Homelessness and Children

Homelessness and Children

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,