Street Children
SSSK seeks to make people aware of both the reasons why children may be found ‘on the streets’ and of the interventions that can help these children achieve their potential. This generally involves
- gaining their trust
- finding them a safe place to live (possibly back with their family if there can be adequate monitoring and support), and,
- ensuring that they have access to both education and healthcare. This may involve ensuring that they have a recognised identity (equivalent to a birth certificate) to enable them to take advantage of state education and healthcare.
Many will need help and advice from trained social workers to deal with the traumas they have experienced. Street children need to have more of a childhood, without the pressures, abuse and violence which they encounter on the street. They can also use and develop some of the survival and community building skills that they have developed when on the street.
The discussion on these pages is based on background information from the Consortium for Street Children (CSC) and from EarthAction. In addition, we would draw attention to the parallel accounts on other websites which reflect the differing situations in different places.
See: http://letthechildrenlive.org/street-children/ and
http://www.cenitecuador.org/en/about/working-children about children working on the streets.
There’s a website http://www.gvnet.com/streetchildren/ which has been set up by Professor Martin Patt from the University of Massachusetts in the US. It is intended as an educational tool, and includes articles about the prevalence, abuse and exploitation of street children in more than 150 countries. It provides a huge resource, including some specifically for teachers and some for parents. It consists mainly of press reports and articles, but there is other material as well.
Two of the videos we found on the site are a good introduction to some of the problems faced by street children, together with the description of one very positive intervention (of the kind that SSSK would encourage and want to help with):