ST. PETERSBURG, Russian Federation (ILO Online) - They linger in the subways, the train stations, the central squares of St. Petersburg and other big cities in Russia. They wash cars, carry heavy loads at the local markets, beg in strategic places, and many of the girls are involved in prostitution. They are street children.
They have become part of the urban landscape and people hardly think about these children - where they come from, how they make a living, whether they suffer or not. Even their exact numbers are not known. According to official sources, there are between 50,000 and 55,000 working street children in Moscow and around 16,000 in St. Petersburg. Probably the most reliable estimate of the proportion of street children comes from Volgograd where a recent IPEC study identified 7,000 working children in the region's 2.5 million population.
Most of street children have families but for various reasons they work on the streets, doing dangerous and sometimes illegal work, some of them working under slave-like conditions.
Anya is one of these children. When her parents died, she had to edge out a living on her own. Social workers tried to convince her to go to an orphanage, but Anya refused. The neighbours did not care about the girl. She decided to stay with her grandmother who lived in a suburb, but they quarrelled and Anya did not stay with her.
She practically abandoned school; she had no money left to make a living. Like many other street girls she ended up in prostitution.
"Please don't think that I am a prostitute, it is because I was starving", Anya told a psychologist at the local youth employment centre called Vector. The centre is working closely together with an ILO-IPEC project on social rehabilitation of working street girls in several districts of St. Petersburg.
Two hundred girls aged 12 to 17 living at the edge of society received social and psychological assistance since 2001, and acquired professional skills in wood, cotton cloth and leather design and computer skills. An important element of the project was working together with the families of the children.
Another innovative IPEC project was implemented in the Vsevolozhsky district of the Leningrad region. The project was based on the local social rehabilitation centre and included four modules: street social service; rehabilitation of working street girls; mutual assistance groups; and medical service.
"We have developed and tested social rehabilitation models for working street girls and their families - models that did not exist in Russia before", explains IPEC project coordinator Alexey Boukharov. "For instance, social workers in Russia do not make any distinction in the rehabilitation methods for boys and girls: the documents and instructions for the social services call them all 'teenagers'. Needless to say, how important it was do develop special programmes for working street girls and how effective they turned out to be in the end. Now all our models are available for replication in other cities and regions of Russia".
"The Russian Federation has ratified ILO Conventions No.182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, and No.138 on Minimum Age. The country's child labour legislation is up-to-date", says child labour expert Klaus Guenther from IPEC. "Efforts should concentrate now on the implementation, on bringing the legal provisions in line with everyday practice of social services and other bodies that are dealing with street children in Russia", he adds.
In 2006, the IPEC project for working street girls was completed, but the work goes on. In May this year, IPEC launched two new projects - this time in the Vyborgsky district of the Leningrad region - aimed at preventing child street labour through working with the children themselves, and - most importantly - with their families who will be supported by improving their living conditions and creating new employment opportunities. As in the previous project, a prevention model will be developed for the future replication by the social services.
Today Anya is a vocational school student. She does not like to recall her past, and maybe that is the reason why she does not visit the Vector centre too often. But the centre has already given her the most important thing - a chance for a new start in life.