Say Yes, Spring 2005: Yusuf Kulca

Yusuf Kulca, Director of the Umut Çocukları (Children of Hope) NGO grew up in an orphanage. Having spent the first three years of adulthood living on the streets, he trained in child education and subsequently worked as a journalist before establishing Umut Çocukları in 1992. Umut Çocukları works to re-integrate children who live on the street with their families and society.

It is not surprising that numbers of street children in Turkey are reaching such high levels when available statistics show that roughly 15 million families live on the poverty line and 9 million children live with families who are at risk. These factors, coupled with a general weakening of the family unit and the concurrent increase in divorce rates are directly linked to the rising numbers of children on the streets.

Civil Courts generally give custody of children to the mother but most women are not sufficiently well off to handle the family upkeep on their own. In rural areas especially, women are not well educated, they lack skills and are deprived in most respects. So they have to take poorly paid work to supplement what little alimony that they might get from their ex-husbands.

Of course the capacity of these mothers to provide care is compromised and if they should re-marry, the children possibly face harassment, violence and abuse in their new family environment -- circumstances that can easily lead them to take to the streets.

The failure to keep children at school also contributes to the problem. Securing the full cycle of eight years compulsory basic education for every child would go a long way towards addressing the issue but, sadly, we have yet to see this properly implemented.

Another ‘trigger’ on the rising numbers of children on the streets has been the wave of ‘uncontrolled migration’ to the towns and cities. In the past, migrating families used to settle into a new location with the help of relatives or friends but patterns of migration in recent years generally tend to break with this tradition. Large numbers of street children in cities and towns are from families destabilised by migration, vulnerable to all kinds of potentially destructive influences without the support of helpful intermediaries.

The role of television as a feature of modern life is well-documented the world over -- especially for the poorer sectors of society where the options for entertainment and diversion are limited. And the children of the poor are just as susceptible to the more sensational influences of television, film and music videos as the children of their wealthier peers. Dazzled by the quite naturally high expectations of youth, hungry to break out of the poverty trap, they are easily exploited by gangs who cynically traffic or push them into breaking the law.

The media could be a more positively influential medium on our families -- a bridge between us and our aspirations. But all too often they fall short on this score. The routine documentation and dramatisation of war, murder, crime, drug abuse and dysfunctional relationships on film, in print and in music reduce the more sordid aspects of our humanity to the everyday. The general effect is an entirely inappropriate sense of normalcy that inures us to issues which we should question rather than absorb as a template for acceptable behaviour.

The education and support of families is as important in keeping children off the streets as the education of the children themselves. The social services need to focus on what is going on within the family -- informing them about contraception and also about the most effective ways of raising and educating what children they have.

Visit the Umut Çocukları web site (Turkish only).

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