When it comes to homeless children in South Africa, whats the nature and extent of the problem?
It goes back to the early 1990s, evolving out of the breakdown of the family that the end of apartheid brought on. Kids started popping up on the streets. Poverty is the No. 1 problem. Then come the abuses: alcohol abuse, physical abuse. There’s also a specific cultural issue of “regret” — when people are married, have kids, break up and then enter new relationships where one partner resents the previous children and becomes abusive. That’s a huge issue. What compounds everything is the AIDS/HIV crisis. How old are these children? It’s a whole mix. My first time in South Africa was 2002. The youngest kids were 11 or 12. I was blown away. We finished filming this year, and today, it’s not uncommon to see kids as young as 5 or 6 on the streets. What is street life like for them? It’s quite an array of abuses. Everything you could think of. They have to beg constantly to get food for themselves. There’s child prostitution, physical abuse, a lot of rape. There are two main gangs on the st
