Mean Streets
Does the mindset that dominates 80 or more family political dynasties also cause the big yawn that handcuffs street children to life sentences of grueling penury?
“People are so familiar with the omnipresence of (batang kalye)_ they’re rendered invisible within the chaotic picture of daily city routine.” writes Judith Pomm of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. “Indifference appears the most common reaction.”
Her study is titled : “At The Margins: Street and Working Children in Cebu City.” But it’s implications ripple out to other Philippine cities where the problem “emerged in the economic recession of the 1980s.” The Marcos kleptocracy, by then, had bankrupted the country. The problem, however, persists up to today. Yet, other equally poor countries, like Chile , Paraguay , Cuba or Tanzania, have lower numbers of street “Mga anghel na walang langit” ( ‘Angels without a heaven’ ) is how a soap opera dubbed this issue. In Colombia, they call it ‘gamines’. Prickly scientists use the ponderous phrase: Children In Special Need of Protection.”
But no term has been “successfully coined to capture” this silent slow motion emergency, silent because nobody is surprised and cries out”, she notes. But the kids’ resilience and coping mechanisms do not outweigh vulnerability “Some children prove strong enough to find their way out, sometimes through institutional help. The majority do not.”
Firm figures on this mobile population are hard to pin down. Kids spend intermittent periods with their families. Some abscond from institutions. Others drift from one street to another, even to other provinces. Family crises, jobs, threats of police arrest or from rival gangs drive their meanderings.
The first surveys of 1988 “suggested the number of street children could range from two to three percent of the child and youth population of a city.” Metro Cebu had an estimated 15,200. “Flows” rather than “stock” would be a more relevant indicator.
The street offers skimpy income for the family’s short rations.. It’s the only alternative to a desolate crowded home, abuse or violence. They “leave home” to escape from their families and ply sidewalks, hang around malls, begging, selling cigarettes, “sometimes even their little bodies”. Less visible, street girls “are clearly an understudied reality. And they’re particularly stigmatized as they are perceived to be prostitutes”.
They craft survival strategies to meet daily needs, interviews reveal. They appropriate niches where they cadge a few pesos, feel safe and find enjoyment. “They create alternative communities which substitute for families they can not rely on,” the study notes. Their pride is “a defiant one born out of the lack of choice.” And all disappear from welfare agendas when they are not children anymore.
There’s no shortage of publications, laws and programs, resulting in a not always coherent matrix . Patchy data zaps assessment of institutional intervention and successes. An unofficial estimate pegs quality and implementation at a skimpy 20% to 40%.
Official programs respond to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “Unfortunately, it has the weakest base in Practice. Law enforcement here is often a matter of contacts and money and thus the privilege of a minority.”
Reactive and protective approaches for programs, transport elements of the Catholic value system that dominates Filipino society. The quasi-nomadic life style of _bata sa kadalanan_ is “continuously measured against ubiquitous Catholic and domestic family ideals.” the study points out. “( But these ) ideals have little to do with the real life situation of poor families whose children roam the streets.”
Under these values, family is secure, a place of love and care. It excludes the_kalye_ as sites of danger, dirt and failed families. Structural injustices are ignored. Discourse is whittled down to either “normal children in homes or deviant children on the streets.” And grimy _bata sa kadalanan_ are stereotyped, by the better-off, as living “anti-social, immoral chaotic lives.”
This branding is done by a skewed society of a few very rich families, (who moonlight as political dynasties) , a sliver-thin middle class and a mass of indigents. . “Injustice is a given. Not everybody is born with the same chances.” These cash-flush families fret about their interests, little beyond. As the Filipino anthropologist Landa Jocano once warned: “The importance of the family in understanding Philippine social organization can not be over-emphasized”.
Among the poorest, the “distinction between home and street is increasingly obsolete,” the study notes. More use the street as a collectively shared space, for working, sleeping and living. “The way people treat street children offers a critical vision of (this) society. It accepts life on the street as an alternative for those who are deprived of a wholesome childhood but which actively rejects them and aggravates their situation.”
This mindset anchors the widespread indifference to street children “Very few consider this a problem that should trouble the public,” the study found. There’s little solidarity with the extremely poor. Only three, out of 30 respondents, would help out.
“Demonizing them supports the justification that one does not have to bother with them.”
Isn’t this a scientific retelling of what was that story again? The one about a Levite and priest who sidled to the other side of the road, so they’d not bother with a fallen victim. And both of them are us?
E-mail: juanlmercado@gmail.com
