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.