Adolescents in street situations in Bangladesh and their exposure to physical violence and emotional abuse

Abstract

After more than three decades since ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child, many nations are still grappling with the phenomenon of children and adolescents who work and live on the street or spend a significant amount of time on the streets or public places. The current quantitative descriptive study of 592 Bangladeshi adolescents in street situations aged 10–17 quantifies the extent of physical violence and emotional abuse for these adolescents and explores the relative contributions of predictors of abuse. In collaboration with a local community partner, an agency that worked with children and youth in street situations, we recruited street-involved adolescents who lived in Dhaka, the nation’s capital, for participation in the study. We used key informant and snowball sampling strategies to conduct face-to-face structured interviews with a set of prepared closed-ended questions focusing on physical violence, emotional abuse, demographic information, time on the streets, family socioeconomic status, sleeping arrangements, and elements of social support. Data were analyzed through SPSS using OLS regression and one-way ANOVA. Total time of street exposure, sleeping alone on the streets, inability to write, level of family poverty, and types of informal employment were key predictors of violence and abuse in this sample of adolescents in street situations.