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Street Girls: Beyond 'at risk'! We often refer to street children as “at risk” or “vulnerable” but is this far I was driving through a residential area of Durban this week when I saw three street girls that I have a longstanding friendship with. Excitedly they ran towards my car and we exchanged greetings. All three of them are girls that our street team are currently working with. Today these girls, who are between the age of ten and sixteen, were in a different part of the city to where they normally live. I asked them why. “We are running from David (not his real name), he is raping us. We are scared” David is a youth in his twenties who has just returned from prison, he terrorises the younger children beating boys and raping girls when he is drunk. When girls who have been living on the streets in the Point are of Durban are test for HIV we rarely hear of a negative result. They live in one of the highest risk categories possible for contracting the disease. What does this actually mean? What is these children’s reality? Zodwa (not her real name) ran to the streets partly due to the fact that her mother had sold her for sex to a man who raped her. She was nine. At 11 she tested HIV+. Traumatised, she ran to the streets in the vain hope of escape. When a girl arrives in the streets it is only a matter of a short amount of time before they attract interest. Usually it is a boy or young person living on the streets who sees the opportunity for a girlfriend. This can mean rape, coerced sex or even fully consented sex. Often the young boy is not sinister but acting on normal teenage impulses albeit in a very abnormal and anarchic environment. This can result in sexual activity almost immediately. Other times when a girl arrives in the streets she falls victim to older youth and other men. She is hungry, disorientated and desperate and will do literally anything to survive or feel “protected”. Sexual contact often happens on the first night of being on the streets. Sometimes there are old men who “hang around” groups of street children in order to exploit them. For many, the first night on the streets is a new chapter in the rape experience in their lives. There is always someone there, ready for “new arrivals”. Zodwa has learnt, over the years, to survive through prostitution and the support of her boyfriends and fellow “group” members. At first as a young girl she sniffed glue to smother the fear and physical pain inflected on her from street life. Overtime she learnt to cope, perhaps by building a wall in her mind. She still huffs glue most of the day. The corner that they live on is a busy one near the port of Durban. Truck drivers stop at night and beckon her and her friends to the car. Zodwa who is 16 now, “work” involves performing sexual acts on truck drivers and local men alike, or, letting them penetrate her fragile body. Despite being sick, all she has is her body. She knows that she must be prepared to do anything. Survival is the driving force. She will get out of the vehicle with enough money to buy food for her and her friends, and buy enough glue to forget. She has sexually transmitted diseases and does not even know what is wrong with her or that she needs to treat these. If you ask her about this “work”, she is ashamed. She thinks that she is the naughty one engaging in such activities. She sees herself as the dirty one. She takes deeper huffs of glue. Sometimes she gets really sick. She rolls up into a ball under a blanket of old clothes and cardboard on the street corner, shutting the world out for days on end. Her friends bring her food. She gets thin. Sleep is an escape. She is bright and informed, she knows exactly they type of things that happen when you have fully blown AIDS. She waits, just her and her glue bottle. Her friend Patricia (not her real name), who is desperately thin and clearly sick, survives in the same way. She is 13 but looks about 11. The look in her eye is of a gazelle caught in the headlights. She has given up trying to process life and lives in the moment…or trying to escape it. She endlessly draws on the glue bottle deadening the reality of her life. As I look at her I desperately look for the happy ending. I scratch for a scenario that enables me to remove myself from the reality of knowing that she will soon be dead. Even life is giving up on her. Her reality is one of suppressed pain. It’s so sad that I find myself fleeing to a part of my consciousness where an override facility stops me connecting the real and present to the trigger switch of my emotions. I begin to hope that there is no God because if there is, he has chosen to ignore this street corner. Both of these girls can show you their stab wounds. Stabbed by older boys or girls during fights, sometimes even by their boyfriends They will tell you stories about being hurt by police, security guards and other citizens. They can tell you about their friend Mbali, who was being beaten up on their very street corner; a fight about glue. She tried to escape but ran straight into the path of a car. She was killed at age 13. They loved her. They may tell you of their other friend Sarafina who suffered from AIDS related TB for many months on the streets, skin and bones, finally to die at age 16. They loved her too. They will tell you of the cruel words of passers by, the anger of local businessmen who want them to move on, people who laugh and call them names. Their stories are a series of indictments on society. These girls are considered the rubbish of society by many, de facto criminals, immoral, the filthy, diseased and somehow subhuman. Very few people see through the stereotypes heaped upon street children to see human children crying out for love, affection, dignity, safety and a better life. Their reality is our shame. Zodwa has just had her first child. The father is another street boy. For a brief moment, a few months, they are in love. The bashful flashing of glances between the two is reminiscent of many young relationships. Smiles, caressing, touch. Love is so powerful. She laughs, her smile broad enough, for a moment, to distract us from her scars, sores and thin frame. A few months later, he is gone, who knows where? But that is street-life, temporary. Zodwa and Patricia are real children, with real emotions. Broken, and broken again, they live in a punch-drunk state from physical and sexual violence combined with the effects of glue sniffing. They are victims. Defenceless. Defeated. They are not at risk or vulnerable. It has gone beyond that. I think about these words “vulnerable” and “at risk”. How sanitised they sounds. Why are we afraid to say more suitable words and phrases like brutalised, crushed, manipulated, expendable, afflicted or oppressed? What will it take to stand in solidarity with Zodwa and Priscilla? Are we ready to join the struggle for the liberation of street children? This will mean frontline action; it will be political and will upset some. But for the sake of children like Zodwa and Patricia, and the sake of our own humanity, let’s join together to bring a revolution in the way street children are perceived and treated. I have worked with street children for over fifteen years. One of the most disconcerting realities of this work is the fact that I feel like I am outliving many of the children that I have known. The following girls have lost their lives whilst living in the streets of Durban and East London, South Africa: Felicity…TB/AIDS (East London) Note: This list does not include girls who have disappeared and have not been heard of since. Tom Hewitt
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