Sunday, April 22, 2007 Mercado: Deaf to whimpers By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
DO you hear the children crying, o my brothers/ ‘Ere sorrows come with the years”.--–Elizabeth Barret Browning.
In Cebu, a phletora of agencies of varying effectiveness work for street kids, writes Judith Pomm of Germany’s Rhur University Bochum. But many citizens turn deaf ears to whimpers from the growing number of kids who take to the streets to beat poverty and hunger. Indifference “appears the most common reaction.”
Mga bata sa kadalanan blend into the woodwork unnoticed, she notes in her study: “At the Margins: “Street and Working Children in Cebu City.” They show resilience and develop coping mechanisms. “Some prove strong enough to find their way out, sometimes through institutional help. The majority do not.”
In Colombia , they call them “gamines.” And in Brazil, vigilantes execute them to “clean the city.” Mga anghel na walang langit (“Angels without a heaven”) is how a local soap opera dubbed “this silent slow motion emergency---silent because nobody is surprised and cries out.”
In 1988, the first surveys “suggested the number of street children could range from two to three percent of the child and youth population of a city.” In Cebu, some estimates peg them at 5,000. But tallying these semi-nomads with precision is difficult.
The Philippines has cobbled an extensive legal framework: from the Child and Youth Welfare Code of 1974, to the Child and Family Courts Act in 1996 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
But “law enforcement (here) is often a matter of contacts and money and thus the privilege of a minority,” the study notes. The UN convention “has the weakest base in practice because law enforcement mechanisms are largely underdeveloped.”
Unofficial estimates peg implementation and quality at 20 percent to 40 percent. So, the problem persists.
Cebu City needs to consolidate and improve the work of more than 22 organizations under a city task force, as uneven economic growth deepened poverty. Early intervention and more preventive work are urgent. “Once children settle down into street life, it is extremely difficult to bring them back.”
Officials milk the kids for publicity, shove them into “houses of safety,” stressing their criminal potential, e.g. “they scratch parked cars.” “Homelesness gets confused with delinquency.” Two justifications are offered: vagrancy and mendicancy. “We don’t arrest children. We protect them,” says an official.
“In Cebu City, attempts to permanently place them elsewhere rarely succeeded. Arresting street kids for begging, vagrancy of stealing, then bringing them to approved institutions does not address the root causes that shove them into the streets in the first place.”
Mothers must be supported to gain access to social services. Agencies include street children in planning but exclude them in practice. Immunizations don’t reach footloose street children. They drop out of vocational training workshops and tend to drop out. Barriers like birth certificates, school records, parental signatures, etc must be dismantled.
Laws are blind to constraints that children face in real life. Child labor is illegal to protect them from exploitation. But it “impedes their finding a living in a legally secured way. They are further impoverished and endangered into being sucked by illicit activities.”
Officials pretend that clearing streets of begging children “protects them.”
These are different ways people detach themselves, socially and emotionally, from the children’s reality…Demonizing them supports the justification that one does not have to bother with them.”
An Ibanag proverb sums it all up: “He who is indifferent to the cry of he helpless will, in the future, shed tears and no one will listen.”
