We've heard a great deaf recently about the lives of children in Irish orphanages in the 1950s but what of children's lives today? Is life here improving for vulnerable children in particular? Focus Point's experiences suggests that it is not.
IN THE first three months of this year Focus Point's Outreach/Streetwork Team contact with no less than 42 different homeless children aged 12 to 17 who were out on Dublin's streets and had nowhere to go that night. We do not make contact with homeless children so the real total is much higher than this.
The team which is one of a number of services for people out of home run by Focus Point works on the streets of Dublin, mainly at night, making contact with young homeless people.
The aim of the work is to develop a trusting relationship where advice, guidance and accommodation options may be offered to them. The root cause of a child's homelessness lies in a breakdown within a family relationship which makes it impossible for the child to continue to live in the family home. She or he may have to leave because of sexual or physical abuse or because of violence between the parents - or because their parents may not be able to provide them with the love and care they need. Poverty, unemployment, education take up and bad housing add enormously to the pressures on families struggling to provide for their children.
For some children the path to homelessness includes a period in care. Most people would think that the support and guidance a child in care receives would prevent her or him becoming homeless. But this is not so. The most recent figures available (1993) show that 42 per cent of homeless children in the Eastern Health Board area had previously been in care. This disturbing figure suggests that the care system is failing some children.
Homeless children, all of whom are vulnerable and frightened, get sucked into the street scene in a matter of days. They tell Focus Point staff of the pressures to become involved in crime, drug abuse and prostitution and of long nights of exhaustion, terror and hopelessness. Some sleep in squats, others sleep in derelict houses, in buses or cars, or on the streets.
But despite all this Focus Point's experience is that if homeless children are given a real opportunity to make use of accessible, professional services' and to form constructive relationships they can and do make positive choices about their lives and move away from the streets.
The tragedy is that the range of services that homeless children need are simply not there. A child who is homeless out of office hours has to go to a Garda station (and for a variety of reasons some young people will refuse to do so) where gardai will contact the Eastern Health Board's Out of Hours Social Work Service. The child may then face a very long wait before a referral to a hostel is made - if a bed is available. The Out of Hours Service has access to only six emergency beds, and Focus Point has documented cases of homeless children who had spent the entire night in a Garda station because there were no beds available. Some children, faced with this, return to the streets in despair.
It is no only during the night that homeless children need services, they need them during the day too. And here again, adequate services are not available.
"The Eastern Health Board run day facility, which was based in Dublin city centre and could only cater for a small number of children has been moved (we are told temporarily) to a location outside the city centre and is in accessible to many homeless children who congregate in the city centre. Focus Point's coffee "shop is being used increasingly by children as our Young Persons Drop in Centre. We are doing what we can but we cannot and should not have to pick up tem of care for homeless children.
WHAT is needed as a matter of extreme urgency is a comprehensive child centred service for homeless children which is geared to meet their educational, social, emotional, financial and human needs. That is to say a service which, unlike a Garda station, is designed with children in mind. It needs to be genuinely accessible to them, where they can be received in safety and comfort. Such, a service must operate as a genuine partnership between the voluntary and statutory sector.
Essential elements of this include accessible full time day care more emergency and short term beds specialised units for children with particular needs more preventative work with families a re evaluation of the care system.
Section 3 of the Child Care Act 1991 requires health boards "to promote the welfare of children in its area who are not receiving adequate care and protection". The needs of homeless young people urgently require that the spirit and meaning of the law be implemented fully. Additional resources will be required to enable the health boards and the voluntary sector to establish a comprehensive service. The Government must provide those resources now.