“ The child who is hungry must be fed; the child that is sick must be helped; the child who is backward must be helped; the delinquent child must be reclaimed; and the orphan and waif must be sheltered and succoured.”

Begging Children

For those of you who have visited India, you will have undoubtedly seen many slums on your travels. People who have come from other states. Many of the children can earn between 10 to 40 rupees a day working in the markets selling plastic to customers. They have to find their own food and clothes, and many therefore take to the streets to work or beg. This is a never-ending cycle, with a complete lack of education and family support. These children will have no hope of ever breaking out of the poverty they have been born into.

Surviving Childhood:

We should not forget how many children simply do not physically survive their childhood. Some of the children die as a result of deliberate and direct human aggression or neglect; but the greater majority die from easily preventable or curable diseases. Some children find their lives so difficult that they try to take their own lives.

Children are apprentice citizens rather than fully constituted members of the social world. Children’s lack of status rules them out from being viewed as ‘ social ‘. We value children highly in emotional terms but deem them ‘useless’ in any formal since, excluding their contributions from measurements of work and production and making them invisible in statistics, debates and policy-making. We may want to educate children for freedom and democracy but mostly they experience control and discipline. What is happening here ?. Children have the right to participate in the family, school, community and society. Children are right holders.

Childhood is a relatively neglected area of the social sciences. ‘A child s goal is to be successful. Children are not in-competent member of Adult society; they are component members of their own society……….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under Events, Feature Stories, Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.