El Salvador Launches New Strategy Against Child Abuse

In 1980 a group of 11-year old boys in El Salvador made a simple agreement: to stick together and defend one another on the dangerous streets they called home. They called themselves Mara Salvatrucha. Today, it’s one of the deadliest gangs in the western hemisphere and has more than 25,000 members across Central America. Street children aren’t just victims of violence. Because of their vulnerable situations they’re perfectly primed to be recruited into gangs, or even form them.

El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America. It’s slightly bigger than Wales, but with 7 million people. A majority of Salvadorans work on farms, usually growing coffee, and many parents send their children out to work in the fields as extra labourers to help feed the family. Extreme poverty causes all kinds of problems within families, and as our regular readers will know the number children who are abused in their own homes is scarily high. These children so often end up fleeing their homes and living a life on the streets, where they aren’t expected to survive longer than about four years… if glue sniffing, disease or malnutrition don’t kill them, violence often will.

So we need to make sure they stay with their families, where we have a better chance of helping them and keeping them safe. That’s why Viva El Salvador is joining forces with the Salvadoran Ministry of Education to try and stop children from leaving their homes, by addressing the problems that lead to child abuse.

We’re going to begin by interviewing 800 schoolchildren in high-risk areas around the country, finding out where, when and why domestic child abuse takes place in El Salvador. Once we are more familiar with the root causes, we can begin working closely with each child to teach them how to prevent abuse and restore their rights. We will also take the same steps with children living on the streets, with the aim of helping them reconcile with their families and return home.

In other Latin American countries, Viva’s city-wide networks have been crucial in bringing healing to children and their parents through family mediation programmes, job training for unemployed parents, addiction counseling and education for children who can’t attend school. By helping families raise their standard of living, we’re actually helping treat the root causes of child abuse, not just sticking a plaster on the open wound.

So although this programme is just beginning in El Salvador, we have high hopes that it will do a good job of helping children stay safe. Keep watching this space to find out how it all develops…

Viva El Salvador