According to UNICEF 365 million children live in extreme poverty, while around a billion children lack access to basic necessities like nutrition or clean water. We know how important learning job skills are, yet here we have an eighth of the world population who’re highly likely to grow up without learning those skills and will inevitably end up marginalized again.
A sane system would be apologetic to such children, yet we have people who are nauseated at the sight of homeless kids.
We see such children all around us. They’re outside restaurants, movie theatres, parks and temples, asking for a little help for them to buy some food.
There are people who’ll shoo them away like they were some nasty pest. They’ll grumble how such kids are ruining their enjoyment, how any place they go to have some entertainment and get a little peace and quiet, these kids turn up and ruin the experience.
Then there are the responsible adults who’ll hide their apathy under the garb of concern. “They need to be taught to work, instead of depending on handouts.” “Don’t give them money, they’ll only buy drugs.” “Why do their parents procreate if they can’t provide?”
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” ― John Stuart Mill
The biggest contributor to such mind-boggling behaviour is probably the general lack of resources. It makes us want to hold onto the negligible wealth we own and naturally trains us to compete with anyone, even kids. We know deep down that helping children like these will require large investments, investments that will have to come out of our own minimal bank balances as tax.
On the flip side, we know the benefits of having such children around. They get used as cheap labour, where the pay can be as low as 1/250th the minimum hourly wage in USA. So, we see sweatshops in South East Asia and Africa filling up with such children for large conglomerates and businessmen to exploit.
We know how children from such socioeconomic backgrounds go missing and what they go missing for. Reportedly, 420000 homeless children went missing from schools’ rolls in the land of opportunities in 2020, 27% of trafficking victims are children and 66% of trafficked children are girls. It’s data that’s easily accessible.
People know it happens. People know it can happen to their children. And people will do anything in their power to protect their own babies from such fate, including trampling on such kids and perpetuating their misery by making it socially accepted that their fate is their own fault and they’re beyond helping. We’ll keep repeating amongst ourselves how such kids are the fault of their parents and how sorry but incapable we are.
“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation” ― Charles Darwin