Do you hear the children crying, o my brothers / 'Ere sorrows come with the years". - Elizabeth Barret Browning.

The answer is no. Many turn deaf ears to whimpers from the growing number of kids who take to the streets to beat poverty, hunger, and sometimes abuse, in their hovels.

"For most street children, the situation is desperate," writes Judith Pomm of Germany's Rhur University Bochum. Penury and strained family life shove many into streets that can be like "war zones." But those "bright lights" offer their only alternative.

Physically visible but mostly unnoticed, ang mga bata sa kadalanan ply sidewalks, hang around malls - begging, collecting garbage, selling "sometimes even their little bodies," she says in a study titled: "At The Margins: Street and Working Children in Cebu City."
But it's implications ripple out to other Philippine cities where the problem first "emerged in the economic recession of the 1980s." The Marcos kleptocracy, by then, had bankrupted the country.

Mga anghel na walang langit ("Angels without a heaven") is how a soap opera dubbed this issue. In Colombia, they call it "gamines." Prickly scientists use the ponderous phrase.

No term captures "this silent slow motion emergency - silent because nobody is surprised and cries out", she notes. But the kids' resilience and coping mechanisms do not outweigh vulnerability "Some children prove strong enough to find their way out, sometimes through institutional help. The majority do not."

So, how many kids roam the streets of this city?

Who knows? These semi-nomads spend intermittent periods with their families. Some abscond from institutions. Others drift from one street to another, even to other provinces. Family crises, jobs, police arrest or rival gangs drive their meanderings.

In 1988, the first surveys "suggested the number of street children could range from two to three percent of the child and youth population of a city." Nationwide, that'd have come up to quarter of a million kids then. Some surveys claim the numbers have dwindled. Really?

The Philippines cobbled an extensive legal and program framework over he years: from the Child and Youth Welfare Code of 1974, to the "Special Protection of Filipino Children Acts" (RA 7610 and 7658) in 1992, the Child and Family Courts Act in 1996 to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

But "law enforcement ( here ) is often a matter of contacts and money and thus the privilege of a minority," the study notes. The UN convention "has the weakest base in practice because law enforcement mechanisms are largely underdeveloped"

Lack of hard data and monitoring makes evaluation of many programs difficult. Unofficial estimates peg implementation and quality at 20% to 40%. So, the problem persists.

"Poor desperate street children spoil the illusion of a well-managed city." So, officials forcibly shove kids into "houses of safety." They stress their criminal potential, e.g. "they scratch parked cars".

Structural injustices are ignored. "Homelesness gets confused with delinquency and seems to provide automatic grounds for arrest. Tacitly counting on public approval, two main justifications are offered: the first is vagrancy; the second mendicancy." These arbitrary interventions are cloaked with terms like "Operation Love."

This anchors into 'ubiquitous Catholic and domestic family ideals:" that family is secure, a place of love and care; the kalye are sites of danger and dirt. "(But these) ideals have little to do with the real life situation of poor families whose children roam the streets." Discourse is whittled down to either "normal children in homes or deviant bata sa kadalanan stereotypes.

Such reaction "does not address root causes that shove them into the streets in the first place. After custodial sentences, children return to the streets." The need is for early intervention and more prevention. "Once children settle down into street life, it is extremely difficult to bring them back."

Mothers must be supported to make their own choices and gain access to social services. Agencies include street children in planning but exclude them in practice.

Immunizations don't reach footloose street children. They rarely know about vocational training workshops and tend to drop out. Barriers like birth certificates, school records, parental signatures, etc must be dismantled, if kids are to get services.

Rights of children are encoded in laws blind to constraints that children face in real life.

Child labor is illegal to protect them from exploitation. But it "impedes their finding a living in a legally secured way. They are further impoverished and endangered into being sucked by illicit activities".

Officials pretend that clearing streets of begging children "protects them." (This) hides the fact that society actually wants to be protected from these children." the study asserts. These are different ways people detach themselves, socially and emotionally, from the children's reality.

"Demonizing them supports the justification that one does not have to bother with them," it adds Indifference, disgust or pity, "appears the most common reaction" of ordinary citizens.

An Ibanag proverb sums it all up: "He who is indifferent to the cry of he helpless will, in the future, shed tears and no one will listen."

(E-mail: juan_mercado@boholchronicle.com)