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Increased in Dead Street Children

March 24, 2008
Gela Mtivlishvili, Kakheti

Convention on the Rights of Child is based on four essential principles: right to life, development, protection and participation. Every country that has ratified the convention should comply with those guiding principles and Georgia is one among those countries that signed the convention on June 2 1994. Georgia is obligated to protect the fundamental rights of the child on national level. Nevertheless, children of the socially excluded families do not have minimal living conditions. Children without parental care go out in the street. They are often victims of the physical and sexual assault. Particularly grave is the situation facing Georgian regions. According to official statistics, the number of deaths among street children has taken a marked increased.

Term “street child” has become a new concept in Georgian society in recent times. Children who live, beg, steal, rob or engage in commercial sex in the streets are collectively called street children. Most of them are glue-sniffers and they manage to buy the glue with the money they collect through begging in the street or other above-mentioned activities.

Nine-year-old Giorgi lives in one of the villages in Pankisi Valley. Every day he gets up at 6:00 AM; he does not have breakfast; neither washes his face and gets dressed in the clothes the UN presented him with several years ago and walks nine kilometers to Akhmeta. On his way to the district center he has to walk, or maybe a bus will give him a lift. Giorgi has mother and four under-age siblings; he returns home once a week. Giorgi works hard but cannot earn enough money to pay at least 3 GEL for transportation a day.

“I do not have father. I was six when he died. My mother does not work and she has four other children besides me. We are hungry most of the time; my eldest brother is disabled and the rest in the family are still very small. It is left to my mother and me to earn money to feed them. Mother leaves home early in the morning and return home late at night. Sometimes she does not come home at all. Or she will come home in a very bad mood or even drunk. She makes little children to drink vodka sometimes so that they will stop their crying because of ill-hunger and to fall asleep. You can understand why I don’t want to go home to see such a terrible situation.”

-Where do you sleep at night then? What are you doing in the street all day long?

-Until now I wandered in the central streets of Telavi and begged there. Not long ago a shop keeper gave me a little job. I carry goods from the warehouse to the shop. Sometimes the boxes are very heavy and the owner does not give me money; he deceives and threatens me with reporting the police about my past robbery. Anyway, this job is better than begging in the street. I work until late and spend night in the waiting hall of an old auto repair station.

-Do you stay outside alone or with somebody else? Don’s you have problems with police?

-No, we are several boys together. The eldest among us, Zura, is fourteen and he is from Telavi. The rest of us are younger than he is. It was cold here in the winter but it was not possible to start a fire to stay warm. We didn’t want to draw any attention to ourselves, as we did not want to have problems with police.  Once, police officer beat me very cruelly. I was buying cigarette in the shopping booth and they met me there. They scolded and slapped me though I do not know why. We should not have problems with police because we do not steal. One of our friends, a seven-year-old boy, is begging near the church and mostly the agriculture market. His mother makes him beg; he must bring her five GEL everyday. If he collects more during any day, he gives some extra money to us. It only happens during holidays. Sometimes, when we have money we buy glue; but mostly we buy pills at the drug-shop. We swallow several pills and then we feel high and don’t think about our worries.

-Are you the only one who does not go to school or other boys are not getting an education either?

-How can I go to school? I have neither clothes nor shoes to wear. Besides that I do not want to get an education. Street life is difficult but I have got used to it. None of my friends go to school either,”- said Giorgi.

Representatives of the Georgian Public Defender’s Office consider that street children must be integrated into the society. “The attitude of the state towards the street children is completely different. Because of the non traditional life-style of these children it is very difficult to find placements for them in institutions. Most of them have parents who encourage their children to beg and commit crime for the most part These children learn street life from the very early age; they have their own income from petty  thievery and begging. They are able to use this money to purchase temporary “freedom”. They cannot live according to the rules and values that the rest of the society considers as essential,” said Sozar Subari, the public defender.

The Ombudsman provides several recommendations to the Georgian Ministry of Science and Education when it comes to how best to deal with street children: establish a real protection mechanism for children, especially when there is concern that a parent may have a negative impact on the child. Moreover, he considers that it is important that the Ministry of Education should define its policy and program towards “street children,” one among other programs.

“The state should work out a concrete policy regarding the issue, which has not been implemented to date.  If the responsibilities assumed or envisaged by the legislation are not implemented, we will face serious problems in the future. The longer we wait the more difficult it will come to improve the lives of children. Later on, we will have a separate layer of society that is prone to crime. This is clear as this group is already getting caught in up various crimes and as they get older it will be more serious. It is clear that after they get caught up in the criminal justice system that the situation will become more serious as they will have become hard core criminals who will do one crime and then another,” said the public defender. 

The representatives of the Ministry of Education pointed out that placement of the street children in appropriate institution deals with set of various difficulties. Nonetheless, they are working to resolve the problem with various measures.

The non-governmental organization Human Rights Center also works on the rights of the child. Lia Khuroshvili, the lawyer for the center, stated that the children must be protected from the life in the street; but when they are forced to beg in the street from their family members, there needs to be acting laws that will protect them from violence. 

“More complex and concrete legislative base should be created to address the problem and to find a solution. The state should have resolve and take on the responsibility to protect street children. State structures are not using all current mechanisms that they have access in protecting the rights of children”

The state has not determined to solve the problem about glue-sniffing among street children as of yet. There is no law or normative act in Georgia that will protect children from the habit. There is no state program for the rehabilitation of the glue-sniffing children. Especially difficult is the situation in this field in the regions, as there are already several community based projects implemented in Tbilisi that seeks to solve the problem. The overall inattentiveness makes an already difficult situation all that more grave. It is clear that year-by-year that the health conditions of street children worsens,” said the lawyer.

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, that Georgia has ratified, contracting countries shall take legislative, administrative, social and educational measures in order to protect the child from any kind of physical or psychological harassment, violence, insulting or ill-treatment from their parents, legal guardians or others. Tinatin Phkhovelishvili, representative of the “Union to Protect the Child from Violence”, said that Georgia does not comply with the minimum demands of the international convention.

Those who protect children’s rights tell that the state cannot offer anything to the children who have spent or are spending most of their lives in the street. They claim that   in order to reintegrate them into the society in future that more is needed.  Experts think that the way to rehabilitate and save the children connects with a variety of issues. One of the first things that are necessary in supporting them is to come to a realization of what problems they face and determined what they lacked in the first place and what drove them to living in the streets and following such a lifestyle all day long.

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