What are your reaction about street children

shoot on sight

Street children are those children who, when they experience family problems, hunger, neglect and domestic violence, escape from their homes and live part–time on the streets. When they are settled and know street survival techniques, they return at times to their hovels and shacks to visit their families and bring food for their younger brothers and sisters. When they see that the food they bring is not enough, they return to the street and their brothers and sisters sometimes follow them, looking for the source of the food.

Parents at times send them out to beg and scavenge and even prostitute them or sell them in to bonded labor. We cannot forget the children born of teenage street children and aborted in backstreet clinics.

Other street children are child workers, permanently on the streets and engaged in scavenging, child labor, begging, peddling drugs and petty theft. Many end up in jail. Their rights are frequently abused by the police while on the streets. The girls are sometimes raped in custody and forced to hand over their daily earnings.

Others are accused falsely for crimes committed by street children who have been recruited into gangs controlled and protected by the police. The gangs of street children prey on the younger and weaker children and sometimes make them sex slaves, using drugs, food and fear to control and dominate them. The street children are trained to be drug couriers. Although innocent, the younger and unprotected can suffer untold abuse by the other street youth. When in the jails, they can be mixed with criminals, rapists and pedophiles.

They are runaways from dysfunctional, broken homes with an abusive parent. In the home, usually a hovel and poor environment beside a polluted canal or malarial swamp, they suffer sexual abuse, rape, physical abuse, verbal battering, rejection, malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and dengue.

Most street children are illiterate. Having no incentive, money or support and encouragement to study, they have dropped out of elementary school. They join street gangs for their own protection and use industrial glue as a mind– and mood–altering tranquilizer. They work selling plastic bags, newspapers and flowers or begging for a syndicate. Many are controlled by pimps and sold to sex tourists on street corners or brought to the casa, a house of prostitu tion. Street children are the poorest of the poor; they are the most vulnerable and weakest and unless they are helped they will be the HIV/AIDS victims of the future. They are forced to be child prostitutes that attract foreign sex tourists. They are susceptible to becoming criminals or even terrorists angry at the adult world that gave them life in the worst misery imaginable. The adult world has done this to the children.