A small girl with eyes lost below dusty eyelashes finds no embarrassment in asking for the bottle of water next to the driver because «my mother is thirsty,» or asks the drivers for the price of «a can of noodles because I'm hungry,» placing her hand on her stomach in a childish expression of hunger. In some cases the children hide behind sacks of tissues, pens or roses, which earn them a bit of money as they try to take on the grown-ups' job of providing for the family.
At the busy intersections and side-streets, the beggar children move from stores to restaurants, selling roses, tissues, or pens.
Ola has become a daily guest at a restaurant in Tripoli, where she sells roses and is welcomed by the management. But other children don't always have such good luck with the owners and employees. A Syrian boy was beaten by an employee from a restaurant at a well-known café in Hamra Street in Beirut. It was followed by a wave of online anger and then a one-off protest in front of the café, asking that the employee be disciplined.
But the owners and employees of commercial establishments continue to abuse children, in most parts of the country, and it's not restricted to beatings. Fatima was run over in Sidon while trying to sell the roses that she had left with her, just before midnight. The driver hasn't been identified; a group of young people in Sidon have organized «the rose-seller» campaign, in a bid to shed light on the dangers faced by Syrian refugee children in the streets of Lebanon. Several local television stations have cooperated, by getting the campaign's message out through hosting its organizers, who explain what children face, physically and psychologically, in the streets, and highlight the fact that these dangers rise at night and in isolated places.
According to a report by UK Care in June of last year, «more than 50,000 Syrian refugee children work under difficult conditions, for 12 hours a day, in order to help secure food and shelter for their families.» No more than 30 percent of Syrian children receive schooling in Lebanon, the study also finds. These children exhibit many signs of physical and verbal abuse, due to the widespread use of sectarian and racist terms, and even the carrying of light weapons; they also suffer from isolation or fear of society.
As a response, local and international organizations try to introduce social and psychological support programs to buttress the students' school curriculum. As for the street children, who are at greater risk of experiencing social, psychological and even physical problems, they are deprived of this support because they aren't in special schools for refugees, as the parents of some force them to beg or work to secure the requirements of daily life.
According to a report by Lebanon's Labor Ministry, the ILO and Save the Children in February, Syrians make up 73 percent of Lebanon's street children; most suffer from «domestic and physical violence, and sexual exploitation.» During the release of the study, Sejaan Azzi, the minister of labor, called the children «time bombs and potential terrorists» while highlighting the importance of dealing with them on a humanitarian basis «because they are part of us.» He promised to complete a study on building a shelter for refugee children by March but this has yet to take place; the ministry has merely launched a website for the «Unit for Combating Child Labor.»
On the ground, Internal Security Forces personnel decline to detain children unless they are selling or taking drugs, because there are no specialized detention facilities for juveniles at police stations, while the existing juvenile prisons are already overcrowded. Some officers say they are obliged to avoid dealing with many criminal cases with street children for these same reasons.
Observers fear that the phenomenon of Syrian child labor will become more widespread and that the various social problems posed by their presence in the street will become more complicated. These include early marriage, as girls are offered for money or in order to protect them from the problems of being unwed, or to keep them out of prostitution. The possibility of children joining gangs of thieves, or becoming religiously hard-line, or becoming child soldiers – these all appear to be realistic scenarios, as Lebanon's street children problem grows. The UN links the treatment of Syrian refugee child labor to seeing to the families' nutritional needs on a regular basis, «because halting food assistance has a dangerous impact on children, «as it is very likely that families facing additional pressures will have to force labor or early marriage onto their children.»
In the end, the poor state of official statistics on Syrian child labor only clouds the picture, whether in terms of the figures, or the solutions.
The street children, who are at greater risk of experiencing social, psychological and even physical problems, they are deprived of this support because they aren’t in special schools for refugees, as the parents of some force them to beg or work to secure the requirements of daily life