BACK to Pakistan Street Children LinksAlmost twice as many children will die on the streets this year than died on 9/11..... The terror is very real, writes Mohammad Anwar.
Thirteen year-old Zahid spends his nights at Cantt railway station in Karachi. He makes his living selling whatever waste paper and bottles he can collect and is desperate to find shelter, not to mention someone who would care for him. "I only hada fewbiscuits for dinner as I could not earn much," said Zahid, settling down on a concrete chair for another night at Cantt station. He added shyly: "I make good money if I am hired by guys for a 'massage'." Massage is a euphemism for sex and Zahid's revelation merely confirms that street children, both boys and girls, are commonly abused by pedophiles.
Zahid has been on the streets for three years. "I have nobody. I came to Karachi with an uncle who promised me a job, but I was left here to fend for myself." This is just one of the many stories common amongst street children.
Ten-year-old Ziad, a professional scavenger, has never been to school but he is well versed in the economics of survival. If he sells 40 to 60 rupees worth of waste paper and plastic bags, he eats lunch; if he earns less, he goes without food and waits outside the restaurants for leftovers. Such is the cruel calculus of work and life on the streets.
It is frustrating to see the human face of so much suffering that could be alleviated with low cost interventions. Many children cannot afford the cost of going to school and, if they can, they have to take their own chair or sit on the floor. Many young people in Pakistan have no hope for the future. They have no faith either in their governments or in their families, which are failing them. The children head to the streets or join the ubiquitous gangs that have permeated society and provide the role of a surrogate family.
The problem of street children is universal. There are over 100 million street children in the world. The problem is comparatively high in those countries where there is rapid growth of urbanization. Cities like Mumbai, Calcutta, Manila, Zenario, Mexico City, Bangkok, Johannesburg and Nairobi are some of the examples where street children are found in large numbers. Those number havegrown in recent decades because of widespread recessions, political turmoil, civil unrest, increasing family disintegration, urban and rural poverty, natural disasters, growing urbanization and rapid industrialization.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that of the 100 million children who call the street their home, "only" 20 million children live on the streets without their family. In South America there are at least 40 million street children; in Asia 25 million; in Africa 10 million; and in Europe approximately 25 million children living on the streets.
For the most part, street children beg or subsist on the little money they earn picking up garbage, hawking small goods, shining shoes, parking cars, and washing windshields. Some indulge in petty crime while othersmay seek escape by sniffing glue and using alcohol and other drugs. The World Bank reports local sources' estimates that 90 percent of street children in Central America sniff glue.
In Pakistan, in a population of 135.6 million, more than 22.5 million are adolescents, which is a major proportion of the population. According to a survey conducted by Centre for Research and Social Development (CRSD), about 1.2 million children are on the streets in Pakistan's large cities working as beggars, vendors or shoeshine boys. Children become homeless because of abuse and poverty and once on the streets, they are exposed to countless hazards, including child labour and sexual exploitation.
The study, conducted by various organizations, revealed that most of the children come from urban slums and townships, and often from broken homes or households headed by a woman. Some of them may have been abandoned by their families but most of them run away from home because of abusive and exploitative family relations. Bus stops, railway stations and marketplaces become their homes and workplaces.
In order to survive, these children end up doing odd jobs, drifting from one to another. They can be found washing cars,selling newspapers, street vending, scavenging, shining shoes, running errands, carrying bags, and often resorting to begging in between. Some drift into prostitution to make extra money. There are some who only steal and prostitute themselves.
These children barely manage to get three meals a day. Many rely on leftover meals from restaurants and eating-places in the areas that they hang around. Many are also found in the vicinity of religious shrines where people donate food for the poor. Some live in the places of their work, on payment, in the bus stations or near the railway stations - constantly exposed to various risks.
About 10,000 children are living on the streets of the biggest metropolis and the commercial centre of the country. The report prepared by the Azad Foundation in 2001 says whilethese children are living on the streets, an overwhelming majority of them had families and had run away from their homes for a variety of reasons. However, they visit their families once in a few months for a few days.
The study revealed that nearly 56 per cent of the children had run away due to domestic violence, 20 per cent due to hostile behaviour of parents and 12 per cent due to their parents' drug addictions. Some 64 per cent of the children belonged to Karachi and the rest were from the other parts of the country. The family size of a majority of the runaway children was between six and eight members, while family size of 38 per cent was between nine and 14, while the family of the rest of them comprised between two and five people.
