No more room

Scores of homeless children (street children and socially displaced) in TT, are being turned away from the few children’s homes which exist in the country. The homes are filled to capacity with children who either ran away from home or for various reasons ended up on the streets. Those who are currently in homes for children were rescued by relatives and even strangers, after they escaped from home to flee abject poverty or who were being physically abused by their parents. As a result of the huge backlog, officials who work with street children are overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem and are pleading with the Government to establish a crisis shelter to accommodate these unfortunate kids. They said if the Government does not deal with the problem now, they will have to deal with an entire generation of scarred young adults in the next ten to 15 years. Sunday Newsday explored the issue of socially displaced and street children and how much of this was linked to poverty and economic frustration and child abuse.

The scenario we found was as follows:
1. Children who have ended up on the streets because the parent/parents simply cannot afford to maintain them.
2. Some parents were using the children as pawns on the streets to beg for money to feed the family.
3. Some parents experiencing abject poverty were teaching their children to mug people on the streets. (This was closely observed  in downtown Port-of-Spain by a Newsday team, myself and another colleague, ourselves almost a target.)
4. One of the concerns by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), is parents who are using their children to work for them, especially as street vendors.
5. Single-parent families, especially those managed by some mothers, are turning to male companions to help them maintain their children.
One social worker said in many cases, the step-father abuses the children, unknown to the mother.

In other cases her desperation to maintain financial security for the children, may mean the mother completely ignores the situation and allows the abuse to continue. The child, feeling betrayed and unloved, then turns to the streets for solace. These are just a few examples of what is happening in homes experiencing the harshness of poverty across TT. Judy Wilson, manager of Rainbow Rescue, a home for children in Belmont, said most of them who end up in socially displaced institutions had parents who gave up because they could not afford to take care of them. She said she was concerned about the growing number of young women who were teaming up with older men for financial support but were abandoning their children in the process. “One of the growing problems we are seeing now is where a lot of young women are turning to older men for financial support. The children seem to have problems accepting this and the mother is forced to choose.

A number of other social problems come out as a result of this and the child/ren end up homeless and on the streets,” she explained. How bad  is the situation? Wilson said it is worsening because most of the available homes could not afford to take any more children. Socially displaced children are usually a combination of those who were abused and those who turned to the streets in order to survive. She said currently, her home can only take up to 12 children. “I have squeezed in one more, and I have checked with all other children’s homes and they are filled to capacity. I am turning away children every day from people who have been asking me to take children who have nowhere to go,” she lamented. Another children’s home she said, has taken in six more than it is supposed to hold. The Rainbow Rescue Director is pleading with Government to do more to help save the children from the streets. She pointed out that many of them are quite intelligent but, because of their situations, are not able to make anything of it.