Paper
Children’s vulnerability, institutional dependency and reintegration: a dialectic cultural response
- issue: Issue 3 / 2008
- authors: Barnabe D’Souza
- keywords: India
- views: 3929
- downloaded: 0
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abstract
Background. According to Unicef a 100 million street children live and work on the streets around the world. For a long time, providing institutional care was the guiding principle for dealing with the street children phenomenon. Recently, there has been a tendency to limit institutionalization of street children in residential care services, as often it is difficult for them to integrate effectively in society once they reach adulthood. Around the world, alternatives to institutionalization are being sought. The trend is to look at alternate care systems that are designed to support individuals within families, which are proving to be more beneficial and less expensive than institutionalization. A family setting provides a medium for the transmission of values through shared experiences. Initiatives carried out in other parts of the world such as Africa, Latin America and Europe have shown that these alternate care systems allow harmonious development of children, and lead to their full inclusion in society.
India has an estimated street children population of 18 million (Unicef 1999). Shelter Don Bosco, a non profit organization in the city of Mumbai, India, has been working with this marginalized group for the past 20 years. Research carried out at its residential facility highlighted that 85% of the boys are dependent on the organization. Exit policies and weaning away from the institutional home have reduced this dependency by a mere 25%-30%.
Strategies targeted directly to children in the street tend to be sustaining street living and ineffective in helping reintegration and rehabilitation. Measures to construct sound solutions that address the underlying causes of the street children phenomenon are lacking.
Interventions in community care model have proved to arrest potential migration, runaways and its concomitant problems. A community care model, based on the preventive pedagogy, aims at pre-empting crisis rather than a symptomatic response. The response is more a tackling of the root causes: poverty and family related factors.
In Mumbai alone there are an estimated 2 million children who live in the slums, and are at risk of engaging in street life. The need is alternative care models using education as an effective tool, for those vulnerable children who are neglected due to alcoholism, abandonment, marital discord and other allied family dysfunctionalism.
Method. Since the past two years, Shelter Don Bosco's project 'Akshar Dhara' in collaboration with 'Reach India' has been working with slum children in Mumbai. The project focused upon identifying and recruiting teachers from the community, building their capacities and skills, such that they would be able to contribute towards the psychosocial and cognitive development of children as an alternative to family adult supervision.
Key findings. Empirical evidence of project outcomes indicated that a total of 1616 children have been enrolled in the educational classes being conducted in 42 different slum pockets in Mumbai. The drop out rate of approximately 48% is ascribed to factors such as displacement, demolitions, permanent or seasonal migration, largely beyond individual control. This project has been able to ensure that a care system (consisting of 42 local teachers) has evolved within the slum communities, where training is imparted to community adults (local resources) in supervising the children in after class hours. In another urban slum development project, Shelter Don Bosco has been working to promote the holistic development of children and their families by undertaking a series of family-centered initiatives. The formation of one senior citizens' group and two women's groups (of 10 persons per group) to take care of the children in the community underlies the fact that through the adoption of strategies of community development and education, care systems put in place in communities through the formation of core "support" groups to take care of the young and prevent them from taking to the streets. The current school drop out rate for the community children is only 4.34%. The 70% of adolescent drop out girls are undergoing special reintegration into school educational programme.
Implications. The paper advocates that in situations where the family is absent due either to death or separation, provisions should be made for long term childcare without uprooting the child from the context he or she is familiar with. The present paper provides evidence based research to support the effectiveness of the community care alternatives to institutionalization.
Research from Shelter Don Bosco[1], Mumbai, India emphasizes that, dependency on institutions is a norm with children in long term institutionalized residential care (especially those involved in a formal education system). A clearly defined Exit policy needs to be put in place, with measures and goals to be achieved in set periods of time. The active participation of all three levels of personnel involved in the care of the child. The management, care givers and the children need to follow a participatory model of approach (D'Souza. B. 2005).
Alternate models of care in more non-institutionalized settings are more cost effective as well as individual based. Our research, within the slum communities in Mumbai, proves the evidence that, a community care alternative is one such model that gets the participation of the community in the growth and care of the child.
Key references
D'Souza, B. (2005). Adolescent Alcoholism Prevention vis-a-vis Community Development: A Model. In D'Souza, B., Sonawat, R., & Madangopal, S. (Eds.), Adolescent Issues and Perspectives (pp.161-178). Shelter Don Bosco Research, Documentation and Training Centre, Mumbai.
D'Souza, B. (2005). Pivoting Peripheries. Mumbai: Shelter Don Bosco Research, Documentation and Training Centre.
Shelter Don Bosco, Mumbai India; http//:www.shelterdonbosco.org.
UNICEF in INDIA, 1999-2002. Challenges and opportunities. Indian Country Office Publication, NewDelhi.
Contacts: Barnabe D'Souza, Shelter Don Bosco, Wadala, Mumbai - 400 031 India, E-mail: dsouzabarnabe@gmail.com or ifcu@vsnl.net, Phone 0091 22 2415 0562 or 0091 22 2416 33 43.
[1]. http//:www.shelterdonbosco.org