75% of street children want to return home: experts

Chennai: Four years ago, when child welfare officers in Chennai rescued Devyani*, 13, off the streets, she was nothing like the other children they had found in the past: her clothes were tattered, yet expensive and her language crisp. Weeks later, officials discovered she was a victim of sexual abuse. And the perpetrator was her father.
Today Devyani stays with her aunt."Or that's what we believe because we have no contact with her. Would you call that a successful reunion with family? I would rather not," says Andal Damodharan, president, Tamil Nadu chapter of Indian Council for Child Welfare.
While it was Devyani's choice to be united with her extended family, in most cases, children don't have a choice. They return to the same lives they ran away from.
"Among many reasons a child chooses to return to her/his family either after realizing that running away was a mistake or due to the lack of an alternate option," Andal adds.
Child rights activists, who on Monday attended a regional consultation on strengthening reunification of children with their families, said at least 75% of children on the streets want to return home, irrespective of the reasons that drove them out. A team from Chennai-based community health education society (CHES) interviewed street children over the last four months and found 55% of them had run away from broken or abusive families. "If 75% of them wanted to return, it signifies the importance of involving families in the healing process," says CHES director P Manorama.
Another team from Railway Children India studied 21 families in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to map the pattern of runaway children who returned home. They found 11 children had left home only once, while three left twice. Incidentally, seven of them who had run away multiple times, were from West Bengal.
Researchers also found that the act of running away of kids in turn was a wake-up call for parents who began paying more attention to them. Others found mentors in the family to take care of them in the absence of parents.
Railway Children India has rescued from the country's streets 8,000 kids of whom around 7,000 have been re-united with their families. "About 30% leave their home a second time. That is a call for us to go beyond the happily reunited narrative," said Navin Sellaraju, India director for Railway Children.
*(Name Changed)