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Revealed: The dark side of Mwanza street children
2008-09-21 10:08:57
By Reinier Carabain
The scene is common and painfully familiar; a busy street lined with shops displaying the latest fashion of electronic equipment, well-dressed people going in and out, the sound of vehicles whizzing by, expensive cars, and the flash of neon lights.
At night, the city comes alive and urban life reaches its peak. But, in the background, children huddle in corners, or walk about aimlessly, dirty, disheveled - a pitiful sight.
Some are selling cigarettes, peddling lottery tickets or flowers; some are just loitering and others are asleep in city arcades.
As night progresses, these children are seen gambling, smoking, sniffing solvents, talking up with locals or tourists for a night of ``big money,`` some time taking on odd jobs to get some money to ease their grumbling stomachs or to take home to starving family members.
In some parts of the world, street children have been a familiar phenomenon for many years. In the last decade this phenomenon has grown at an alarming rate throughout Africa.
UNICEF‘s report, The State of the World‘s children: Excluded and Invisible`(2006), notes that street children in Africa are among the most physically visible of all children, living and working on the roads and public squares of cities.
Yet, paradoxically, they are also among the most invisible and, therefore, hardest to reach with vital services, such as education and healthcare.
These ignored, shunned and excluded street children, the offspring of today‘s complex urban realities, represent one of the most serious, unique, urgent and rapidly growing socio-educational challenges.
One of the African countries, which have witnessed a tremendous increase in unsupervised children either living alone or working on urban streets, is Tanzania.
Since Tanzania has introduced the neo-liberal development paradigm in 1985, instructed by the World Bank and the IMF, and has been severely hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the number of street children has increased rapidly and has become a growing social problem and concern.
This social problem is especially acute in big cities, like Dar es Salaam, Arusha, Morogoro, Moshi, Tanga, Mbeya and Mwanza, where the rates of urban population growth have been exploding.
The rapid population growth has been associated with an increase in the number of children living alone on urban streets or spending most of their day on the streets in the quest for survival.
The majority of these children have for various reasons either abandoned or have been abandoned by their families and have migrated to urban areas in order to earn a living.
Urban street children are seen as a problem which further compounds the nature of an urban crisis. Tanzanian politicians, policy-makers and urban planners seem to be helpless in their efforts to either solve the problem or to assist street children and have failed to prescribe plausible concrete solutions.
In fact, the official government attitude towards street children has been very negative. Street children are considered to be hooligans, vagabonds and prone to commit crimes.
As a result of this, they have been target of harassment by law enforcement organisations; there are many cases of street children being beaten by police, detained and sometimes repatriated to their rural homes.
Nevertheless, these draconian measures have not provided long-term solutions to this social problem.
The number of urban street children has continued to escalate every year.
The street scene of Mwanza city shows many contrasts during night and day.
During daytime, the central business district of Mwanza displays a lively, abundant centre, which consists of many banks, hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, bars and even a casino.
But, during the night, the street scene of the business district, as well as the area around the market and the bus station, changes completely.
Signs and effects of poverty become prominent manifested in numerous roaming homeless families and children under the age of 16 years old who live, sleep, and forage for food unaccompanied by any adult kin.
However, during daytime, these homeless families and street children have been kept away from the centre by the police and the sungusungu: the neighborhood vigilante groups.
Since the 1990s, the number of homeless families and street children in Mwanza has increased. Especially, the phenomenon of unaccompanied street children who face social exclusion, has amplified considerably, since the collapse of socialism.
In the paper, Street children of Mwanza: a situational analysis`, a UNICEF-funded study, the authors Rajani and Kudrati reported in 1994, that there were approximately 240 children, who both lived and slept on the streets in Mwanza.
Poverty, violence at home, disintegration of households and the effects of AIDS-related morbidity and mortality among parents, were the most significant reasons, why these children wound up on the streets.
During the last decade, the number of people living in the streets of Mwanza has increased dramatically. Currently, more than a thousand children live in the streets of Mwanza.
The number of socially excluded street children has been estimated between 700 and 750.