Attaullah, 15, came to Karachi alone from Rahim Yar Khan after his father remarried following his mother's death. "I ran away from home because my father was a drunkard and I didn't have my mother. He wouldn't let me go to school and would beat me. When I left home I came onto the streets and started looking for work. I was hungry for three days, but Istill didn't beg. I will never go home but I do want to go to school." Atta is among a few lucky children who has found a place (known as a Drop-In-Point) where he can get a wash, clothes and medical service. While living with a group of children on Burns road, he started glue sniffing with the other children.
Nabeel Zubari, lecturer of sociology at Karachi University, says that "the plight of street children in Pakistan came to the forefront with the Javed Iqbal incident, involving the killing of more than 100 street children in Lahore. This one incident exposed a number of unpleasant truths about the frailty of the family and its crumbling support system in the face of extreme poverty. All these children came from poor families and had left home either to look for work or to escape the harshness of their existence at home."
Zubari also states that there are no statistics available on street children in Pakistan. With the increase in the rest of the population and poverty, the magnitude of the problem can only get more serious. "There are clearly growing numbers of children in the street with no apparent family links," he says.
A recently concluded research study by CRSD indicated that there are more than 40,000 street children in Pakistan. The study indicates that the problem is more widespread and severe but that there is more hope than one would think. Street children can be seen as the tip of an iceberg. They are not qualitatively different from other children in socially vulnerable situations. Their situation is often worse, but most of them have a family and links to society.
Shabbir Ahmed, Media Coordinator at CRSD, says that in Karachi, "a study has identified as much as 20 different types of jobs street children have taken in different stages of their lives, but at the end they have taken up more street-based jobs such asbegging, selling flowers or newspapers, shining shoes etc. They earn between 50 to 100 rupees a day.They can be found working in areas like junk yards, temples, market centres, cinema halls, bus terminals, hardware shops etc. in all the busy areas of the city."
Most of the street children come from poor agricultural backgrounds. Others' parents are involved in several low-income jobs such as construction labour, driving, small business, carpets and tailoring. Only a very few street children belong to the middle class families.
According to Faisal Edhi of Edhi Foundation, "as many as 1,231 children, between the ages of six to 14,were missing in Karachi, since January. These children's parents reported their disappearance to the foundation. During this period out of the 621 children who turned up at the Edhi Children's Home, 82 children rejoined their families." He further says that "police stations make entries in their roznamchas (daily journals) about a missing child and pass the information to all police stations. According to the police sources, during the last 10 months, they registered 39 FIRs of missing children in Karachi.
The Edhi Foundation runs a centre called Apna Ghar (Our Home) for street children and the mentally ill, orphans and runaways. There are 10 such homes in the country out of which seven are located in Karachi. About 6000 people live in Edhi Homes. "A destitute or homeless person becomes a member of Edhi's family once he/she enters its premises," says Faisal.
He further adds that street children are the most deprived, marginalized and unprotected group. "They live in a world of their own, alienated from mainstream society. While they do develop survival skills and some degree of resourcefulness and self-reliance, their environment hardly holds out opportunities for access to social services, education and vocational skill's training," he says.
The CRSD study states that an alarming majority of runaway children are either resorting to, or are forced into, prostitution. Some boys "drifted"into prostitution or were preyed on by street gangs and marketplace mafia; some were picked off and sold into bonded labour. They all made pathetically small amounts of money, sums of anywhere between 60 to 90 rupees a day.
Pimps and pedophiles prowl around bus stations and are quick to identify runaway children. They offer the unsuspecting child promises of a job, money, board and lodge and eventually coerce the child into prostitution. Upon resistance, these sexual predators resort to threats and blackmail.
It is not uncommon for street children to be subjected to physical abuse by the police. They are frequently detained arbitrarily, 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.
Street children also make up a large proportion of the children who enter criminal justice systems and are committed finally to correctional institutions. The detention of more than 4,400 juveniles in 82 jails of the country for the past many years is a dismal commentary on the plight of young offenders. Up to 3,750 of them are under trial, languishing in prisons because of delays in court proceedings. When TR contacted police officials for comments on police brutality towards children, they declined to comment, saying "it's not an issue".
Street children are exposed to unsanitary and unhygienic surroundings and various health hazards. Theirhealthis poor. "The lack of access to bathing and toilet facilities and medical care further exacerbates their poor health conditions," says Syed Qadir Bux Shah, administrator Auqaf and incharge Abdullah Shah Ghazi Mazar.
