How many?

Street kids... do you also immediately think of Latin-America, the glue sniffers in Brazil and Colombia? Not entirely untrue: the street kids in Latin-America are indeed the best known examples. It is here that the phenomenon has taken dramatic portions, with Brazil leading the way. It is difficult to judge the numbers of street kids, for they are hard to count. As a result, estimations vary very widely. A lot of street children are not registered at birth by their parents. Therefore, they officially do not exist. Fact of the matter is that too many children are forced to survive on the streets. For Brazil alone, estimations vary from 7 up to 17 million.


In every country

But street kids and adolescents can be found everywhere, perhaps fewer here and more there, but they are there...on the streets of the big cities...on all continents, far from our reality, but for those willing to see, also closer to home. Rio de Janeiro or Cape Town, Antwerp or Bucharest, Guatemala or La Paz... Street kids are a reality on all continents, though there are big differences in numbers, causes, and nature of the issue. Genuine street kids actually living on the streets are rather rare in industrialized countries, although you now read about 10 year old Eastern-European refugees in Antwerp too. In our regions, however, we are talking mainly about street adolescents.


The numbers keep growing

The phenomenon of street children is not a new one and has popped up through the course of history, for example after wars or (natural)disasters. However, urbanisation, one of the main causes of the phenomenon, has led to a huge increase in the number of street children in the cities.

And the number of street kids will continue to grow all over the world, if poverty keeps rising, the Aids epidemic keeps growing and armed conflicts keep increasing and escalating. Due to the increase in number of street kids, violence and aggression towards these children also keeps growing.

How can it be that a civilisation that can send spacecrafts and satellites into space is not capable of taking care of its own children?