someone called El-Turbini, involved
up to 30 victims. This alone tells us that the phenomenon is as widespread as
it is alarming. We have a Ministry for Social Welfare that is supposedly in
charge of children's homes around the country. We have several NGOs that
receive no financial help from the ministry and rely on funding from private
citizens and foreign aid organisations. And yet the
government has been unable to find real solutions to the problem of homeless
children. The latter are falling prey to gangs of racketeers and drug dealers
who have no qualms or conscience. The phenomenon resonates with the history
of some Latin American countries where belts of poverty around major cities
produce child gangs as well as gangs that kill children. The two-week saga surrounding the
capture of an 11-member gang that is believed to have committed a series of
rapes and murders in a number of governorates, including Cairo, Alexandria,
Al-Beheira and Qalioubya,
has prompted concern about the perennial problem of street children.
According to interrogations, 26-year-old Ramadan Abdel-Rahman,
also known as El-Torbini (meaning express train),
is the gang leader who ordered the murders of numerous street children. Although Abdel-Rahman
and his accomplices allegedly led investigators to more than 10 bodies in
scattered parts of the country, they also took them to Marsa
Matruh where no bodies were found. But after being
remanded in custody for an additional 10 days, gang members are said to have
confessed to killing more than 30 street children. EGYPT:
Street children worst hit by violence, experts say "We get chased and hit all the
time by all kinds of people, from police to taxi drivers to passers-by,"
said 12-year-old Mohammed, who spends most of his time at the gates of Cairo
University but sleeps in a different area most nights. Abla El-Badri, who heads the
government-run National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM) committee for street children, said Egypt's half a
million street children were always vulnerable to physical attacks. "If boys find life on the
streets hard, then girls, who might face more frequent sexual attacks and
rape, live in near-constant fear," El-Badri
said. Iskandar put two and two together, and the
result is a program in which garbage collectors recycle the empty containers
instead of reselling them in return for educational funding from the
companies looking to protect their brands. Big business is happy, plastic
goes eco and the garbage collectors get a chance at educational mobility.
It’s a win-win situation. Egypt street
mothers find refuge Many Egyptians regard street
children as a nuisance, or at worst as petty criminals fully meriting the
harsh treatment to which they are often subjected. Their health problems are often
severe, ranging from cholera to tuberculosis and anaemia.
Studies show they are exposed to a
variety of toxic substances, both in their food and in the environment around
them. They are also at risk of various kinds
of abuse. In one survey, 86% of street
children questioned identified violence as a major problem in their life,
while 50% stated that they had been exposed to sexual molestation. A
new approach to Egypt’s street children Among the swirling crowds of
Cairo, one hardly notices the small figures of children who call the streets
their home. Adel is one of them. He left home at nine to escape a life of
misery and violence. But the life he found on the
streets was no better, Adel admits. Now after four years of a rootless,
vulnerable existence, he longs to return home. “When I see other children on
their way to school, I wish I could be like them. Here on the streets, I have
no future,” Adel adds with a helpless shrug. Mass Arrests of Street Children in Egypt with Beatings
& Sexual Abuse Common www.hrw.org/press/2003/02/egypt021903.htm The Egyptian government conducts
mass arrest campaigns of children whose "crime" is that they are in
need of protection, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.
Children in police custody face beatings, sexual
abuse and extortion by police and adult criminal suspects, and police
routinely deny them access to food, bedding and medical care. Police
Criticized On Child Arrests Street children and truants were
being arrested on the basis that they were ''vulnerable to delinquency,''
even if they had committed no crime. Violence
Against Girls in Conflict with the Law VIOLENCE
IN DETENTION FACILITIES - “He [the officer]
curses me and makes me stand while he hits me with a stick. When I fall to
the ground he makes me stand again. He hits me all over my body—from my head
to my feet.” — Amal A., sixteen, detained in
Cairo, Egypt Voices of Egypt's Street Children - Selected Children's Accounts www.hrea.org/lists/child-rights/markup/msg00170.html www.hrw.org/press/2003/02/egypt-test021903.htm [scroll down] The guard here says, 'You are a
woman [sexually].' He keeps saying that to me. I keep saying, 'No, I'm a girl
[i.e. a virgin].' Yesterday, he said, 'If you are really a girl, take your
clothes off so we can examine you. -Warda N., sixteen The guards at the [ Every little bit [the guards at al
Azbekiya] hit us. They hit us with belts. When they
come to wake us, they wake us up with belts. If someone says anything, they
hit all of us -Marwan ` They ask you where you are from.
Then the prosecutor says 'You stole something.' I say, 'I didn't steal
anything.' Then he says, 'O.K. Begging.' - Khaled
M., eleven Information
About Street Children - Egypt [DOC] A quarter of the street child
population is believed to be less than 12 years old, with two-thirds between
13 and 16 years old and only 10% over 17.
The key factors pushing children onto the streets in Child Protection -
Egypt's Street Children: Issues And Impact These children lead an unhealthy and
often dangerous life that leaves them deprived of their basic needs for
protection, guidance, and supervision and exposes them to different forms of
exploitation and abuse. For many, survival on the street means begging and
sexual exploitation by adults. Update December 2001 – United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention [PDF] [page 12] HOPE FOR STREET CHILDREN IN EGYPT - With some 16 million
inhabitants Cairo is the biggest city in Africa and the Middle East. It is
also home to a rapidly growing street children population of around 150,000.
Many of these unfortunate children have to deal with broken families,
poverty, abuse and violence. Sadly, drugs such as cannabis herb, tablets, and
solvents, are all too often used to cope with the pain, violence, and hunger
of the streets. Drug
Demand Reduction among Street Children in Egypt The project builds up
comprehensive drug abuse prevention and treatment services for street children
in All material used herein
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Human Trafficking in [Egypt] [other countries]Street Children in [Egypt Child Prostitution in [Egypt] [other countries]