People involved with the girls say the real numbers may be much higher. MOTHERSĪ 2006 government survey showed roughly half of street girls had had sex and about 45 percent of those had been raped. She later discovered she was pregnant and, although she lost the baby, she still fears going home. “A guy came and attacked me and left me not a girl,” the 15-year old said. She hopes to go to university.Īnother girl, Amani, facing beatings over her school performance, ran away from home with a friend in the port of Alexandria, but her friend left when she ran out of money. She managed to leave the streets fairly quickly, finding her way to a shelter where she attends school and plans for the future. I slept on the pavement at night, normally,” she said as she sipped a juice box. They are largely scorned in Egypt, where girls are expected to be virgins at marriage and rape victims may be seen as tainted.įor Magda, a chatty 11-year-old with a chipped front tooth and a ponytail who wants to learn karate, it was her parents’ separation - followed by beatings by her grandmother - that led her to the streets more than three years ago. Their number has since swollen and Mossallam said an estimated 20 to 30 percent of street children are now girls. People who work with Cairo street children say they began to see girls living on the streets in the mid-1990s who would cut their hair to pass as boys and stay safe. Nora said at one point as a young girl, she had an unofficial “marriage” to a street guy: “He had a room, and I didn’t want to be on the street.” So naturally when she is with someone they do have a sexual relationship,” said Alia Mossallam, who works in child protection at UNICEF. “The sexuality of their existence on the streets starts very early on, when they are raped.
Ilham, a quiet 11-year old, said she had spent a week sleeping outside a police station, getting food handouts from officers after her parents split up and an aunt burned her with hot metal. Some beg or sell packets of tissues, weaving between cars at intersections. SELLING TISSUESĬairo’s street girls - often children of Egypt’s rural poor or from urban shanty towns - may sleep on the pavement or in public gardens, face a constant threat of rape, and sniff glue to dull the pain and numb the cold. In a separate case last month, Egyptian police arrested a man accused of imprisoning six youths, sexually assaulting them and forcing them to beg in the streets. Two leaders of a children’s gang were sentenced to death in May for raping and killing at least three and possibly up to 26 street children in Cairo and northern Egypt. But not all girls manage to find a safe way out. Nora lives in one such shelter with Shaimaa, her baby’s ears pierced with tiny gold studs. Not only for street girls but for the boys also,” said Seham Ibrahim, whose Tofoulty organization runs a shelter for street girls. In Egypt’s socially conservative Muslim community, a life on the street can do lasting damage to young girls. I got snatched,” Nora said, using a word that in the parlance of Egypt’s street girls means being taken by men and raped.Ĭoupled with the lure of a city of fancy cars and luxury shops, economic hardship that has left one-fifth of Egyptians in absolute poverty has driven many like her out of their homes, as traditional family structures are strained. While baby Shaimaa played with slippers at Nora’s feet, the young mother described how she traded beatings by her brothers at the age of six or seven for a life of early forced sexuality on streets where she became pregnant soon after puberty. She was one of hundreds of thousands of children who the United Nations says may be living on Egypt’s streets, including a growing number of girls arriving as young as four or five years old fleeing poverty, abuse or broken homes. The girls that are taken in are often children of Egypt's rural poor or from families living in shantytowns on the outskirts of Cairo. The shelter takes in unmarried girls from the street that are not already pregnant. Instisar (L) and Elhaim (C) do an arts project with their teacher at the shelter that they live at in Cairo November 14, 2007.
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