Of street children

Aslam* is a 12-year-old boy, who is found often on a street’s corner on main Garden Town road. He is dressed in dirty, stained clothes, sometimes laughing gleefully at jokes his older friends crack, sometimes smoking. But now, Aslam* has found something much more fulfilling. He has taken to sniffing glue. “I don’t do it that often,” he says. “But its fun to do it with friends.”
Meanwhile in Shalimar area, Arif* has been trying to fit into others who live on sidewalks. He has just run away from home and does not have any place to go. Despite his desperate attempts to fit in, he has faced much bullying from his other counterparts. Yet Arif denies that he is disturbed even an iota by covering it up. “They dare not touch me,” he says, with the simple ferocity only a young boy of 10 can bring to his face. “I can dodge even the police!”
Aslam* and Arif* are mere symbols of what is a much deeper issue haunting the streets of Lahore. In fact, like all other major cities and urban centers in the country, Lahore too hardly stands out regarding this problem. According to statistics, an estimated 1.2 million children live on the streets of Pakistan’s major cities and urban centers. Many manage to brave through ending up in hardening themselves, several others become the victim of drug abuse, sexual abuse and even murder.
Many a times, they are arrested for involvement in criminal activities. But all of them undoubtedly face violence, threat, abuse, manipulation, exploitation and bullying by others on the roads. Perhaps the most unfortunate part is that many of these children are not born to parents who are homeless themselves. In fact they opt to become ‘homeless’ after they run away from home, escaping abusive parents or guardians.
In countering so many kinds of threats and violent behaviour, these children are most obviously adversely affected. Dr Ejaz Warraich, consultant Psychiatrist of Jinnah Hospital, says that he has encountered many such children and that in general they can be divided into three categories. One type is those who come from lower socio-economic backgrounds. They stay on the streets playing and later go back home. These children, he says, have no real aims in life.
The other two types of children who roam around on streets are either runaways or homeless, or maybe belong to families who are reckless about them. These, he says, are used in beggary and become part of that sphere or else become serious victims of drug and sexual abuse among many other things. “One can imagine what input these children can give to the society when they grow up,” says Dr Warraich.
“They have no insight, no moral or ethical values developed in them, and of course no education. They learn everything in incorrect ways and do not have general knowledge about things. Therefore they are hardly expected to work either once they grow up.” In short, these children grow up to be associated with criminal activities, and in the dark irony of life, victims of opportunism become opportunists themselves.
“They can be used by adults very easily because they are vulnerable, impressionable, and weak,” says Dr Warraich. “Some are trafficked and used for begging purposes. They used to be sold abroad as camel jockeys until the government began to regulate visas of certain age groups and this slowed down a bit. They were even used as child militants in suicide bombings.”
Dr Warraich says that this was a phenomenon of urbanization and the concept of street children was limited to cities not rural areas where children lived in a supportive and collective system. Urbanised and even more dangerous areas of semi-urbanization result in a highly challenging, highly demanding life, which resulted in several inner conflicts especially guilt and revenge. “One cannot think of this happening in welfare countries,” he says. “But in Pakistan, let’s not even begin to discuss of the Social Welfare Department.”
Unfortunately poverty is the key cause that leads to such conditions of children. In many cases parents themselves sell the children away for money, and there is a concept of giving them away on rent too. For this, the children are either rented out for sexual services, or for other laborious and dangerous work.
Meanwhile as the plight of these children continues, when it comes to protecting them, contrary to the tall claims by the federal ministries and even the provincial departments, the government has so far introduced no proper legislation to safeguard street children’s rights. The number of street children is increasing with every passing day and they are susceptible to all kinds of violence and abuse.
SPARC, an NGO working on child issue, Executive Director Arshad Mahmood told Pakistan Today that the number of street children had increased manifold after the floods that hit most parts of Pakistan last year. “Only Punjab and KPK have a legal system to address street children’s issue but unfortunately, this sensitive matter is badly neglected in Balochistan, Sindh and Islamabad,” he said.
He even went on to blame the police as being the leading enemies of street children as rampant violations against the rights of these children were committed with impunity. “The police have no fear of reprisal from the law and the society,” said Arshad. According to a recent global report on administrative detention of children in Pakistan, despite Pakistani laws requiring that children should be brought to a magistrate within twenty-four hours of their arrest, many children were kept in police lockups for considerably longer periods, often for two weeks, and in one case, for three months.
The report claimed that the arrest and detention of children living and working on the streets by police officers on the charges of vagrancy, indecent behavior or prostitution, being a public nuisance, incorrigible or exposed to moral danger is reported to occur in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Meanwhile the government has not bothered to conduct any surveys on this data. No revised figures regarding street children are available and according to a survey conducted by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), at least 10 percent of these children have no knowledge of their families.