January 20, 2006	Friday	Zilhaj 19, 1426

ROME: For three weeks, police kept the man under surveillance, watching as he picked up his merchandise in the outskirts of the city and dropped it off in one of Rome’s most attractive piazzas. The 35-year-old Romanian was not dealing in drugs or contraband cigarettes but children. He controlled a group of nine boys aged between 10 and 14, who were transported every day into Rome and told to beg for money or wash the windscreens of people’s cars. Each child earned €50-70 a day, which they handed over to their boss in return for food and clothing. After secretly videotaping the man’s activities and amassing enough evidence, police arrested him.

There is a lot of money to be made out of the exploitation of children and a recent report by the social studies institute Eurispes and the children’s charity Telefono Azzurro shows how many vulnerable young people there are in Italy. According to a survey by the two organisations, at least 50,000 foreign children are forced to beg on the streets or work instead of going to school. In Rome alone, the number is put at 8,000.

The minors, mostly young boys, are sent abroad by relatives in the hope of making better lives for themselves and arrive after long and frightening journeys, passed along the route by people smugglers. More than a third of these lone youngsters come from Romania, arriving overland and hidden in the backs of trucks, often armed only with the telephone number of a relative or a fellow countryman. Albanian minors arrive clandestinely under cover of night on the coast of Le Marche in the east of Italy, after a two-hour trip by boat across the Adriatic Sea with other illegal immigrants. Moroccan children undertake a voyage partly by sea and partly overland through Gibraltar, Spain and France.

They head for big cities like Rome, Naples or Milan and can easily fall into unscrupulous hands. A recent telephone call to an emergency helpline run by the children’s charity illustrates the danger. The caller was a 21-year-old Moroccan calling from Rome’s Termini station who said he had been approached by a boy of 14, who had recognised him as a fellow Moroccan. “The problem is he doesn’t speak Italian and he has been in Italy for five days,” the caller said. “He said he took a train from southern Italy and wants to find work and somewhere to stay. He’s a simple boy, he comes from the countryside, and he doesn’t realise the dangers he could get into. You’ve got to help him.” Social services arranged to pick up the teenager and he is currently in a children’s refuge, awaiting a decision about whether he will be allowed to stay in Italy or have to return to his country of origin.

Dr Ernesto Caffo, associate professor of child neuropsychiatry at the University of Modena and president of Telefono Azzuro, says Italy is a magnet for junior clandestini, as Italians call illegal immigrants, because it is easy to get to and is regarded as a destination and transit country. Such children can become invisible in a big city and are regarded as easy prey for criminals who take advantage of their confusion and vulnerability. But it is not only unaccompanied foreign children who beg on the streets of Italian cities. Parents, unable to work themselves because they are here illegally, loan their children to organised gangs or use their youngsters as a front for their own begging.

“This is a very difficult problem to solve because the parents do not believe they are doing anything wrong,” he says. “For many Eastern Europeans it’s entirely natural to beg and to take their children along too. They see their offspring as instruments to be used in the daily struggle against poverty.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service