Round-ups - street children being fenced in

As I've mentioned earlier, the police are imprisoning street children at the moment. They're having what they call a round-up. Round-ups are measures taken by the police to get children and others off the streets. They do mostly consist of policemen going around beating the children and putting them in prison. According to a friend of mine, the police can take all kids without identification papers to jail. How many children do you think remain if the police get to them? How many children go around with ID papers on them? It's outrageous.

The causes for these round ups vary; the ongoing one is, according to a teacher at the CRO, due to the uprising in Kampala between followers of the Kabaka and the president's men. The government seems to think that the street children and other residents of the streets played a big role in the riot. They find it necessary to take severe action. But it wouldn't suffice to have round-ups in Kampala, oh no. If there was a riot in Kampala that might have involved street children, there's no guarantee that it won't happen elsewhere as well. This has resulted in round-ups in all major cities in Uganda, where many street children wind up being fenced in.


I can see that the intentions of the round-ups are defendable; they're there to get children off the streets. But the results are a bit more problematic. For the kids that don't get off the streets, they only get a beating and jail time, and then, when the round-ups are over, they go back to their ordinary street lives. So the round-ups don't cause any large changes in their lives. But for some, their lives change a bit. Some children may get off the streets, but does that make their lives all that much better?

A life on the streets is not a decent life in any way. A lot of suffering and pain awaits the children that go to the streets, I've seen it myself. And if they felt like they had another choice, I hardly think anyone would choose the street life. This means that the life they left could be even worse, or at least not all that much better, than living on the streets. So I wouldn't say that these children's new situation necessarily count as success stories of the round-ups. The only positive effect in Mbale, as far as I can see, is that it brings new children to the CRO. And that is actually a rather good thing, because it's a step in the direction of education and a brighter future, a future off the streets. But not even that can justify the means of the police. There is nothing that under any circumstances can justify the abuse of children!