Street children.

Age: under 18, and live in the streets of a city

Reasons: migratory flows, poverty, social disintegration, abandonment and domestic

violence

Places: where street children can be seen in Mexico City are at the junctions of
streets and avenues, in markets and in metro stations. Less frequently, they can be
found in parks, shopping areas, tourist areas, bus terminals.

Consequences: discrimination, drug use, exploitation, prostitution.

Activities: gangs, members of organized crime,

civil society organisations: rather than achieving the goal of reintegrating the street
children into their families or into society, has only succeeded in entrenching them
further into the streets, where they end up using the welfare programs as just another
means of obtaining resources to survive

Specific cases:

'Rat Kid' children who sleeps in the sewers, live in extreme poverty, sniff glue, wash
wind screens for money. These poor souls are located in the famous zocalo square,

Main problem:

The use of drugs, specific consume solvents results in permanent brain damage, for
this reason the possible treatment and reinsertion became more difficult.

The intrafamily violence/domestic violence is almost a constant in the majority of the

cases. We have to comprehend that the psychological and physical violence are
very significate, but the economical violence is important to.

Some solutions:

Make social programs to prevent the problem, focusing on the poor areas, archive
this through psychological evaluations in the schools, detecting the more vulnerable
cases and bring help.
Another options are build places to accommodate the children and bring them
education a home and food. But this will involve some obligations, like studying and
do social work to make the children aware of the situation on the country and prevent
them to return to the streets.

Some extra options are given economical support to the poor zones, programs to
encourage the children to keep studying, train agents to attend domestic violence,
perform stricter evaluations for and by social workers.

A detailed investigation carried out by our partner organisation in Puebla has shown
that there are a large number of homeless children with learning disabilities living in
overcrowded orphanages and children's homes in Puebla City (pop. 2 million). They
lack care and attention, as well as the specialist help necessary for them to progress.
They are often on high doses of medication such as tranquilisers or Ritalin which
they may not necessarily need. This stems from the misconception that learning
disability is an illness rather than a condition.

Without education and training they have no chance of finding employment, and will
spend the rest of their lives homeless, within these orphanages, abandoned and
unwanted. The aim of Mexico Child Link is to help the child or young person with
learning disability to become as independent as possible.