Street children in Vietnam

According to data by the Street Educators’ Club, the number of street children in Vietnam has shrunk from 21,000 in 2003 to 8,000 in 2007. The number dropped from 1,507 to 113 in Hanoi and from 8,507 to 794 in Ho Chi Minh City. In the meantime the number of migrant children is increasing. This number is, however, unconfirmed owing to varying definitions of street children. Some experts mention several different categories of street children in Vietnam: "children who have run away from home or who have no home, and who sleep on the street; children who sleep on the street with their family or guardian; children who have a family or guardian and who usually sleep at home, but work on the streets; economic migrants who rent rooms with other working children; and bonded laborers".

There are almost 400 humanitarian organisations and international non-governmental organizations providing help for about 15,000 children, who live in especially difficult conditions.

Street children in Bucharest, Romania

A report of the Council of Europe of year 2000 estimated that there were approximately 1,000 street children in Bucharest, Romania. These children were homeless as a result of the policies of former Communist ruler Nicolae Ceauşescu, who forbade contraception in the hopes of increasing Romania's population. Many of these children are abandoned or run away from home because their parents are too poor to feed them.

Some Romanian street children are preyed on by sex tourists, mainly from Western Europe, and many can be seen inhaling aurolac (an aluminium-based paint traditionally used for painting a type of wood-burning stove) from plastic bags, the substance of choice for those of limited means.

Romania has made much progress, allowing the number of street children drop to low levels, which is lying at or below the European average. Given that socio-economic conditions continue to improve in Romania, the number of street children is expected to diminish.

Underlying causes

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world with a population of approximately 190 million people. The disparity between the rich and the poor in Brazilian society is one of the largest. The richest 1% of Brazil's population control 50% of its income. The poorest 50% of society live on just 10% of the country's wealth.
Street children are an urban problem which has roots in rural poverty, neglect and the enforced, even violent displacement of large numbers of people from the land.
This problem is accentuated by the fact that the urban population is becoming younger. In Latin America alone, projections for the year 2020 point to 300 million urban minors, 30% of whom will be extremely poor [Ref: Independent Commission on International Issues]. 78% of the Brazilian population live in cities and towns.
The persistent poverty, rapid industrialization and the burgeoning of urban shanty towns (favelas) generate massive social and economic upheaval. Profound poverty means that family disintegration, violence and break-up become more prevalent.

Death squads

Most of Brazil's street children expect to be killed before they are 18. Between 4 and 5 adolescents are murdered daily and every 12 minutes a child is beaten. Conservative figures put the number at 2 killings every day.
There are reports that some children have been executed and/or mutilated. In July 1993, eight children and adolescents were killed in a shooting near the Candelária Church in Rio de Janeiro. This event was widely publicised around the world, and the routine killing of street children in Brazil was harshly criticised. As a result, the death squads moved underground. However, corrupt officials are still reputed to be involved - In São Paulo, 20% of homicides committed by the police in the first months of 1999 were against minors.

Street children in Russia

In Russia, street children usually find a home in underground pipe and cable collectors during the harsh winter. These underground homes offer space, shelter and most importantly of all, heat from hot water and central heating pipes.
Russia has 1 million street children, and one in four crimes involves underage youths. Officially, the number of children without supervision is more than 700,000. However, experts believe the real figure has long been between 2 and 4 million.

NGO responses

Non-government organizations employ a wide variety of strategies to address the needs and rights of street children. These may be categorized as follows:

• Advocacy - through media and government contacts agencies may press for the rights of street children to be respected.
• Preventive - programs that work to prevent children from taking to the streets, through family and community support and education.

• Institutional
  • residential rehabilitation programs - some agencies provide an environment isolated from the streets where activities are focussed on assisting children to recover from drug, physical or sexual abuse.
  • full-care residential homes - the final stage in many agencies' programs is when the child is no longer in the streets but lives completely in an environment provided by the agency. Some agencies promote fostering children to individual families. Others set up group homes where a small number of children live together with houseparents employed by the agency. Others set up institutional care centers catering to large numbers of children. Some agencies include a follow-up program that monitors and counsels children and families after the child has left the residential program.

• Street-based programs - these work to alleviate the worst aspects of street life for children by providing services to them in the streets. These programs tend to be less expensive and serve a larger number of street children than institutional programs since the children still must provide for themselves in the streets.
  • feeding program
  • medical services
  • legal assistance
  • street education
  • financial services (banking and entrepreneur programs)
  • family reunification
  • drop-in centers/night shelters
  • outreach programs designed to bring the children into closer contact with the agency
• Conscientization - change street children's attitudes to their circumstances - view themselves as an oppressed minority and become protagonists rather than passive recipients of aid.

Many agencies employ several of these strategies and a child will pass through a number of stages before he or she "graduates". First he/she will be contacted by an outreach program, then may become involved in drop-in center programs, though still living in the streets. Later the child may be accepted into a halfway house and finally into residential care where he or she becomes fully divorced from street life.

