Another face of AIDS

While the total number of people infected with HIV/AIDS in Ukraine is about 1.5 percent of the population, you should multiply this figure by approximately 15 to determine the real incidence of this infection among risk groups. The abuse of injectable drugs and promiscuity (indiscriminate unprotected sex) even among children aged 10-12 are the main pillars of this statistical picture.

This is the opinion of experts from UNICEF and the international charity AIDS Foundation East- West (AFEW), who recently completed a study entitled “Children and Young People Living or Working on the Streets: the Missing Face of the HIV Epidemic in Ukraine.”

The study examined the health of 10-to-19-year-olds in Kyiv and Odesa, places with the largest numbers of street children. Polling 650 children, the experts learned that 76 percent of those who live in Kyiv and 94 percent of those in Odesa use drugs or stimulants. Every third orphan tramp from Odesa said that he had been sexually assaulted or exploited in the past six months, and almost 40 percent of them said they were “paid for this.”

According to AFEW regional director Olena Voskresenska, in most cases these children know nothing about AIDS and do not think about the future.

Indeed, who cares about their health if they have to think about their daily bread? “Only 43 percent of the respondents in Kyiv and 33 percent in Odesa are aware of the principal ways of HIV transmission (unprotected sex and dirty needles),” she noted. Here is what Kyiv street children know about this disease (from the experts’ notes): “Of course, I know: through blood, a cigarette filter, sweaty hands” (a 17-year-old boy); “You can catch the disease from the air” (an 18-year-old girl); “I will get infected if I smoke too much, wear dirty clothes, or pick up a cigarette butt” (a 13-year-old boy).

The experts point out that most of those surveyed are 10-to-15-year-old boys who have led this kind of life for at least two years, usually live in street “hideouts,” and came to Kyiv and Odesa from all over Ukraine. Sadly, 60 percent of the so-called “Kyivites” and 43 percent of the “Odesites” are social orphans: their living parents left them to their own devices. Another important detail: all these children have experienced severe psychological traumas (violence, torture, sexual or labor exploitation) at a certain stage in their life.

It is extremely difficult to take homeless children off the street. Social workers claim that the more experience of living outside a home environment a child has, the more difficult it is to wean him from the streets. Naturally, there are those who want to live a normal life. Here is what a 13-year-old Odesa boy said: “I want to live normally and work. I want to have two apartments, two cars, a woman, no, the woman later...a security guard. Let my life be easy so that I work, believe in God, pay part of my salary to the pension fund, study, and acquire the profession of businessman or manager or something like that.”

I would like this child to be healthy until he gets the internal passport in his hands and enters some kind of educational institution, where he will have no time to indulge in reveries of an easy life. The point is that these children are not at all adapted to “normal” life and, according to Deputy Minister for the Family, Youth and Sport Svitlana Tolstoukhova, they need serious rehabilitation in special re- socialization centers. The nearly 100 refuges for the homeless in Ukraine are of little effect: the kids are free to enter and leave whenever they please. Tolstoukhova says that the groundwork for carrying out this crucial work already exists: two months ago Ukraine adopted the National Action Plan for Combating Homelessness. The plan calls for reducing the number of homeless children by 70 percent by 2009, and the state is committed to providing 90 percent of HIV-positive children with medication.

The next two years will show how much our authorities care about children, but so far the only good piece of news is the official statistics of the Ministry for the Family, Youth and Sport: the number of homeless children (especially those who take to the streets for the first time) decreased in 2007. As a rule, this figure is assessed by the number of children who end up in a refuge as well as by means of the Urok (“Lesson”) All-Ukrainian Action, when experts try to determine how many first-graders did not attend school (8,000 in 2005 and 7,000 last year). This year’s Urok will begin in a few days, so information is supposed to be made public in a month’s time.

Oksana MYKOLIUK, The Day