Developing Policies for Children Living on the Streets
The International Center for Research and Policy on Childhood at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (CIESPI at PUC Rio) is in the middle of an exciting project to use a federally mandated strategy to improve policies and practices for children in the situation of the streets.
The International Center for Research and Policy on Childhood at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (CIESPI at PUC Rio) is in the middle of an exciting project to use a federally mandated strategy to improve policies and practices for children in the situation of the streets. This latter term (hereafter simply street children for brevity) refers to children and youth who have loose connections to home, community and school; who spend much of their days on the streets but who generally do not sleep on the streets. The vast majority of children seen hustling on the streets in Brazilian cities fall into this category of being in the situation of the streets rather than being twenty-four hours a day street children.
The Brazilian Statute of the Child and Adolescent (1990) which established a comprehensive list of specific rights for children also created a new strategy to assist the implementation of those rights. In an effort to decentralize and broaden participation in policy and budget decisions, the Statute mandates the creation of Children's Rights Councils (Conselhos de Direitos da Crianca e do Adolescente) and Guardianship Councils (Conselhos Tutelares) in most of the country's nearly 5,000 municipalities. The Children's Rights Councils are responsible for the implementation of the Statute at the policymaking and judicial levels. These councils are made up of an equal number of representatives from civil society (NGOs) and from relevant government departments. The Councils, however, currently lack sufficient resources and the support to shape significant programs for change.
The first goal of this project was to assist the Children’s Rights Council in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro to improve its draft policy guidelines about street children and to facilitate the adoption of the guidelines. We are pleased to report that the Rio Council formally adopted the new policy guidelines in June 2009, and that the guidelines contain specific and concrete goals for eight municipal departments and the nonprofit sector to improve the condition of street children. CIESPI’s role in this process included providing the Council with the most up to date background data and research on street children and more broadly vulnerable children in urban Brazil, facilitating the participation of the nonprofit sector in the Council’s work, and facilitating the work of the entire Council and its subcommittee on street children to develop the final proposal. CIESPI staff attended all the relevant Council meetings and all the subcommittee meetings and provided those two groups with detailed minutes of previous meetings to facilitate the groups’ subsequent discussions. CIESPI will now assist the Council in the dissemination of the policy and in the development of strategies to implement it.
The project marks several “firsts”. It is the first time that any municipality in Brazil has developed a policy on street children through the mechanism of Children’s Rights Councils. With CIESPI’s assistance, the policy is grounded in the most recent policy research on this group of children. This is also the first time that an independent research organization like CIESPI has been invited to document the process of making and implementing an important municipal policy.
CIESPI is capitalizing on the experience of working with the Children Rights Council in Rio, by inviting key people involved with Children’s Rights Councils in other cities in Brazil to learn from the Rio experience and to share their home city experiences of trying to formulate policies for street children. These cities are in the states of Amazonas, Pernambuco, Maranhão, Bahia, Rio Grande do Sul, Goiás, Espírito Santo, and São Paulo. In April 2009, participants from these states participated in the first of three annual conferences to discuss their Councils’ work on policies for street children. The CIESPI team is playing different roles in the different cities depending on the local situation, needs and opportunities.
The project has also created international interest in light of the widespread disjunction between the legal rights of children (as described, for example, in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child) and the implementation of those rights. We also note that in Brazil, for example, while Article 19 of the Statute on the Child guarantees the right of all children and adolescents to live in the context of their families and communities, children on the streets by definition do not enjoy that right.
In November, CIESPI director Irene Rizzini (co-coodinator of the project with Paula Caldeira) will be using material from the project in a working conference organized by the Human Rights Program at the Law School of Harvard University on Children as Citizens. The same month, professor Rizzini will be a keynote speaker in Paris at an event organized by the Air France Foundation in collaboration with UNESCO on the Foundation’s work on vulnerable children and the launching of a documentary on street children. The project will also be discussed at the Childwatch International Conference Children’s Rights at a Crossroads in the roundtable discussion on Research, Policy and Practice to take place in Addis Ababa (November 30 – December 2, 2009).
For more details on the project including the project’s first two news bulletins, visit the CIESPI web site at: www.ciespi.org.br.
