Prevalence,
Abuse & Exploitation of Street Children In the first decade of the 21st Century gvnet.com/streetchildren/Paraguay.htm
|
|||||||||||
|
CAUTION: The following links
and accompanying text have been culled from the web to illuminate the
situation in HOW TO USE THIS WEBPAGE Students If you are looking for
material to use in a term-paper, you are advised to scan the postings on this
page and others to see which aspect(s) of street life are of particular
interest to you. You might be
interested in exploring how children got there, how they survive, and how
some manage to leave the street.
Perhaps your paper could focus on how some street children abuse the
public and how they are abused by the public … and how they abuse each
other. Would you like to write about
market children? homeless children? Sexual and labor exploitation? begging? violence? addiction? hunger? neglect? etc. There is a lot to the subject of Street
Children. Scan other countries as well
as this one. Draw comparisons between
activity in adjacent countries and/or regions. Meanwhile, check out some of the Term-Paper resources
that are available on-line. Teachers Check out some of
the Resources
for Teachers attached to this website. ***
FEATURED ARTICLES *** The Specific
Situation Of The Street Children TOS Ministries
International, www.tos-ministries.org/index.php?id=324&L=1 [accessed 3 July
2011] More than 50% of Don Bosco Roga Project for the
People of At one time this
article had been archived and may possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 5 July
2011] In ***
ARCHIVES *** The Department of Labor’s 2004 Findings on
the Worst Forms of Child Labor www.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/tda2004/paraguay.htm [accessed 16
December 2010] CURRENT
GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND PROGRAMS TO ELIMINATE THE WORST FORMS OF CHILD LABOR - The Ministry of
Public Health’s Social Welfare Office has developed ongoing programs that
offer financial help to vulnerable groups including street children. The Government of Spain’s Development
Agency is supporting a program to reform curriculum, provide educational
services to adolescents who do not have a primary school education, and
address the educational needs of street children. Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61737.htm [accessed 10
February 2020] SECTION
6 WORKER RIGHTS
– [d] Although the labor code prohibits work by children under age 14, in
August the press reported government research documenting that approximately
40 percent of the children in primary grades worked in street vending jobs
during school hours in Ciudad del Este. The 2001 census
reported that 5 percent of the workforce was under the age of 14. According
to the NGO Organization for the Eradication of Child Labor (COETI), 265
thousand children, or 13.6 percent of those between the ages of 5 and 17,
worked outside their homes, many in unsafe conditions. In supermarkets, boys
as young as age 7 bagged and carried groceries to customers' cars for tips.
Thousands of children in urban areas, many of them younger than 12 years of
age, were engaged in informal employment, such as selling newspapers and
sundries and cleaning car windows. Many of the children who worked on the
streets suffered from malnutrition and disease and lacked access to
education. Some employers of the estimated 11,500 young girls working as criadas denied them access to education and mistreated
them. According to the Secretariat for Children and Adolescents, many of
these children were also sexually abused. Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child, 12 October 2001 www1.umn.edu/humanrts/crc/paraguay2001.html [accessed 16
December 2010] [47] The Committee
expresses its deep concern at the increasing number of children who are
exploited economically, in particular those under 14 years of age. In
particular, it notes cases of abuse of girls in domestic service and a large
number of children working in the streets, often at night and in unhealthy
conditions, especially in the capital, Asunción. It also notes that ILO
Convention No. 138 concerning Minimum Age for Admission to Employment has not
been ratified. David Vargas, Inter
Press Service News Agency IPS, Pozo Colorado,
Paraguay, Jul 1 2008 www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43576 [accessed 5 July
2011] www.ipsnews.net/2008/07/paraguay-fourteen-years-in-the-wilderness/ [accessed 27
December 2016] According to the
last census, there are 87,000 indigenous people in Paraguay, making up 1.6
percent of the population of six million. (By contrast, 95 percent of
Paraguayans are of mixed-race - predominantly Spanish and Guaraní - descent).
