Moses Mwangi, a street boy in Nairobi, Kenya
Attention to street children has focused largely on their pressing economic and social plight – poverty, lack of shelter, denial of education, AIDS, prostitution, and substance abuse. But with the exception of killings of street children in Brazil and Colombia, little attention has been paid to the constant police violence and abuse inflicted on these children, or their treatment within the justice system through which they regularly pass. Civil and political rights violations against street children have been largely overlooked, symptomatic of the larger failure to take seriously the full scope of children’s rights (in particular articles 37 and 40) enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Viewed as “anti-social” or criminal elements, or a scourge on a city’s tourist-filled streets and business districts, many police and ordinary citizens simply wish street children would disappear, by whatever means. Street children throughout the world are subjected to routine harassment and physical abuse by police, government, and private security forces, out to wipe the streets clean of a perceived social blight. Street children face extortion, theft, severe beatings, mutilation, sexual abuse, and even death.
Street children are charged with vague "offenses" such as vagrancy or loitering, or status offenses such as being “in need of protection or discipline,” which effectively make children’s poverty and homelessness, or status as children, a crime. They are often arbitrarily rounded up and detained simply because they are on the streets and appear to be homeless.
Some street children are arrested and jailed because of their involvement in small businesses deemed to be illegal, such as unlicensed hawking, or are accused of petty theft, drug related crimes, or prostitution. Some are arrested as scapegoats, or in order to finger or catch others. Many police believe street children have information about crimes committed on their beat, or attribute crimes in the area to street children directly, imputing criminal associations and criminal activities to street children generally.
For whatever the alleged crime, from vagrancy to theft, street children face frequent roundups, being chased down by police and hauled off to jails. They are often held for excessive periods of time, for days and even weeks, under horrendous conditions, and usually mixed with adults. In jails they may be further beaten by police, or forced to pay bribes in order to be released. Girls are sometimes coerced into providing sexual services to police in exchange for release, or are raped. From jails, street children may be transferred eventually to long-term penal institutions, sometimes euphemistically called “homes” or “schools” where they may languish, out of sight, for years.
Few advocates, let alone lawyers or prosecutors, speak up for these children, and street children rarely have family members or other concerned adults able to intervene on their behalf. Family members are often not informed of their children’s arrest and detention in the first place. Contrary to popular belief, many street children actually have family members and homes to which they might return periodically, and are not orphans.
Human Rights Watch has attempted to highlight the serious nature of the human rights abuses committed against street children by law enforcement personnel in Brazil, Bulgaria, Colombia, Guatemala, India, Kenya, and Sudan, and on the gross lack of police accountability for abusive actions. Widespread impunity and the slowness of law enforcement bodies to investigate and prosecute cases of abuses against street children has allowed violence against street children to continue unchecked.
Establishing police accountability is further hampered by the fact that street children often have no alternative but to complain directly to police about police abuses. The threat of police reprisals acts as a serious deterrent to any child coming forward to testify or make a complaint against an officer. After witnessing and experiencing acts of brutality inflicted by law enforcement, it is no surprise that street children place little faith in the system to bring their tormentors to justice.
Even in Guatemala, where the NGO Casa Alianza has been singularly active in seeking police accountability for the rape, torture, and killing of street children, only a handful of prosecutions have resulted out of hundreds of criminal complaints filed. Frustrated with the failure of the national judicial system to address these cases, Casa Alianza and the Center for Justice and International Law brought a landmark case, involving the police killings of five street youth in 1990, to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and subsequently to the Inter American Court of Human Rights, where the case is now pending. Still, violence against street children in Guatemala continues and the government is as slow as ever in responding to the abuse.
The example of Guatemala demonstrates that even where there are strong advocates willing and able to assist street children in seeking justice, without the commitment of governments, the judiciary, and most importantly law enforcement itself, the abuses will continue.
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| 1) Governments should repeal the crimes of vagrancy, loitering, and status offenses against children, wherever they exist. 2) Governments should undertake mass education campaigns to educate the public, and law enforcement officers, on the plight of street children and their need for special treatment and care, rather than punishment and elimination. 3) Governments should ensure that police officers who are specially trained in children’s rights and in working with children, are delegated the responsibility of handling all police work involving children. Female police officers should be recruited, with the goal of reducing and eliminating sexual violence by police against street girls. 4) Governments should ensure that complaints regarding police ill-treatment of children are promptly and thoroughly investigated, and disciplinary and criminal proceedings ordered where appropriate. Complaints about abuses against street children should not be allowed to languish indefinitely but should be made a top priority of governments, to show their commitment to protecting the rights of all children to the fullest extent of the law. |