One of the miseries brought by modem civilization is the
situation of street children.
In the old times, and still now in some areas, children worked
with parents and teamed a lot of things from them; later,
children looked after aged parents, and therefore much value was
put on children, and there was a strong bond of affection between
parent and child.
However, now it has changed. Parents go to work, and children
do not go to work with them. Children only cost much money for
food and education. Parents of a poor family are suffering from
much financial stress. As the stress becomes bigger, their love
for their children decreases. Then, a home, which should be a
place children receive affection, becomes a place where they
receive pain physically and mentally. Therefore, in some cases,
children choose not their house, but the street.
Street children may express satisfaction with the freedom from
abuse by parents or by siblings; nevertheless, their lives seem
not so easy.
They live from hand to mouth, working in some odd jobs; if
they have no job, the steal to eat, and if they have extra money,
they buy drugs.
In general, street children's lives are rather short. They are
in bad health, because of their abuse of drugs, venereal disease
and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Some are killed in
conflicts with rival gang groups. Sometimes children's corpses
are discovered in the condition in which their internal organs
are removed skillfully. They are used for organ transplants in
secret.
In Brazil, on an average, four a day are killed (Michaels).
They are killed mainly by death squads hired by terrorized shop
owners. More than twenty per cent of policemen surveyed in Rio de
Janeiro admitted they had been invited to join death squads,
which perform executions for pay (Rudolph). Most Brazilians show
no sympathy toward the massacre of street children. They do not
care about children's human rights. They only pay attention to
the high crime rate.
Furthermore, if they could grow up, the situation might be
worse because they would grow up with no special skills and the
few jobs they could do would all be taken by younger children.
Therefore, their future seems difficult.
Most people are not acting for street children; however, some
are tackling this problem earnestly. They proffer social programs
and shelters, where children can take a shower, sleep free from
care, and can obtain food, clothes and education.
For these people, the most difficult thing is to make
themselves relied on by children. Street children are apt to be
suspicious of others. The most important things are to give them
affection ungrudgingly and to make them learn how to communicate
with others. These are things that children could not learn from
their families.
However, the help is not sufficient for financial
difficulties, and there are few trained officers. More help from
the nations or from developed countries is necessary. The United
Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Right of
the Child by a unanimous vote in September 1989. At the present
time, it has been ratified by more than 130 countries
("Convention"). The convention changed the view on children
fundamentally, from a child as an object of protection to a child
as a subject with rights.
Now that women's liberation has been winning success in many
countries, now is the turn for children.
by Yuko Akiba
Works Cited
Aflssebrook, Annie and Anthony Swift. Broken Promises: The
World of Endangered Children. Trans. Machiko Khoda. Akashi
Shoten, 1990.
Michaels, Marguerite. "Rio's Dead End Kids." Time. 9
August 1993.
Rudolph, Barbara. "Cops Out of Control." Time. 13
September 1993.
United Nations. Convention on the Right of the Child.
1994.
