Domestic Violence, abandonment, and street kids
Men and women sleep on the same pillow, but they have different dreams.
Once you have locked your door you are the emperor in your own domain. –Two Mongol Proverbs
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Early on in my stay in Mongolia I wasn’t sure if I should continue to pursue the study of shamanism because my activist and political instincts were drawing me to social causes. A brilliant young activist named Undarya, who helped to form the feminist coalition MONFEMNET, came and lectured to my class at SIT in Ulaanbaatar. I was very moved by her passion and wanted to work in solidarity with her cause. She spoke of a variety of women’s and queer issues that generally weren’t being taken very seriously by the Mongolian government or in the dominant discourse within society. Some of these included excessive un-prosecuted domestic violence, the status of homosexuals and transgender folk, and the impossibility of being out in Mongolia, human trafficking, child labor, dispossession, and the shifting role of women in the ger in contemporary society.
As a result of the shift to a market economy without sufficient infrastructure, as well as of traditional social norms, men are overwhelmingly leaving their countryside subsistence herding families in search of work in the big city. Unfortunately, they are largely not finding work or are unable to send economic support home, and they turn to liquor or domestic violence or both in a sense of utter helplessness. This puts women and children into a desperate position, leaving women as the (often battered) sole providers of income as well as taking on all of the responsibilities of the family and the herds of animals, and when women can’t get by in these circumstances, their children work. The UB post article entitled “Market Children in Mongolia”15 revealed a number of troubling statistics regarding how widespread child labor in Mongolia is today.
There are over “4,300 child workers in Ulaanbaatar” working for an average of a measly “Tg16 3,000 (about US$2.50)” pocket change per day to support their families and themselves. 84% of child workers are under the age of 16, and 64% of them are male. 60% of child workers had dropped out of school or have never attended. In the case of many child workers there is no possibility of going to school because of the need to work during the day (often a fruitless task because of police harassment, forcing children into more dangerous and potentially exploitative situations created by the drama of the night.) This is because “schools also demand resident registration” excluding an additional 21% of children who are homeless or, as the children of nomadic herder families often find, without permanent residence. While “UNICEF estimated that 36.6 percent of children in Mongolia ages 5 to 14 year-(s)-old were working in 2000” there’s really no way to know, because in the countryside, children “herd livestock and work as domestic servants.” In a study conducted by a local NGO in Ulaanbaatar where 1,000 children were sampled from grades seven to ten, it was found that almost 60% of girls working as prostitutes are between the ages of 13 and 16, and 70% have dropped out of school, while 10% are homeless and “cannot get free health cover, [as…] hospitals are reluctant to treat them because they will not get paid.”
My biggest concern prior to my departure for Mongolia was of becoming desensitized to extreme poverty, and more specifically, to street kids. While I never became desensitized to their existence or presence, I did see them everyday, and often gave them food or crayons (unhelpful, I know, but they usually traveled in gangs and if you take change out of your wallet to share, your wallet just gets snatched and then you’re in a foreign country without your passport.) One day, there was a boy following me for several blocks past the State Department Store, a major stop for Westerners and a hub of street-kid activity. I started chatting him up in part to divert him from his relentless requests for money that I didn’t have on me anyway, except for enough to take him out to the chain of national-cuisine restaurants, Khan Booz. I ordered him some khorshur and while he ate the first three voraciously (carefully preserving the last two oily fried dumplings in a napkin for later), I found out that the skinny boy, who had some kind of serious skin irritation, was fifteen years old, and had been living on the streets of Ulaanbaatar since he was twelve.
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