Children in street situations

Universal Children’s Day is observed every year on November 20. In Pakistan, the day is usually marked with a few functions at the federal and provincial capitals and messages from the Prime Minister or President of Pakistan with no serious follow up or impact on the state of child rights in the country. In today’s piece I’ll particularly focus on children at risk in Pakistan. There are many categories of children at risk but I will focus a particularly at risk and neglected group commonly known as ‘street children’ and in the international arena are called children in street situations or children living and or working on the streets.

According to a report of the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child, an estimated 1.2 million children are on the streets of Pakistan’s major cities and urban centres constituting the country’s largest and one of the most ostracised and vulnerable social groups. These include ‘runaway’ children who live or work on the streets as well as the minority that return to their families at the end of the day. According to a survey conducted by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 72 per cent of the working children do not have contact with their families and 10 per cent have no knowledge of their families. Although limited literature is available regarding the exact magnitude of the problem of children in street situations in Pakistan, an overview of the information available indicates that the problem is severe.

There is no commonly accepted and internationally agreed definition of children in street situations. Generally children in street situations are categorised in four categories; children on the streets, children of the streets, part of a street family and children in institutionalised care. Children on the street are children who live with their families. They come on the street for work in the morning and go back to their families in the evening. For a good time they are without appropriate care facing exploitative environment, including physical and humiliating punishment, sexual abuse, hazardous work conditions etc. In the context of Pakistan number of children on the street are very high.

Children of the streets are children who do not have a place to go in the evening. They work and live on the street. Research by many organisations indicate majority of these children are those who run away from their homes due to multiple factors including neglect and violence at home or the places they work. These children are most vulnerable in case of experiencing a higher degree of exploitation as compared to children working on the street. In many cases they are abused physically, emotionally and sexually in return for providing shelter. Often these children get involved in criminal activities and drug abuse. Luckily number of children living on the street are not very high and efforts can be made to reunify them with their families.

Children as part of street family are children from the homeless families, gypsies and nomads who as a family and in some cases as a community live on the street. Street family phenomenon is a major problem in Pakistan’s urban context. In Islamabad, one can find children belonging to street families begging and selling things on all the major traffic signals of the city. Similarly, in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar and many other cities one can find children from the street families begging, selling or cleaning wind screens of the cars at the traffic signals.

In any form street children are most vulnerable segment of the child population regardless of their age, gender, location or origin. The government has a responsibility to provide them protection from violence, abuse, exploitation and neglect. Federal and provincial governments have taken some steps in this regard in the shape of National Child Protection Centre in Islamabad, Child Protection and Welfare Bureau in Lahore, the Mobile Child Protection Units in Karachi and Zamoong Korinitiative in Peshawar besides some drop in centres by different NGOs in different cities of Pakistan. These efforts however, have not been able in prevention of the phenomenon of children in street situations.

To put this in perspective, the successive governments have not been able to effectively respond to the issue of children in street situations even in the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT). Above all there is no law at the ICT for the protection of children including children in street situations and resultantly the National Child Protection Centre has no legal status nor sufficient budgetary allocation. The Capital Administration and Development Department should join hands with the Ministry of Human Rights for enactment of the long awaited ICT Child Protection and Welfare Bill and then it’s implementation.

Children in street situations got particular attention when their representative team performed well in the Street Children Football World Cup however, that attention was also limited to occasional functions, distribution of shields and cash prizes among the players and some unmet promises. Nothing special was done on the policy, legislation and budgetary allocation level to make sure that children don’t end up in street situations and those who are in street situations are rehabilitated and reintegrated with their families.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted Concluding Observations and Recommendations on June 3, 2016 on Pakistan’s 5^th Periodic Report to the Committee. While highlighting its concerns about the children in street situations the Committee noted, “the Committee is alarmed at the reports that a large number of children live in street situations and are deprived of all their basic rights, including access to health care, education and shelter and are subjected to hazardous forms of child labour, child sexual exploitation and abuse as well as trafficking. It is also concerned that the children living or working on the streets or whose parents are in conflict with the law are often handled by the police, instead of the trained staff of child protection centres”. The Committee recommended that the State Party (The Government of Pakistan): (a) Undertake a systematic assessment of children in street situations in order to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy, which should address the root causes, in order to prevent children from leaving families and schools for the street; (b) Ensure that children in street situations are provided with adequate protection and assistance, nutrition and shelter as well as with health care and educational opportunities in order to support their full development; and (c) Respect the right of children in street situations to be heard when developing programmes and measures designed to protect and assist them.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 22^nd, 2016.

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