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Street Children (Congo)

This is one of the most distressing debates in which I am likely ever to take part in this House. All the same, I congratulate the hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr. Brown) on bringing it to the Floor of this Chamber, on taking us, in such a comprehensive way, through the issues and on setting the stage for the debate. It is the beginning of the end child poverty month, so the timing could not be more apt, even if it could not be more upsetting. As the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber) said, this debate is also happening in the context of the second round of presidential elections between President Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba. There is a desperate hope among us all that the elections will be the basis for real progress, but I must say to the Secretary of State, who in a sense sits here for the international community, that the great challenge will be to persuade the loser to lose with grace and not to return the situation to civil war, because if they do that, we will be back where we started. As Save the Children and others report, the primary victims of the years of civil war, instability and complete economic collapse have been the children of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As the hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) said, basic services such as health, education, clean water and social services are beyond the reach of most Congolese children. That is crystallised for many of us in the statistic that one child in five dies before the age of five. He also mentioned that that is perverse in a country that is so rich in natural resources and minerals; it is the country’s curse when it could be its hope. War and the mass population movements have separated thousands of children from their parents and families. Most appalling is that these impoverished, separated and sometimes abducted children are recruited into armed groups as child soldiers and, in effect, sex slaves. Save the Children has identified 30,000 such cases, but we all know that that must be an understatement. By the end of last year, some 17,000 children had been demobilised and, it was said, reintegrated into their communities. That leaves many more, particularly in the more remote forests where the Mai-Mai militias are, who are completely out of reach. We are hearing about extensive re-recruitment of those children, their engagement in the demonstrations and violence that have been part and parcel of the presidential elections and their then being rejected, drifting to the cities and ending up as part of the street child population. I was also concerned about informal estimates that 12,000 girls are part of the armed groups and that they are in sexual servitude. Many more have been raped. They are unable then to rejoin society because of the stigma. We hear nothing about the sexual abuse of boys. The reality must be that it is a widespread practice. Are we not at the point where that must be confronted head on? Mention of it seems to be absent in every piece of literature on which I can lay my hands, and I assume that that is for cultural reasons. We must confront and deal with the damage done to the boys, as well as the damage done to the girls. Yesterday, I was talking to a woman from Sierra Leone—the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Mark Simmonds), who is the Front-Bench spokesman for the Conservatives, was present at the same meeting—about how poverty drives families to put their children into the sex trade as the only means of generating some income for the family. Obviously, with that goes HIV/AIDS and its repercussions in the collapse of families and of economic and social structures. As the hon. Member for Amber Valley said, the abandonment of children in urban areas has been the underlying and most fundamental cause of the street children phenomenon, which is the subject of today’s debate. The hon. Member for Dumfries and Galloway gave some numbers. Some 40,000 children are said to be living on the streets of Kinshasa, but other organisations put the numbers far higher. There have been accusations that witchcraft and fetish preachers play a key role in that process. We must take that seriously on a different level. I have dealt with such a case in my constituency. We must recognise that the power of some of these movements extends far beyond the borders of Congo, and that there is an interlinking set of issues. Something like this is inexplicable to me, but we have no choice but to take it head on. While one must recognise cultural norms, I cannot think of an acceptable one that allows children to be treated in that way. Among the numbers I find no reference to disabled children. One of the issues that I have raised with the Secretary of State is disability, which is so often treated as a cross-cutting issue, but never finds itself on any priority list. I cannot believe that it is not wrapped into many of the problems and issues involving these children in Congo. Disabled children must be the most vulnerable group of these thrown-away kids. As the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) said, this has been going on so long that there is a second generation on the streets and it is becoming institutionalised. There is little local sympathy. Descriptions such as ““feral children”” and ““vermin”” are used. Before we condemn that too heavily, I have heard the same comments in my community about children who are considered to be engaged in antisocial behaviour. We must be careful about our use of language. We can see how, in a sense, it could be extrapolated in situations and we can recognise how appalling the consequences are. Even for parents who care about their children and want a future, education is beyond reach if they are poor, which is the overwhelming definition of people in Congo. The hon. Member for Islington, North said that he was not sure about the figures for public investment in education. I believe that in the 1980s more than 90 per cent. of children were in primary education, and now the figure is well below the 60 per cent. mark—I assume that it has dropped below half in the most recent years. The investment in education used to be a public subsidy of more than $500 per child, and now the figure is $18 per child. A poor family must find a way to make up that missing number. Some 3.5 million children in Congo are not in primary school and 6 million adolescents are not in education, so the problem is huge. We cannot separate any of those issues from the total collapse of the state, which we will have to address. That falls very much on the doorstep of the Department for International Development. The hon. Member for Islington, North talked about the importance of focusing on economic development. Given the resources of Congo, if some measure of security can be established, there is surely the potential to find solutions to that issue. It is a credit to the British Government that they have been the largest bilateral donor. I am sure that the Secretary of State will take us through the numbers involved in the commitment, but it is one of which we can be proud. I close simply by echoing some of the calls that have been made in this Chamber. There have been calls to engage the multilateral community, including the European Union, in ensuring that this remains a priority issue. We require programmes that listen to the needs of children and give them some degree of empowerment, programmes that examine reintegrating the kids and finding ways to get them into jobs, so that there is a change for their future, and programmes that reach girls and disabled children. We need to work with civil society, local non-governmental organisations and churches. Above all, we must ensure, whether through pressure, the structure of aid programmes or the use of influence, that the Congolese Government have and use the resources and expertise, and that training is in place to provide genuine protection for street children and to ensure that people who commit crimes against them are pursued and pay the price.