Greed and neglect drives millions of children onto street
The Universe
(January 09, 2005)
Poverty is on the increase and so is human greed. Our rich life style condemns millions to poverty.
The vast number of street children in the world (100 million, according to UNICEF) is the result of human neglect, moral decay and spiritual paralysis. Greed and political irresponsibility allow an unjust global economic structure to dominate the planet and cause the greatest wealth and poverty ever known.
This process allows politicians in power to misuse their power to favour the few over the many. They privatize national wealth, assets and natural resources and concentrate this wealth in the hands of their cronies while the rest sink into poverty.
This explains financial crises, the absence of employment, good education, health and other social services. This is the ultimate cause of the street children disaster sweeping the developing world and parts of the developed world.
It leads to many other social evils, such as child labour, violence, war, child soldiers, economic disruption, migration and refugees. The world today has a glittering outward facade showing an image of prosperity; however behind it the very wealthy exploit the poor driving them into ever greater rural and urban poverty, misery, disease and early death.
The poor and oppressed are turned to ideologies or religious fanaticism and revolt the regional wars, low intensity conflict, antiterrorism action by multinational forces create loss of work, schooling, insecurity and more refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, slum dwellers and ever increasing number of street children living in dangerous circumstances.
Street children escape from their home and live part time on the streets. When they are settled and know street survival techniques, they return at times to their family hovels and shacks. They leave again and bring their younger brothers and sisters.
Parents at times send them out to beg and scavenge and even prostitute them or sell them in to bonded labour. The worst exploitation of children is the taking of a kidney that is sold to wealthy patients in need of transplants. We cannot forget the children aborted on the streets and back alleys or dumped into the garbage by the not-so-secret abortion clinics.
Other street children are permanently on the streets engaged in scavenging, child labour, begging, peddling drugs, petty theft and many end up in jail. Their rights are frequently abused by the police while on the streets, they are raped and forced to hand over their daily earnings.
Others are accused falsely for crimes committed by street children recruited into a police controlled and protected gang. The gangs of street children prey on the younger and weaker children and sometimes make them sex slaves using drugs, food and fear as the controlling weapon.
They are runaways from dysfunctional, broken homes with an abusive parent. In the home, usually a hovel and poor environment beside a polluted canal or malarial swamp, they suffer sexual abuse, rape, physical abuse, verbal battering, rejection and malnutrition diarrhea and dengue.
Most street children are illiterate. Having no incentive, money or support and encouragement to study, they have dropped out of elementary school. They join street gangs for their own protection and use industrial glue as a mind altering and mood tranquillizer.
Street children are the poorest of the poor, they are the most vulnerable and weakest and unless helped, they are the HIV-AIDS victims of the future, child prostitutes that attract foreign sex tourists. They will become angry at the adult world which has done this to them. [End]
