50,000 STREET KIDS in MOSCOW!!!!

[jutka]

By Sarah Rainsford in Moscow


Slouched against the station wall, Dima takes a defiant drag on his cigarette.

His fingernails are encrusted with dirt, his oversized red anorak grubby and torn. He is now 13, and has been living rough in Moscow for four months.

"My stepfather's an alcoholic. He used to shout at me and hit me. So I left. Now I live here, at the station. I sleep on central heating pipes, or on a train. The police sometimes pick us up, but they always let us out again."


Leningrad station, like most in Moscow, is dotted with tiny figures like Dima. They wander among the crowds begging money, or loiter near cafes angling for leftovers.

In the darker recesses, boys - some are just five or six years old - bury their noses in plastic bags, sniffing glue.

'Street army'

President Vladimir Putin has called the rise in the number of bezprizorniki, or street children, a "threat to national security" and ordered the government to take action.


Officials here estimate there are as many as 50,000 children living on the streets of the Russian capital, begging, stealing and sometimes selling themselves to get by.

That is more than were left homeless and orphaned after World War II.

Today though, the majority of them have at least one living parent. While they have turned, in most cases, to drink or violence, the authorities have turned away.

MORE...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/wor...00/1780436.stm