The invisible people

(a girl from Ethiopia)

I can’t stop thinking about what I heard the other day on TV, where they were covering the life of the street children of Nepal, someone described them as: “The invisible people”.
Those worlds are still reverberating in my mind all along since then, as they do not sound right and are very disturbing.
Street children are the sons and daughters of poverty, development, materialism and the collapsing of moral and spiritual values. They are the victims of a failing system, the innocent sufferers of a collective selfishness.
They live on the streets for several different reasons; many are orphans who lost their parents from HIV, malaria, typhus, starvation, etc. Others are abused children coming from dysfunctional family environment, who ran away from their homes escaping from the daily physical and moral abuse they are subjected to. Some of them are even born on the streets.

Some facts about street children:

• Recent global estimates indicate there are 100 million street children. Other more localized studies point to 11 million in India, 1 million in U.S., 445,226 in Bangladesh, 250,000 street children in Kenya, 150,000 in Ethiopia, 30,000 in Nepal and 12,000 in Zimbabwe. Projections estimate an increasing number of street children, growing especially with the pace of urbanization.

• These street children include: children living on the street with no home at all, children spending most of their time on the streets, without opportunities for education and care; and child workers who spend most of their time working on the street.

• The United Nations estimates that between 133 million and 275 million children experience violence at home annually, with the largest proportion in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Boys and girls are often equally subjected to child abuse by family members and are equally victimized by child labour exploitation. However, globally, girls make up 98 per cent of children who are sexually exploited. Child abuse is a major risk factor linked to future criminal behaviour.

(a girl from Ethiopia)

• Helping street children is a though challenge, as these children usually need a long period of rehabilitation. It can take many months or years to firstly build up their trust, as they have normally endured only pain and abuse from adults. So it is a long-term work of commitment and rarely a quick fix that they need to help them release their potential.

• Observers say that street children have a life expectancy of around four years on the street.

• UNICEF estimates that over 2 million children, mainly girls, are exploited through prostitution and pornography. 1.2 million girls and boys are trafficked each year – many to join the sex trade.

• Law and order officials and self-styled vigilantes both attempt to ‘clean the street’ of these children in many parts of the world. In Latin America the problem is particularly acute with the worst offenders being Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras. An average of three street children are killed every day in the state of Rio de Janeiro. In Cairo, street children are routinely rounded up and beaten by the police, their heads are shaven and then they are transferred to crowded detention centres.

• Studies conducted in Nepal and Guatemala showed that urban street children were in better health than children in stable homes in farming villages: an indicator of the depths of rural poverty in these countries rather than a recommendation for life on the street.

(Village children - Zambia)

None of these children are invisible, we see them everywhere we go, in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. The number is increasing at an unbelievable rate, as governments are failing to implement proper corrective measures to solve the economic and social problems affecting the source of their miserable existence.

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures
is not to hate them, but to be indifferent
to them; that is the essence of inhumanity.”
-George Bernard Shaw

(Information for this post has been compiled from information sources of UNICEF, World Hope, Human Rights Watch, and others.)