#11
The Times (UK)
January 24, 2002
Children face street curfew in Moscow
FROM MICHAEL BINYON IN MOSCOW

MOSCOW is considering a curfew on all children aged under 16 as a way of dealing with the 50,000 homeless children roaming the capital’s streets, many of whom are criminals, prostitutes and drug addicts by the age of 11.

The city council confirmed yesterday that Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor, was pressing for the swift passage of measures to deal with the children, but no funds had been set aside.

Mr Luzhkov sought the curfew as the latest response to President Putin’s demands for urgent action to deal with the street children, whose numbers are now larger than they were after the Revolution and Civil War.

The public is outraged about children sleeping rough in stations, over air-vents, in empty basements or in makeshift cardboard shelters that offer little protection against winter temperatures that plunge to -20C.

At an emergency meeting of the Moscow City Council last night Mr Luzhkov proposed a law making it illegal for any child or teenager to be on the streets after 11 pm. “If this child is homeless, he must be sent to a shelter, cleaned, fed and put to bed. Those with a home should be sent to their parents,” he said. A vote on the proposal is yet to be taken.

Other city councillors have called for tougher laws against the exploitation of homeless children by criminals, who pose as their parents and force them to beg.

Moscow police have already been rounding up children at the main railway stations, embarrassed by the publicity given to their numbers. Many have been forcibly returned to their families, while others have been taken to overcrowded shelters and orphanages.

Aid workers said yesterday that repressive measures, such as curfews, would have little effect on the problem, which is exacerbated by bureaucracy and official demands for papers from the homeless. They said that long-term solutions, such as more orphanages, were costly and there was little interest at lower levels in tackling the problem.

Officials have also been harassing the aid agencies, complaining that their soup kitchens and handouts encourage more homeless people to come to Moscow from other cities and live on the streets. The Salvation Army has been repeatedly ordered to stop its food distribution.

A spokesman for Médecins sans Frontières said that children were part of the larger problem of 300,000 homeless people in Moscow, most of whom have no papers, come from other cities and do not qualify for social services or a place in the city’s few shelters. Many of the street children have escaped from shelters because of the abuse, squalor and hard discipline there.

Nine out of ten children have parents who are living, but who abuse or neglect their children. Many of the runaways have come from homes that have a history of alcoholism.

Russians are usually indifferent to the huge numbers of adult homeless. Mr Luzhkov recently referred to them as “rats” bringing crime and disease to the city. But the growing rabble of dirty and pale children begging on commuter trains or lying comatose after sniffing glue has become a national scandal.

It was an issue that figured prominently in the questions put to Mr Putin during his live phone-in before Christmas and prompted him to ask his Government to produce an emergency plan of action.