80pc children on street victims of abuse in Bangladesh: UNICEF

Staff Reporter :
The most common perpetrators of abuse and harassment against children on street are pedestrians. Alarmingly, 80 per cent of children living on streets are victims of abuse or harassment by pedestrians, UNICEF discloses.
It also reports, more than 30 per cent incidents of violence, reported by children occurred during their night-time sleep.
Street children in Bangladesh are living with deprivation, acute poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, and violence.
This information revealed in a publishing ceremony of the Survey on Street Children 2022, by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) with the support from United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) at Statistics Building Auditorium in capital’s Agargoan area on Monday.
Planning Minister MA Mannan was the chief guest at the ceremony and the State Minister of Planning, Shamsul Alam was the special guest.
The event presided over the Director General of BBS Md. Matiar Rahman. Final report of the survey was released in the presence of UNICEF Bangladesh Representative Sheldon Yett.
Based on first-hand reports from a sample of 7,200 children aged 5-17 years, the survey was conducted after covering hotspots in
Dhaka and in the country’s eight divisions.
According to the survey, most of these children are boys, and the majority end up on the streets either due to poverty or in search of work. Approximately 13 per cent are disconnected from their family, and about six per cent are orphans or do not know whether their parents are alive or not.
Three in four children in street situations can neither read nor write, leaving them with a lifelong illiteracy and grim prospects for the future.
The report disclosed, more than fifty per cent children surveyed reported falling sick within the three months prior to the survey, suffering from fever, coughs, headaches, and waterborne diseases.
A third of the children surveyed reported being injured when working, while half were subjected to violence, as per survey.
Regarding the findings on children living on the street in Bangladesh, Sheldon Yett, UNICEF Representative to Bangladesh, said “The report findings are shocking. They tell us not only of the urgent work ahead, but also those children living and working on the street needs our empathy and support”.
However, the report does not contain absolute figures, UNICEF experts fear that the number of children living on the street in Bangladesh could be in millions.