Street Children In Pakistan

DEFINITION OF STREET CHILDREN

WHO ARE STREET CHILDREN?

Children (under 18 years) who spend most of their time on the streets. There are between 10 to 100 million street children worldwide, depending on the exact definition used.

The target group is homeless and vulnerable street children including their families, who are at high risk of exploitation and physical and emotional abuse, especially through forced commercial sex and violence in the streets.

DEFINITION OF STREET CHILDREN:

"Street children" is a term often used to describe both market children (who work in the streets and markets of cities selling or begging, and live with their families) and homeless street children (who work, live and sleep in the streets, often lacking any contact with their families). At highest risk is the latter group. Murder, consistent abuse and inhumane treatment are the "norm" for these children, whose ages range from six to 18. They often resort to petty theft and prostitution for survival. They are extremely vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS. An estimated 90% of them are addicted to inhalants such as shoe glue and paint thinner, which cause kidney failure, brain damage and, in some cases, death.

Street Living Children: children who cut ties with their families and live alone on the streets

• 20% girls

• Mostly 12-18 years old

Street Working Children: children who spend all their time or most of their time working on the streets to provide income for their families or for themselves. These children have a home to return to and do not usually sleep on the streets.

• 50% girls

• Mostly 6 to 15 years old

Children of Street Living Families: children who live with their family on the streets.

• 50% girls

• All ages

THE CHILDREN, THE CHALLENGE:

Street children are those for whom the street (in the widest sense of the word, i.e. unoccupied dwellings, wasteland, etc.) more than their family has become their real home, a situation in which there is no protection, supervision, or direction from responsible adults.

Out-of-school children often live in dreadful conditions and are victims of abuse. Many of them suffer from various diseases due to these conditions. Many have hardly been to school or no longer go to school. If these children survive hunger, thirst, dangerous and badly paid jobs, prostitution, sexual abuse, diseases, exclusion, police harassment, problems with the law, imprisonment, drugs, and household "jobs" that are really little more than slavery, they will grow up illiterate adults, and alienated from a society that failed to protect them.

Children in these situations often have limited or no access to the formal education system due to poverty, discrimination, lack of identity papers, inflexible school timings, direct and indirect school fees.

REASONS FOR BEING ON THE STREETS

It is often assumed that the problem of street children originates through the totality of urban problems, and that the phenomenon is exclusively urban: there are no "rural street children." However, while it is true that Pakistan’s street children are usually found in its urban concentrations (e.g. Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore etc.), many of these children have rural origins. Some of the children have taken refuge in the city from natural or man-made disasters. A large proportion comes from urban slums and townships, and from broken homes or female-headed households. Some of them may have been abandoned by their families but many of them run away from home because of abusive and exploitative family relations. Others come to the cities by themselves, drawn by friends and/or the glamour and promise of city life.

The table below summarizes the reasons given by street children as to why they were on the streets.

ECONOMIC REASONS :

For decades, Pakistan has focused on urbanization- locating industries in major towns and cities, an unequal distribution of resources with a marked rural-urban disparity, policies that stress big dams and attitudes which encourage deforestation. All these combine systematically to displace people from towns to cities. Urbanization and displacement also leads to a breakdown of the family structure, social tensions and upheavals driving children to urban streets.

The street children interviewed related how, due to lack of stable or sufficient income, their parents had often sent them out to beg on the streets, often forcing them to drop out of school in the process. Many children also linked the poor living conditions of their home environment to an increase in various forms of violence within the family that ultimately contributed to them running away permanently.

The availability of work for children in Pakistan is considerable, with the legal minimum age for employment at 14 for shops and commerce, industry, and work at sea, and 15 for mines and on railways. Yet the massive informal sector and the general social acceptance of child workers has brought many rural children of a much younger age to the urban streets, with as many as 3.3 million children (73% boys) between the ages of 5 and 14 reported as �economically active’ in the country in 2000.

A significant proportion of these child workers are involved in bonded labor in brick kilns and carpet factories. When a child’s parents die or become too old to work it is usual for the obligation of repaying the debts to be passed on to their children. Sometimes, however, the children are forced to take on the full burden of the debt from a much earlier age and a child's labor is pledged directly in order to obtain an additional loan of money or goods. This is especially true among families from ethnic minorities, such as the formally Hindu tribes that have a very low social status and are subject to gross discrimination. Although most of the children under bonded labor sleep and eat within the compound of their factory, the work is seasonal and children often turn to the streets