Around the world millions of children are found homeless, sleeping in the streets, under bridges, or on deserted properties. Their days are spent hustling by prostitution or petty crimes. They prey on each other as well as people passing by that they manage to steal from. Yet still this is home to these children, where they are deprived of the most basic human needs, housing, food, and clothing. Since they have no family or relatives and no hope for the future, they have been tagged “Nobody’s Children” or “Throw away Kids”, living each day as if it were the last, causing them to become outlaws, which as a result is a threat to the security of the community we live in.
There are various reasons that children are found homeless, ranging from their own desire to leave home to become independent of their parents rules, to broken marriage where the father is absent from the family which is the most likely cause. However some parents are irresponsible in caring for their children. Some parents beat them, sexually abuse them, or throw them out of the family into the streets to fend for themselves, resulting in the child feeling that he or she is better off by his or her self, even living on the streets. Statistics show that sixty percent of the homeless children between eight and seventeen years of age use hallucinating substances, forty percent use alcoholic beverages, sixteen percent are drug addicts, and ninety two percent use tobacco products. In an effort to belong and be loved many of these homeless children find themselves becoming family members to gangs promoting further negativity in their lives.
Since they don’t have any marketable skills, they often survive by begging, stealing, and selling their bodies for money. It is not easy to help homeless children because the majority of them are afraid, and they refuse to submit information to authorities. Some homeless children have managed to escape from the homeless condition because of help from kind people and their own willingness to learn and work to overcome the anxieties and insecurities that homelessness offered them. There have been efforts on the part of organizations to solve the problem by means of charities, foster homes, orphanage, and reform. But in spite of these efforts and funds expended by the government the problem continues to rise because solving today’s housing problems and meeting tomorrows housing needs prove to be an overwhelming task for the government because the problem of housing shortage and homelessness is not an isolated issue. Other problems such as population growth, poverty, unemployment, and inflation has to be addressed and without successfully handling these problems there doesn’t seem to be much hope for the homeless whether he or she is adult or child having what is basic to human needs: shelter.
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