And while 35 percent of the population lives below the poverty line,
according to official figures, native communities are the poorest of the
poor. Lugo also
reaffirmed his campaign pledge to put top priority on fighting poverty. He
said he would "personally" take a hand in improving the lot of the
army of street children cleaning windshields for a few coins or hawking candy
on the streets of the capital. But with regard to
solving this problem, he said "It would not be prudent or responsible to
announce a timeframe. I don't know how long it will take to provide a
response to this situation, and I don't know if we will be able to
definitively do away with the monster of poverty, but I want you to know that
the children will be the personal concern of this president." The
Boys From Paraguay Polly Curtis, The
Guardian, 14 March 2003 www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/mar/14/gapyears.students1 [accessed 5 July
2011] Most of the children
there had parents who lived in the city but couldn't afford to look after
them, were in prison, or had left for Facts
- An International Perspective Re-Solv www.re-solv.org/international.asp [accessed 5 July
2011] The problem of
solvent abuse isn’t confined to the The protection of
street children ECPAT International
Newsletters, Issue No : 47 1/April/2004 At one time this
article had been archived and may possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 5 July
2011] The game of
realities is terrible. It is to be hoped that a country that has a National
Plan of Action against CSEC (Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children)
would search for real solutions to its social problems. Yet plans, codes and
laws run the risk of being little more than papers filed away in bureaucratic
offices, and the media’s coverage of issues related to these plans, codes and
laws is fleeting. El Embudo (The Funnel) Ashoka, Changemakers, April 1999 proxied.changemakers.net/studio/99april/embudo.cfm [accessed 5 July
2011] In 1998, La Casa
launched the publication of the book El Embudo,
which focuses on the experiences and
serious problems facing boys and adolescents in prison. Excerpts from El Embudo are presented here. This is a clandestine book,
assembled over two years. It documents, through secret interviews and
hidden-camera photographs, the abuse and neglect of kids in juvenile prisons. We started to look
at the rural youth who come to the city, face miserable conditions, have no work
and enter into prostitution or delinquency," explained Soares. "We're trying to stimulate a discussion on
the concepts of justice – and how our society condones its own wrong doings” Recommendations on
the Rights of Children - Street Children Org of American
States - Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Annual Report 2001 At one time this
article had been archived and may possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 5 July
2011] 126. The Commission
cannot neglect to mention an extremely serious act that was harmful to street
children, which led to a petition that it received on December 23, 2000. The
arrest on November 27, 28, and 29, 2000, of boys and girls who work in the
streets by juvenile court judge Mercedes Brítez de Buzó ”was a poverty cleansing operation on the streets of
the capital” Rights Of The Child Statement by the
Consortium for Street Children to the fifty-seventh session of the UN
Commission on Human Rights, 7 April 2001 www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/0/e1f099b6b3dbc071c1256ae0004932c1?Opendocument [accessed 5 July
2011] Specific examples
of alleged violations that have come to the attention of the Consortium for
Street Children over the past year include: Paraguay – the inhuman conditions and ill-treatment, sometimes
amounting to torture, endemic in the Panchito López Juvenile Detention Center, as highlighted in a recent
report by Amnesty International (April 2001) and in the report of the Special
Rapporteur on Torture (E/CN.4/2001/66, para. 835) Committee
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights CESCR Concluding Observations International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 14 May 1996 sim.law.uu.nl/SIM/CaseLaw/uncom.nsf/0/e18a32513b924936c125663c00343b4c?OpenDocument [accessed 5 July
2011] 15. The Committee
is particularly concerned about the large number of child workers and street
children in 27. The Committee recommends
that the State party should launch a program, in cooperation with UNICEF and
ILO, to combat the exploitation of child labor and the abandonment and
exploitation of street children. The Institute del
Manana
( Project for the
People of At one time this
article had been archived and may possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 5 July
2011] The Institute del
Manana ( El Abrigo www.projectpy.org/elabrigo.htm [Last access date
unavailable] El Abrigo (The House of
Shelter and Care) is operated by a group of Mennonites in Asuncion. The
shelter is designed for street kids and provides a loving, predictable
atmosphere in which young children thrive. El Abrigo
houses boys and girls ages 6-13 in clean, well kept rooms equipped with
showers, toilets, bunk beds and desks for studying. The staff at the shelter
use a point system with the children to motivate appropriate behavior. All
material used herein reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107
for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use. PLEASE RESPECT COPYRIGHTS OF COMPONENT
ARTICLES. Cite this webpage as: Patt,
Prof. Martin, "Street Children - Paraguay",
http://gvnet.com/streetchildren/Paraguay.htm, [accessed <date>] |