He says that many children can be found around the Mazaar. "We have interaction with the children; when asked for the reasons behind their living on the street, the most common answer was problems within the family. Many of the children speak of their parents' substance abuse problems as something that affected their daily lives, with catastrophic consequences."
To escape from their misery and past, street children often resort to glue sniffing. They either pour the glue onto a piece of cloth which they roll up and sniff, or pour the sticky substance into a shopping bag and hold it near their face. Some choose to enhance the pleasure by putting it in their mouths. It is easy and cheap to buy glue.
According to doctors, children sniffing glue start feeling dizzy, light-headed and drowsy, giving them a feeling of pleasure. Inhaling glue by covering the face causes the displacement of oxygen in the lungs and subsequently the central nervous system, causing breathing to cease. Ingredients in the glue are known to be addictive and cause side effects like loss of memory; effects on bones and joints.Their muscles stop working and there is a very real danger of going in to a coma. These chemicals also affect the central nervous system and respiratory system of the user.
Advocate Ilyas Khan, an expert on child rights and laws, says that as a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) the state has a fundamental duty to protect children from being on the street. It is recommended that the existing laws should be reviewed in the light of the CRC and other relevant international instruments, where necessary revisions should be undertaken and new laws should be introduced. The Sindh Children Act is officially in force throughout Sindh, but its implementation has until recently been limited to the city of Karachi. The Punjab Youthful Offenders Ordinance is nominally in force in just one district of Punjab.
On November 28, 2001 at a meeting in Islamabad, National Commission for Child Welfare and Development (NCCWD) formed a Working Group for the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Street Children, comprising members of NGOs and other civil society organizations working for the welfare of street children. But so far the group has done nothing except issue statements in the media about the pathetic conditions of the street children. Only a few NGOs have taken up the issue, and are working for rehabilitation services for these children in their limited capacity.
Marie Adelaide Rehabilitation Programme has a drop in centre which is among those actuvely pursuing the cause of street children. Based in Burns Road, Karachi, it is one of the few centres providing meaningful services to these children, where they can take baths, have access to medical check-ups and services, and consultations with a street counselor. They are also provided clothes.
Joe Augustine, a street counselor and himself a recovered addict, says that these children need love, trust and concern; they need someone who has sympathy for them. Most of these children have been sexually abused in their early childhood, mostly by their own relatives or family members.
They are around 60 kids from different parts of Karachi who regularly visit the center and avail the facilities. Though the children were initially reluctant to visit the centre, they were eventually convinced and started to bring their freinds as well. Out of these 60 children, most of them are addicts and involved in glue sniffing and are being rehabilitated as well.
Most of the centre's staff are rehabilitated addicts so they work with more enthusiasm and commitment. Augustine believes that we need to see the roots of the issue, which lie in poverty, family problems, and family abuse. They need love, sympathy and trust, they need the freedom that they enjoy on the street.
In Rawalpindi, Youth Empowerment Skills (YES), a project of AMAL, started a pilot youth oriented project in the area of Gawal Mandi. Target population for YES is out of school male youth aged between 10-17 years. 'The majority of street children are working in shops or workshops," says Pervaiz Tufail, the project manager."The majority of them are paid between five to 10 rupees a day and many are vulnerable to physical / sexual abuse."
Under the YES project, AMAL is providing a series of result oriented activities like HIV/AIDS awareness and sensitization programmes, rights based training, life skills training, non-formal education/ vocational training, assertiveness, self-protection, peer education, training of trainers, monthly social and cultural activities, and development of community organization.
When conducting interviews with street children, TR learnt that their main survival strategies consisted of telling lies, in order to keep people at a distance, and to preserve a sympathetic view of their condition. They wanted to love and be loved; to have a role and to contribute. Their sense of self, the world, and of how to negotiate their realties and supports in them. They were aware of the threats and dangers, but not driven by them.
Despite being exposed to harsh realities, their wishes are very innocent: "I wish to be a decent person," said one. Another said,"I wish to continue my education," while another added, 'I wish to be rescued from the streets."
Street children are vulnerable to various forms of exploitation and abuses. They are deprived children, denied not only their rights as children but also their childhood. Without guidance, love, concern, education and security, they are heading for an obscure future. Most importantly, they need to be steered back to the mainstream of social life through proper education opportunities, reformation, care and rehabilitation. As said by Faisal Edhi, "do not undermine them. They have enough potential and talent. If they are brought into a better environment, they are a real hope for future. Society should worry about what we're doing to these kids by letting them live on the street and should ask some hard questions about why we're not helping them as much as we should be."
