Blame & Banishment - Médecins du Monde

Blame and Banishment: The underground HIV epidemic affecting children in Eastern Europe and Central Asia
SECTION III Children of the streets:
The end of childhood…
“Yana was just eight years old when she started living on the streets. Her father, an
alcoholic, died young and she was separated from her mother who was sent to jail. Originally
from Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, Yana wandered through several towns
and eventually ended up on the streets of Odessa, Ukraine. Her ‘home’ was a makeshift shed in
a park. A group of 20 street children built the hideout themselves, the youngest only six years
old. They begged, stole and prostituted themselves to survive. Drugs helped them cope with their
lives. Through sharing needles they also shared HIV. Yana fell sick and died at the age of 13 on
”
the streets of Odessa, addicted to drugs and infected with HIV…
Today, street children in the region are dying of AIDS and drug use in much the same way
as they died of cold, famine and typhoid in the twentieth century. A recent study of 15- to
19-year-old street children in St Petersburg, involving 313 participants, found that almost
40 per cent of them were HIV-positive. Injecting drug use was found to be the strongest
risk factor, with a greater than twentyfold increased risk of HIV. More than half of them (51
per cent) had experience of injecting drug use; 96 per cent were sexually active; and 24 per
cent had more than six sex partners per year. 33 High levels of HIV prevalence have also been
found among street children in studies in Odessa and Donetsk, Ukraine. 34
The phenomenon of street children is not new and has deep historical roots in the region.
During the last century, millions of children were pushed onto the streets during periods of
war, civil unrest and famine. However, as these children were not supposed to exist in a
‘developed socialist society’, there were no official statistics about them. The problem was
kept ‘under control’ through a network of state-run institutions for orphans and neglected
children. Institutionalization was believed to be the best approach to ensuring the wellbeing
of children otherwise doomed and exposed to the dangers of living on the street. The
approach included a police-run department in charge of collection and placement of children
who ran away from homes or orphanages, and a network of closed boarding institutions
where children aged 5–17 were placed. There was little accountability or questioning of any
abuses taking place in such institutions.
31