Missing street girls: the importance of over-time measures for counting the homeless in Bogota

Abstract

This paper argues that street grils, and girls that move from the Street to other equailly dangerous situations, have been ‘missed´, masking in a numbre of senses the relative deprivation of these young women. One important season for missing street firls is that efforts to count street children are likely to be systematically biased against girls if they are undertaken on a single night without regard to period of time. Due to frequent movement on and off the street, one-night estimates are likely to be skewed towards children who live on the street permanently, hence giving less weight to younger children and to women. The results show that in Bogota, as in many Latin American countries, single-night counts indicate that male Street children outnumber females in the ratio of approximately four or five to one. The absence of treet girls explains part of why the number of gamines appear to be low. Girls tend to spend less time on the street and are underrepresented in any count taken on a single night. Beyond its implications for enumerating street children, the fact that there are so many more boys than girls found living on the street poses a series of questions regading the relative deprivation of young women in especially difficult circunstances. One explanation for not seeing girls on the street is that they may find street life more dangerous than boys. Still, young women are not exempt from the hardships that push young men to the streets. Many young women work in their homes and in the homes of employers as domestic servants. Others can be found exploited in brothels. While they are les visible than street children, many of these young women are exposed to dangers as great as on the street. If visibility is related to the allocation of resources, the ‘missing girls of the street’ may receive less assistance than boys. This papaer makes use of two main data sources, a census of street children that was undertaken in Bogotá in December of 1992, and a survey that was applied to a randomly selected 20% of the children counted in the census and to a sample of children from the poorest neighborhoods of Bogota. The date were collected as part of the Survey of Children and Young at High Risk in Bogota.