Responses by governments

Because they have not reached the age of majority, street children have no representation in the governing process. They have no vote themselves nor by proxy through their parents, from whom they likely are alienated. Nor do street children have any economic leverage. Governments, consequently, may pay little attention to them.

The rights of street children are often ignored by governments even though nearly all of the world's governments have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Governments are often embarrassed by street children and may blame parents or neighboring countries. Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) may also be blamed for encouraging children to live in the streets by making street life more bearable or attractive through the services they provide.

When governments implement programs to deal with street children these generally involve placing the children in orphanages, juvenile homes or correctional institutes. However, some children are in the streets because they have fled from such institutions and some governments prefer to support or work in partnership with NGO programs. Governments sometimes institute roundups when they remove all the children from city streets and deposit them elsewhere or incarcerate them.

In the most extreme cases, governments may tacitly accept or participate in social cleansing operations that murder street children.In Brazil, for example, "Police say the death squads earn $40 to $50 for killing a street kid and as much as $500 for an adult. In January, Health Minister Alceni Guerra said the government had evidence that 'businessmen are financing and even directing the killing of street children.'"

History of street children

Children making their home/livelihoods on the street is not a new or modern phenomenon. In the introduction to his history of abandoned children in Soviet Russia 1918 -1930, Alan Ball states:

Orphaned and abandoned children have been a source of misery from earliest times. They apparently accounted for most of the boy prostitutes in Augustan Rome and, a few centuries later, moved a church council of 442 in southern Gaul to declare: “Concerning abandoned children: there is general complaint that they are nowadays exposed more to dogs than to kindness.” In tsarist Russia, seventeenth-century sources described destitute youths roaming the streets, and the phenomenon survived every attempt at eradication thereafter. Long before the Russian Revolution, the term besprizornye had gained wide currency.

In 1848 Lord Ashley referred to more than 30,000 'naked, filthy, roaming lawless and deserted children', in and around London.

By 1922 there were at least 7 million homeless children in Russia as a result of nearly a decade of devastation from World War I and the Russian Civil War. Abandoned children formed gangs, created their own argot, and engaged in petty theft and prostitution.

Examples from popular fiction include Kipling's “Kim” as a street child in colonial India, and Gavroche in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Fagin's crew of child pickpockets in "Oliver Twist" as well as Sherlock Holman's "Baker Street Irregulars" attest to the presence of street children in 19th-century London.

Street children

Street children is a term used to refer to children who live on the streets as a city. They are deprived of family care and protection. Most children on the streets are between the ages of about 5 and 17 years old, and their population between different cities is varied.

Street children live in abandoned buildings, cardboard boxes, parks or on the street itself. A great deal has been written defining street children, but the primary difficulty is that there are no precise categories, but rather a continuum, ranging from children who spend some time in the streets and sleep in a house with ill-prepared adults, to those who live entirely in the streets and have no adult supervision or care.

A widely accepted set of definitions, commonly attributed to UNICEF, divides street children into two main categories:

1. Children on the street are those engaged in some kind of economic activity ranging from begging to vending. Most go home at the end of the day and contribute their earnings to their family. They may be attending school and retain a sense of belonging to a family. Because of the economic fragility of the family, these children may eventually opt for a permanent life on the streets.
2. Children of the street actually live on the street (or outside of a normal family environment). Family ties may exist but are tenuous and are maintained only casually or occasionally.

Street children exist in many major cities, especially in developing countries, and may be subject to abuse, neglect, exploitation, or even in extreme cases murder by "cleanup squads" hired by local businesses or police.

In Latin America, a common cause is abandonment by poor families unable to feed all their children. In Africa, an increasingly common cause is AIDS.

Street children and my responsbility

Street children means those people who make themselves stay on road,footpath and street.Their life runs very hardly and miserably.Street children have no house to live in ,no proper food to eat ,and no good clothes to wear .Even they don't have clean drinking water .they walk road to road,lane to lane,path to path and street to street collecting old pieces of plastic and other materials thrown by others.

There are many reason for increasing street children in our country.some of them have come with the reason of poverty.some of them are treated very badly by step- mother and other idlers of their family and relatives,and when they have no where to go,so they come to street. some children lose their parents in their early childhood.

Most of the street children fell in bad company and learn to smoke and start using drugs and alcohol.so far as if the matter of my responsibility to them.I will try my best for the solution. I will inform the organization working for these children.I will make them contact with the organization and individuals working for them.I will raise the public awareness,why they do for them. This way I will devote myself to help the street children.

There are many government and non-government organization in Nepal. They have been doing work for street children for example Bal Bikash Samaj, CIWIN,CUBIC etc.However the problem of street children have not solved yet.In conclusion, I can say that “street children “problem is a major problem of our country.If we don’t think seriously about this problem in time it may stand against the development,prosperity and reputation of our country.