Street kids issue needs addressing

THE Government has given K4 million to the Child and Family Services (CFS) to address the issue of street children.
And that money will be used to work on programmes for street children and keep CFC data.
The nation’s capital at some point was swarming with beggars, many of them young children.
These children roamed the city streets every day begging for a few kina or leftover food especially at the traffic lights next to Port Moresby’s most modern shopping complex. Others are selling items on the streets.
Children as young as six and five years of age can be seen selling or controlling traffic when one walks or drives down the streets of the city.
Most of these children have never been to school, dropped out of school because their parents could not afford school project fees.
They live in the settlements and are mostly working in groups to earn a living and to get something to eat or to take food home to their siblings.
A survey conducted in 2014 with the National Capital District Commission revealed that only about one per cent of the children were orphans or children in need of protection.
About 90 per cent of children selling items on the streets were being forced to do so.
Worse still, PNG does not have a sustainable child protection system because the required institutions are yet to be fully established.
NOCFS director Simon Yanis was reported in The National last November saying if the institutions were established and made visible, a permanent child protection mechanism could be put in place.
In 2018, a K2 million project was to be implemented by the Office for Child and Family Services which comes under the Department of Community Development, Youth and Religion.
It was to be in partnership with the National Capital District Commission.
The project then was focused on child labour and to find out why some children are roaming around the streets of Port Moresby.
It is over a year and the children are still there.
According to child protection policy, children in PNG continue to engage in the worst forms of child labour, particularly in forced domestic service and commercial sexual exploitation.
These children work long hours, lack freedom of mobility, do not have access to medical treatment and do not attend school, it said.
Sadly, PNG does not have a comprehensive list of hazardous occupations from which children are prohibited.
Additionally, PNG child labour laws are not effectively enforced.
Studies conducted have identified that children became street kids because of violence at home; both parents left without informing the children so the children were abandoned; the parents had died: overcrowding at home; children were sometimes sent out by their parents to look for money, so they worked on the streets of Port Moresby.
To reduce the number of children working and walking on the street, stakeholders need to assist each other by working together and taking a holistic approach to address this issue in totality.
To assist these children and get them into education, they should be removed from the street and be provided with better and more attractive opportunities.
For a lucky country such as Papua New Guinea, it is a disturbing trend that reflects poorly on the nation’s ability to look after its under-privileged people.