ZIMBABWE-CHILDREN: Those the Anti-AIDS Campaigners Forget

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Isabella Matambanadzo

HARARE, Jun 5 1996 (IPS) - At the sight of a posh car, a raggedly dressed teenager in mismatched shoes bolts off the pavement onto the road and frantically waves his hands in the air like a traffic officer, motioning to the driver to park in the bay.

“Can I look after your car, bass?” he says.

The driver grumbles an inaudible response and gets out of the vehicle. Without looking at the youth he drops a couple of coins into the dirty palm extended imploringly to him.

Content with having sealed his deal, 15-year-old Stanley Makoni quickly counts the coins, separating silver from copper, and adds them to the rest of the day’s takings in his pocket.

Street children have become a common sight in African cities in recent years. Some come from poor rural families that drifted to urban centres in the hope of finding work only to end up homeless and jobless.

“The street children phenomenon is purely economic,” says Dr. Warren Naamara, Resident Advisor of Family Health International’s Aids Control and Prevention (AIDSCAP) in Zimbabwe. “What they need is money. Maybe it is the structural adjustment we are going through.”

However, there are other factors. Some of the children run away from alcohol, drugs, physical and sexual abuse at home.

Generally, the boys do odd jobs such as guarding parked cars, while the girls beg. But destitution transforms many children of both sexes into easy prey for people who sexually exploit them in exchange for a little money, warm clothes, a pair of old shoes or simply a hot meal.

Stanley Makoni admits one elderly man regularly picks him up. “I go with him at the weekend, usually Friday night. He has lots of cars. He gives me a signal. He drives past and then waits for me near the park,” he told IPS, pointing to the Harare Gardens.

“We watch films of people having sex then we do what they were doing in the film, but first I bath, eat and drink,” he said. “Afterwards he drops me in town and gives me some money, 20 or 30 dollars (two or three U.S. dollars) and says he will come looking for me soon.”

“I do this because I have nothing else to give me money,” Makoni adds. “I try to steal something from the house, but it is not easy. It has to be small and something I can sell fast on the street to get more money.”

The children’s immaturity and powerlessness make them less likely than, for example, commercial sex workers, to insist on condoms. This increases their chances of being infected with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV even though research graphs here have set the HIV/AIDS rates in the 5-15 year-old age group as low, referring to them as the AIDS-free generation.

Henry Gotosa, administrator of the Harare Street Children’s Organisation, refutes that assumption. He recalls one girl who was admitted to his institution. “She was about 12-years-old. She was completely disease ridden,” he says. “I doubt very much that these people will use condoms.”

“In a number of the ones the doctor has examined, there is proof that they have been sexually abused,” he notes. “Some of the abusers are big men, big people, business people. White people are involved, even elderly women are mentioned, and tourists. They take the children home to have intimate relationships with them. Give them some money and put them back on the street.”

“Once a child is exposed on the street those are the things that happen,” says Chideme. “It’s a sensitive area and very difficult. They are not open about it … It’s a very, very big problem. Very few really talk about sexual abuse.”

HIV/AIDS research has yet to focus on street children. “AIDS is a problem on the streets. I feel guilty because we have not really done anything about that,” admits Shepherd Mashayamombe, Director of the Zimbabwe Aids Prevention Project (ZAPP).

Moreover, some street children think AIDS is a make-believe disease or just another by-product of street life, says Rose Chideme, Social Officer at the Anglican Cathedral which runs a feeding scheme for street people. “They will say ‘how different is AIDS from any other disease? How worse can my life get?’ They are 12 or 13-years-old. What does HIV mean to them?”

Africa will enter the next century with just over 30 million cases of HIV infection, the World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Programme on AIDS predicts. It forecasts that the spread of HIV infection will cause life expectancy in many countries to drop drastically by 2010.

In the case of Zimbabwe, the WHO says, average life expectancy is expected to decrease from 69.9 to 39.8 years.

“By 2005 or 2010 the epidemic will have reached an infection ratio of one in every three children,” says Helen Jackson, Director of Southern Africa AIDS information Dissemination Service (SAfAIDS).

“The epidemic is reaching national disaster levels. The point is that it creeps up slowly but the level of the problem is extremely high. None of those other diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis are escalating in the way of HIV,” she adds.

However, the anti-AIDS messages offered so far — use a condom, always have safe sex, stick to one partner — are not enough to deal with the problem of street children.

“We need to develop coping strategies at all levels, both the individual level and the community,”says Gladys Siwela, SAfAIDS Information Officer. “I do not know what we can do to encourage people to come out and speak about HIV and accept it as part of our lives. AIDS must not be seen as being synonymous with death or as just a medical issue. It is an issue which should be on the development agenda.”

Zimbabwe’s government is now drawing up a policy that would make it a criminal offence to knowingly infect someone with HIV or an STD. However, using the law to deter adults who sexually exploit children will be difficult.

“The problem is how do you legally prosecute that person?” says Gotosa. “How do you prove all this? Where do you get the evidence? We passed the information onto the police, and have invited them to investigate but it is very difficult. You can see a child being picked up and that the child is benefiting, but so what. What do you do?

“In court if women are not forthcoming to say ‘I have been raped’, what about a boy to say ‘I am a woman, he is my boyfriend’?”

Tackling the sexual exploitation of children is especially difficult in a country where homosexuality is illegal and President Robert Mugabe last year called homosexuals “dogs” and “pigs”, and more especially in the case of girls when there is little in the way of cultural sanctions over child brides.

“We need to find permanent solutions,” says Gotosa. “The way we are trying to curb that is by removing children from the street and putting them in places of safety. But in some cases the men will follow the children to the institutions. The long-term effect really is that once the children are sexually abused and the combination of that with drugs, they become mentally imbalanced.”

Says Dr Naamara: “It is tragic that we are not targeting them. It is equally tragic that we tend to ignore and stigmatise them and do not look at them as an extremely vulnerable group. I do not know what we can do really.”