From the Archives: Street Life
The Plight of Manila’s Street Children, 1990-1992
The United Nations has been attributed as estimating the population of street children worldwide at 150 million. Ranging in age from three to eighteen, about 40 percent of those are homeless.
These images portray the perilous lives of the tens of thousands of children in Manila who make the blighted urban sprawl their homes. As the economy worsens, poverty increases, political violence grows and more and more impoverished rural families are driven from their homes.
It is an indictment of the poverty in the countryside that many people, young and old, still pour into appalling urban shanties for a “better life.” In Manila, options in the city were limited to scavenging for scraps of metal or paper and discarded plastic bottles.
While these photographs were taken more than 20 years ago, recent reports indicate very little has changed concerning the plight of street children in the Philippines as poverty and social instability continue to burden the country.
Despite the country’s robust economic growth in 2014, UNICEF indicates not all groups are benefitting due to severe under-investment in infrastructure and social services.
While government programs and goals remain on track for the Philippines, “nutrition, education and HIV/AIDS (up by 450 percent in 2014), will not be achieved.”
Disparities and inequality among regions continue, particularly in Mindanao, where stunting rates of 40 percent speak to the unevenness of benefits from economic growth.
Prostitution, fueled by poverty, is prevalent in the Philippines. Child prostitution is also widespread and continues to be rampant in the Philippines, where the authorities turn a blind eye in return for bribes.
Ten million children worldwide under the age of seventeen systematically exchange sex for money; millions of others, having been orphaned by the AIDS epidemic and displaced as victims of war, have turned to the streets for their survival.
While the HIV infection rate had stabilized or decreased in most countries, it had risen by more than 25 per cent in the Philippines. For most of them, “infection with HIV is a result of a chain of disadvantages extending back into childhood: violence, exploitation, abuse and neglect — in other words, failures in protection and care.”
If children who have no home manage to survive the streets, there’s no guarantee they’ll survive the justice system.
Children as young as nine years of age are arrested and detained for many months, even while awaiting the resolution of their cases. Most are charged with minor crimes, such as petty theft, drug use, and vagrancy.
In 2005, a UNICEF study indicated that over 4,000 children were in jails and detention centers all over the Philippines, many of them mixed with adults. In Manila street children are subjected to physical abuse by police.
Human Rights Watch describes the situation, “Street children throughout the world are subjected to physical abuse by police or have been murdered outright, as governments treat them as a blight to be eradicated rather than as children to be nurtured and protected.”
“Children are tortured,” continues Human Rights Watch, “or beaten by police and often held for long periods in poor conditions. Girls are sometimes sexually abused, coerced into sexual acts, or raped by police. Street children also make up a large proportion of the children who enter criminal justice systems and are committed finally to correctional institutions that are euphemistically called schools, often without due process. Few advocates speak up for these children, and few street children have family members or concerned individuals willing and able to intervene on their behalf.”
Social instability and uneven distribution of wealth are just two of many other reasons why their numbers will continue to rise, making them vulnerable victims of brutal violence, sexual exploitation, abject neglect, drug addiction, and human rights violations.
All images: Alan Dejecacion
Alan Dejecacion is a photographer based in southern California. Follow him on Flickr, Twitter and Instagram.
Previously on Vantage, Dejecacion has shared his Street Photography , memories of Peshawar and looked back at Laos.
