Gains, losses for Southeast Asia's undeprivileged kids

Gains, losses for Southeast Asia's undeprivileged kids

Volker Bargenda, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Bangkok

For six-year-old "Ann", running away from home was the best decision she ever made.

Ann, after taking a detour that eventually took her to court, ended up at The Mercy Centre, an open house for abused, orphaned, impoverished children, including those with HIV, a sanitary haven amid the rat-infested, cockroach-swamped makeshift shacks that are held together by wooden planks and have no running water or plumbing in Bangkok's notorious Klong Toey slum.

Ann's story sounds all too familiar to aid workers. Her biological dad was long gone before she was born. Her stepfather and her mom beat her with coat hangers.

Then, a year and a half ago, after her mother was jailed, her drug and alcohol-crazed stepfather tossed her against the wall -- something he and her mother had often done before.

But this time the stepfather went too far. He ripped off an arm of Ann's teddy bear.

So Ann ran away, spent a night on the streets of Klong Toey, then went to live with her grandmother. But Ann turned predator, became violent herself and ended up in court, which handed her over to The Mercy Centre, run by Father Joe Maier.

Now, while Ann still has occasional violent outbursts, as Father Joe recently wrote in the Bangkok Post, she usually joyously jumps up and down the hallways, clings to a visitor's arm and grabs his pen and notebook, happy to sign her name in Thai accompanied by a big smile.

Ann is on her way to becoming a success story. But for every Ann, there is a Nan or a Sari whose story spells destitution, desperation and depravity.

"A lot of street kids ask 'why'? I am king of the road here. Why would I want to go into an institution?" said Tim Hague, international advisor for the Mercy Centre, which is home to 140 children and has 4,000 kids enrolled in 34 pre-schools around Bangkok.

Many kids never get to ask that question. Traffickers force children into anything, from domestic slavery to prostitution to panhandling on the streets.

The more crippled they look, the more money they make begging, a Unicef source in Bangkok said. While he said traffickers usually do not mutilate children, they also have no intentions of getting treatment for any open sores or broken limbs the child might suffer from. It would hurt business.

Traffickers confiscate every penny the kids get. If children try to hide money, they are beaten and sometimes tortured with electric shocks, an aid worker with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Bangkok said.

"Weak law enforcement, corruption among officials and a lack of communication between social workers and law enforcement make it difficult to arrest and prosecute traffickers," the IOM aid worker said.

The "good" news is that aid agencies won't run out of work any time soon. Pick your cause and there is plenty to do.

In the Philippines, at least 1.5 million children live on the streets and almost 18,000 were reported to have been abused in 1999, according to the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). UNICEF estimates there are about 5 million child labourers in the country.

Conflicts in the far-flung archipelago of Indonesia, chiefly in Aceh, Maluku, Central Sulawesi and West Kalimantan have left 350,000 children displaced. In Papa New Guinea, the infant mortality rate for under 5-year-olds is 112 for every 1,000 live births.

In Vietnam, one in three children is underweight. Of the 29,000 new HIV infections in Thailand in 2000, 4,000 were children. In China, there were 117 males for every 100 females, according to the latest census of 1990, which doesn't say what happened to the millions of missing girls.

But these statistics, provided by UNICEF, often tell only half the story. Worldwide, the births of 40 of every 100 kids will not be registered, which makes child protection even more difficult.

Most employers in Cambodia, for example, don't ask for verification of age, with the exception of NGOs, garment factories and other businesses that have been scrutinized in recent years.

Eighty percent of Cambodians live in rural areas without any verification of age after decades of civil war. If needed, fake documents are easily obtained from doctors who are responsible for issuing them, aid workers said.

"We've linked birth registration to child protection because it contributes in many ways to the exploitation that is taking place," Birgithe Lund-Henriksen of UNICEF's child protection section in Indonesia said. "Without proper birth certificates we don't know the proper ages of the children, so implementing regulations against child labour becomes difficult."

Ann does not have to work. She found a home, a domicile where she can stay as long as she is enrolled in school, a sanctuary where people smile at her instead of throwing her against the wall.

But she hasn't forgotten where she came from. Recently, she ran away from the centre with her best friend. Asked, after she came back a few hours later why she ran away and why she took her friend with her, she said she didn't want to forget how to beg on the street. As for her friend, Ann thought it was a good idea she would learn that skill as well.