The health and well-being of neglected, abused and exploited children: The Kyiv Street Children Project☆
Introduction
Since the fall of communism and a move towards democratic government in Russia and the former Soviet Republics, major social change has occurred and, like any massive upheaval within previously authoritarian and tightly controlled societies, these changes have produced many casualties. Ukraine followed the “two step democratic transition process” (Diamandouros & Larrabee, 2000), having originally thrown off communism in 1991, only to have it replaced by a restyled but politically unchanged communist party that remained in power until the “Orange Revolution” of 2004–2005 brought about real democratic transition.
The trajectory of postcommunist welfare state development as seen in employment and labor market policies, health and social care, and the pensions system has fluctuated since the early 1990s, bringing with it many victims, casualties and persisting problems (Sotiropoulos, Neamtu, & Stoyanova, 2003). As a consequence of increased family breakdown, substance abuse, poverty and crime, homeless children are a major concern throughout the former Soviet Union, and governments are beginning to recognize the need to develop policies to help rescue these children from poverty, abuse, and exploitation. The reality, however, is that developing and delivering policy is difficult because homeless children are a shifting, diverse, impulsive, elusive and mobile population that may not, initially at least, respond positively to offers of help or support. In addition, it is difficult to plan welfare services for this group because its size is unknown, and there are few legal powers available to welfare staff to rehabilitate these children or to prevent them from returning to the streets.
The size of the problem is difficult to estimate because statistics are either incomplete or unreliable. In Russia in 2002 there were reputed to be around 40,000–50,000 children living on the streets of Moscow alone, more than were left orphaned or homeless after World War II (BBC, 2002; Page, 2004). According to official 2003 statistics provided by the Ukrainian Government, there are approximately 50,000 street children in Ukraine, and almost a quarter of these are in Kyiv (Adventist Development & Relief Agency International, 2003). This is around .63% of the total population in the 0–15 years age group in Ukraine which, for 2003, was calculated as 7,838,000 (World Bank, 2004). Politicians, social researchers and professionals alike agree that these figures greatly underestimate the true size of the problem. The problem of a growing population of street children occurs in other parts of the world; for example, Latin America was estimated to have around 40 million street children in the early 1990s, prompting one observer to note that although these countries had only 10% of the world's population, they had 50% of the world's street children (Apteker, 1991). There are also reports from India (D’Lima & Gosalia, 1992), Africa (Campbell & Ntsabane, 1996), Brazil (Hecht, 1998) and Venezuela (Marquez, 1999).
Comparisons with other countries are difficult because of differences in terminology, population sampling, analysis and reporting, and the major contextual differences in terms of political and cultural institutions, socio-economic structures, and governmental and nongovernmental service frameworks. As will be seen later in this study, the term “street children” is not synonymous with “homelessness” and there are dangers in making comparisons based on unclear definitions. What these international studies have concluded is that in developing countries and those undergoing political restructuring street children comprise a significant part of the “inconspicuous” labor market where they are a potent resource for exploitation by criminal networks and where quick, short-term rewards within a climate of continuing poverty ensures a ready supply of child recruits. These studies show the complexity and heterogeneity of a youth problem that all too often has its context ignored through the imposition of superficial explanations derived from “Western” models of political, socio-economic, and individual psychological development.
Section snippets
The Ukrainian context
There are many local, national, and international agencies working in Ukraine to help support families and children, but their work is often so diverse and dispersed that it is difficult to obtain a reliable view of the overall service network. Few have the resources to report or disseminate their achievements but there is an increasing number of websites that highlight work in Ukraine, mainly undertaken by Christian charities (e.g., Flowers, 2004; Hope Now, 2004), and occasional
Overview
Children who approached and were accepted by the NGOs Aspern and Vifezda because of being homeless or because of other kinds of problem were recruited into the project and assessed. Children were only considered for the study when they had made three visits to the agency within the past 6 months. The project's research workers (K.M. and I.G.) spent 2.5 days per week attached to these agencies, joining in the day to day routine and activities so that children became used to having them around.
Discussion
Behavioral and emotional difficulties, particularly depression are a marked feature of the street children in this study, as well as physical health problems. The rate of child mental health problems in this sample, as measured by questionnaires, is high when compared to a general population survey of Russian schoolchildren (19%) and UK children (10.3%) (Goodman et al., 2005). However, together with the rates for depression, they are very similar to rates of disorder in a British study of
References (24)
- Adventist Development & Relief Agency International (2003, May). ADRA news...
- et al.
The development of a short questionnaire for use in epidemiological studies of depression in children and adolescents
International Journal of Methodology in Psychiatric Research
(1995) Are Colombian street-children neglected? The contribution of ethnographic and ethnohistorical approaches to the study of street children
Anthropology and Education
(1991)- BBC News International. (2002). Moscow's street kids army....
- et al.
Street children in Gaborone, Botswana: Causes and policy implications
(1996) - et al.
Democratization in South-Eastern Europe: Theoretical considerations and evolving trends
- et al.
Street children of Bombay: A situational analysis
(1992) - Flowers, M. (2004)....
Extended version of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire as a guide to child psychiatric caseness and consequent burden
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
(1999)- et al.
Russian child mental health: A cross-sectional study of prevalence and risk factors
European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
(2005)
At home in the street: Street children of North-East Brazil
Cited by (42)
Forced labor and health-related outcomes. The case of beggar children
2023, Child Abuse and NeglectTriple jeopardy: Adolescent experiences of sex work and migration in Zimbabwe
2014, Health and PlaceThe health status of street children and youth in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review of the literature
2013, Journal of Adolescent HealthCitation Excerpt :Children most frequently reported family conflict (including violence, parental drug use, physical abuse, neglect) or changes in family structure (death of a parent, remarriage and resulting discrimination or abandonment) as their reason for being on the street [5,22,23,28,29,35,36,41–43,56–64]. Other reasons for leaving home included poverty, learning a trade, peer encouragement, running away from a children's institution, adventure-seeking, and escaping political violence [17,22,23,29,35,36,41–44,51,57,58,60–63]. Street children primarily earned money through informal economies, including working as vendors, parking attendants, street performers, garbage collectors and recyclers, shoe shiners, sex workers, or petty thieves [20–23,28–30,33,35,37,38,41,42,44,45,47,51,53,57,58,61,62,65–71].
Challenges to Schooling: The Voices of Street Working Children
2021, Child Indicators ResearchThe psychological impact of childhood homelessness—a literature review
2021, Irish Journal of Medical Science
- ☆
This project was funded by the UK Department for International Development through Health and Social Care Partnerships Grant no. UKR007.