World Street Children News

No love left for London’s street children

Evening Standard (London), Jun 9, 2006 by JOHANN HARI

FOR most gay people, London is a liberal bubble - one of the world’s safe places. From the gloriously scuzzy streets of Soho, it can seem like millennia of homophobia have passed in the night like a bad nightmare. But for the thousands of teenage gay runaways who head for our streets every year, homophobia has burned away even their bonds with their parents - and they are in extreme danger even when they arrive here in Shangri-La.

Meet Ronnie Andrews. He lights a cigarette, runs his hand over his shaved head and begins - in his fractured, halting speech - to explain how he ended up here.

"My mum’s boyfriend kicked me out three years ago, when I was 16," he says, looking away. "He found out I was gay, and said I was a pervert, diseased, all that. He told me never to come back, and never to see my mum and my little sisters again. He said I was a bad influence on them."

He slept on a bench in the local park, and tried to go back the next day.

His mum’s boyfriend threatened him, and he got the message.

Ronnie found himself alone in the world with a bag of clothes, a load of neuroses and nothing more. He began a long period of "sofa- surfing" - moving from friend to friend, slowly eroding their hospitality until he was chucked out.

"I lost a lot of friends and upset a lot of people. I was always drunk. I was taking the piss. I didn’t have anything to offer them. Or they just got bored with me."

Desperate, he began to exchange sex for favours. "I still remember the first man. It was disgusting. He was really old, and I had never had sex before. It was really painful, I was shaking, but I needed the money so I tried not to think about it." And with the pain of prostitution came pills and coke, the inevitable cliches of life on the street.

He picks at his nails as he relays all this, but he serves up this narrative in a strangely emotionless tone. I ask if he is angry with his mother for not sticking up for him. "No, I didn’t want her to get involved. I knew she loved [her boyfriend]." It is only when I offer a streak of empathy - it must have been horrific, I say - that I see a crack of emotion. His face involuntarily scrunches and he says: "Trust me, it was."

Ronnie skidded into a lucky streak when a friend pointed him towards Stonewall Housing, one of the very few organisations that help the 30 per cent of London’s runaways who are gay or lesbian, and tossed out by parents who hate gays more than they love their kids. They found him a flat, and - with industrial-strength antidepressants - he is starting to tend to his wounds.

But this hardly ever happens to runaways. Incredibly, Martin Houghton-Brown, policy adviser for the Children’s Society, tells me there are only 10 emergency beds in the whole of Britain for the 100,000 children who run away every year. That’s 10 - no misprint.

"Compare that to the US, where every major city has drop-in centres, and there are 17,000 permanent hostel places," he says. Local councils are supposed to provide emergency accommodation, "but we often hear them say to a very vulnerable runaway, ‘There’s no room now, come back in a week,’" Martin explains.

There are thousands of kids like Ronnie clamouring to enter our liberal bubble here in Zone One. What does it say about us that we leave them to sell their bodies and their souls on the streets?

- Gay runaways can call Stonewall Housing’s advice line on 020 7359 5767.