Latin America's Street Children

http://www.toyboxcharity.org.uk/street_children.html
Factors that push a child onto the streets
1. Poverty – street children are likely to have come from areas of poor housing, with little access to running water or adequate sanitation. Likely to be a lack of social services and affordable education. Parents are usually unemployed and illiterate.
2. War and political and social unrest within the country.
3. Natural disasters cause homelessness and displacement
4. Urbanisation – when families move from rural to urban areas and lose the support of their extended family making them more vulnerable when under pressure. Children are often abandoned.
5. Orphans – as a result of civil war, drought, famine, AIDS epidemic, city violence
6. Dysfunctional family environment – children that leave home as a result of abuse, or they may be abandoned. Some children are born on the streets, eg if their parents are prostitutes. Note: though these are strong contributory factors, most children from poor and dysfunctional families do stay at home.
Factors that push a child onto the streets
Some children are attracted to the street life. These are often children who come from high-risk areas and who have been spending the majority of their days on the streets.
1. Gangs – children may have made friends on the streets and want to leave home to become an official member.
2. Lure of freedom and entertainment in a big city – disenchantment with their life, no longer want to work for their parents, live with 7 siblings in a small shack.
3. Drug Addiction
4. Prospect of making a better life in an attempt to escape hardship.

What the street children say
"If a dream could become real, it would be to live with my family and have a different life." Jose, 15 yrs old

"To live on the streets is so sad. If my dream could come true, it would be to have a life without drugs." Alfredo, 13 yrs old

"Life on the street is like a prison because you are mistreated" Miguel, 12 yrs old

FACTS
• Estimated 40 million children live on the streets of Latin America’s densly populated cities. (United Nations estimate about 100 million street children worldwide)
• Types: those living on the street with no home at all, those that spend most of their time on the streets without opportunities for education and care, child workers that spend most of their time working on the street
• Observers from our partner in Guatemala say that street children there have a life expectancy of around four years on the street.
• According to Unicef, some 75,000 severely malnourished children have been identified in Guatemala in 2005, a consequence of three simultaneous emergencies: chronic poverty, drought and the coffee crisis. Some 67 per cent of indigenous children suffer from chronic malnutrition.
• Unicef also reported in 2004 that in Guatemala in the first 10 months of 2002, gangs or security forces killed 408 children and youths, but most street children were killed by drive by shootings.