In comparison with the report of Rajani and Kudrati, the number of street children in Mwanza has tripled.
The augmentation of urban street children is especially acute in big cities, where the rate of urban population growth has been exploding amidst an intensifying and severe polarisation.
Furthermore, the breakdown of safety nets and the disintegration of traditional households have enlarged the number of street children in Mwanza.
In addition, AIDS-related mortality and the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS, has increased substantially on the national scale, as well as in Mwanza city.
Today, approximately 50 percent of all orphans throughout the country can be ascribed to the deadly virus, whereas the percentage was below 35 percent a decade ago.
Several inhabitants of Mwanza have stigmatised street children as loiterers and criminals, police operations have been organised to clean‘ the streets (Box 8), and street children have been regularly harangued, beaten and jailed.
Moreover, the documentary Darwin`s Nightmare, together with announcements in the Lonely Planet, have shed a negative light on Mwanza‘s street children.
These outsiders have stigmatised, stereotyped and prejudiced street children as the scum of society. In general, outsiders haven`t got any compassion on the phenomenon street children.
The phenomenon of street children in Tanzania is a consequence of societal changes related to the economic transition and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Normally, children who end up in the streets haven‘t got any other choices left for survival.
Although these children are marginalized, street children have just like any other children, needs, desires, rights, virtues, joy, fear, shortcomings and mistakes.
The consequences and effects of living in the streets have resulted in behavioural changes. The street children had to abandon their way of thinking as a child, to change, act and think like an adult.
Part of the behavioural change, is the daily task to beg and look for food in the city. In general, Sundays are the most difficult days to find sufficient food.
Many shops are closed on Sundays and less people will show up in town, which result in less garbage. During normal week days, street children are able to find enough food among the garbage, though the quantity of the vitamins and protein is often inadequate.
An effect of the lack of proper food without sufficient nutrients is the probability to become sick.
Once a street child has become sick, the child is heavily depending on his friends in the streets.
Fortunately, street children are living, most of the times, in groups and are willing to help each other in bad times.
Furthermore, the children referred as well to the rainy season as a difficult period of the life in the streets.
Throughout this period, it is hard to find covered places in Mwanza during nights.
Mwanza has only a few roofed places which offer shelter, consequently, many street children have to spend several nights in heavy rainfall during the rainy season.
Additionally, street children have, in general, only one set of clothes; most often, a short pants with a t-shirt.
Day-in day-out, the street children are wearing the same clothes, as the begged money is used for food.
Moreover, the purchase of new clothes would decrease street children`s reliability of being poor, which could result in less money from begging.
Sex for foods
Living independently at a very tender age makes children more vulnerable to or places them at higher risk from both physical and sexual abuse. Cases of girls being raped and boys being sodomized by force are not hard to find.
In Mwanza, the street boys had consensual sex with and raped street girls, in addition to practicing ``kunyenga? (slang for nonconsensual, anal-penetrative sex) among themselves as an initiation rite, which allows one to become a member of a group and gives ones access to group secrets`.
But sex-for-food practices (survival sex) did not appear to be regular occurrence among the self-provisioning practices of street boys in Mwanza.
Sex plays a much larger and more central role in the lives of street girls than of boys, especially after puberty.
Around the Soko Kuu market and the bus station of Mwanza, prostitutes offer their services for less than 10,000 Tanzanian Shilling.
The majority of the street children abhorred to observe people having sexual intercourses and shivered from the stories they heard from other street children, who had been raped by older, stronger and bigger street boys.
These older street boys operate in groups and choose mainly smaller street boys as their targets. Especially small street children, sleeping without any strong associates or protection from local watchmen, have been simple targets of forced rapes.
In fact, despite the warnings from other street children, all the participants in both focus groups have been rape-victims of older, stronger and bigger street boys as well.
They had their first sexual experience, either forced or voluntarily, between the age of nine and twelve years old.
Extraordinarily, certain street children were encouraged by their first (forced) sexual experiences; they explored more about sexual proceedings and practiced sex with other street children.
Even a few street children became more or less sex-addicted, others carried out survival sex‘; to acquire food in exchange for sexual services.
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