“ The war’s legacy - of orphans, step-parents, broken social and communal bonds and mores, economic devastation and psycho-social issues - is probably the major underlying factor behind children living on the street.”
"child rights can help understand better can why many children go unfed (while adults eat), without schooling (when family money is spent elsewhere), work on the streets (while some fathers rest) or are so severely physically punished..."
2. Street child crisis
War, poverty and aspects of cultural practice combine to create an almost ‘perfect’ storm in terms of ‘pre-conditions’ for street child crisis
The war: Sierra Leone endured a vicious 11 year civil-war between 1991 and 2002. More than half the population was displaced from their homes at different stages. Aside from the diamond, the iconic Western image for the war was the ‘child soldier’. The image is appropriate – even by the rough standards of war, children suffered terribly. Not only did the children suffer though – but the memory of the atrocities committed by child-soldiers has had awful consequences for the precious idea of a child’s innocence. Seven years on, the war’s legacy - of orphans, step-parents, broken social and communal bonds and mores, economic devastation and psycho-social issues - is probably the major underlying factor behind children living on the street.
Grinding poverty: Sierra Leone was desperately poor before the war, but the war only deepened poverty further. Field-workers now believe that poverty is the single largest factor driving children to the street. Children leave or are driven from their homes simply because there is no food for them, money for school fees or they are made to work long hours to contribute to family finances.
Cultural practices. Whilst poverty is the key cause, it is invariably poverty interacting with a further factor which leads to children on the street. This takes us towards sensitive territory because it involves discussion of cultural practice, but it is critical territory to tread. The envelope in which all these factors can be read together is ‘
child-rights’ (or absence thereof).
The traditional practice of ‘
mehn pikin’, whereby poorer, normally rural parents
foster their children to wealthier, normally urban relatives for up-bringing has always been open to abuse; however since the war specialists have reported that the reality of abuse has steeply increased. A noticeably high proportion of the children on the street have fled
mehn pikin arrangements rather than direct from their biological parents’ home (
click here to see our case study of Adama for an illustration). Indeed, the
mehn pikin practice is increasingly talked of as ‘internal trafficking’
A second example of the interaction between war, poverty and complex cultural mores (including inheritance practices) is found in the simple truth that a large number of those children joining the street direct from home have come from homes with one or more
step-parents, most often a step-mother (
click here to see our case study of Foday for an illustration ).
A third example of poverty and culture interacting is the widespread preference for
prioritising education of males over females. In a consultation with street girls in Makeni in October 2008 a striking feature was that despite their age (most of them were in their late teens), the foremost wish of the vast majority of the girls was to attend school. Children who see their care-givers frustrating their life opportunities will even flee that home it appears.
Ultimately, any society lacking a robust understanding and appreciation of ‘child rights’ is at particularly grave risk of abusing its children (without even explicitly knowing it), especially at times of severe stress (such as the prevailing conditions in Sierra Leone).
Sierra Leonian society essentially lacks this protective ‘ring-fencing’ of child rights. Poverty naturally sits at the apex of so much of Sierra Leone’s hunger, illiteracy, ill-health and suffering. However child rights can help understand better can why many children go unfed (while adults eat), without schooling (when family money is spent elsewhere), work on the streets (while some fathers rest) or are so severely physically punished that a few eventually reject the home in favour of the false freedoms promised by life on the street.
Indeed what the above discloses is that the phenomena of street children in Sierra Leone, terrible in its own right, is also symptom of and inseparable from, multiple deep-laying, complex social, as well as economic, problems. It is akin to the tip of an ice-berg.
(
click here to listen to an
explanation of the causes of Sierra Leone’s street-child crisis by Kelfa Kargbo, Operations Director of HANCI, SCoSL’s chief national partner)
