Week One

W1
Research & Ideas

The unit we are doing this term is Unit 11, Devising Theatre. This helps us communicate our own thoughts and ideas on a topic to an audience through an immersive piece of theatre that we make entirely ourselves, using images, poetry and music as our stimulus for creativity.

During Week 1, we began to research our ideas for our end of term devised project. We split off into individual groups and our group was assigned the role of 'Homeless kids/youths' all around the world.

Zafra and Amelia were our two 'editors' and they set up a blog on the computers, documenting the research we found. Myself, Aaron, Natasha, Esme and Max were in charge of conducting research in the library. The rest of the group found research on the internet and sent them to Zafra and Amelia by email. All of this research helped us gather a wider understanding of what the real situation is in the world regarding homelessness.

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Sophie is the youngest of three children. Growing up, Sophie's childhood was traumatic - her mum had mental health issues and her dad was an alcoholic. Sophie often suffered physical abuse at the hands of her parents. Her earliest memory is of being beaten black and blue by her dad when she was just three years old. Sophie was eventually placed in foster care and began to put her past behind her. Then, tragically, her foster mum died suddenly and Sophie found herself on the streets almost overnight. Sophie was homeless for the next three years - mainly living on the streets, sleeping in doorways and parks. During this time one of her friends overdosed. Another was raped and murdered. (A story of a teenager sleeping rough from Centrepoint, homeless charity website)

After two hours of research, we began to piece together a few ideas within our group. The devised piece we are doing will be a section in part of a walking exhibition, where the audience will be guided around various rooms to view different performances and 'exhibits'. How are we going to get the audience from one room to another? How are we going to present our research, thoughts, ideas and experiences in a theatrical way? What is the purpose of the audience? How can we engage them?

Themes 
Instead of just focusing on living on the streets, we wanted to focus more deeply on certain themes.

Here are some of our first, undeveloped themes we wanted to explore in our piece:

• Child trafficking: we wanted this to be a significant theme within our piece because it's an increasingly large problem and it's something that members of an audience perhaps might not be aware of - this could inform them. A place where child trafficking is really prominent is in India.
• Prostitution: a lot of women end up selling themselves for money or so they'll even get a place to sleep the night, especially in less economically developed countries. This is quite an interesting factor of homelessness to explore.
• Drugs and alcohol abuse: a huge factor led to homelessness today and an increasingly significant issue. It can also be something that people that are homeless fall back on. 

Homelessness in India:

A film that can help deepen our understanding of this is Slumdog Millionaire, a film which is about streetchildren in India. We can perhaps incorporate clips from this film into our performance.

One in every 100 people in India's cities are homeless and increasingly so.  Here is some information from a charity website, Slumdogs about the causes and effects of being homeless:

Abuse:
Many of the street children who have run away from home have done so because they were beaten or sexually abused. Tragically, their homelessness can lead to further abuse through exploitative child labour and prostitution. Not only does abuse rob runaway children of their material security, but it also leaves them emotionally scarred. Many of the abused children are traumatised and some refuse to speak for months after being rehomed. To aggravate matters, children often feel guilty and blame themselves for their mistreatment. Such damage can take years to recover from in even the most loving of environments; on the streets it may never heal.

Child Labour:

Most Indian street children work. In Jaipur, a common job is rag-picking, in which boys and girls as young as 6 years old sift through garbage in order to collect recyclable material. The children usually rise before dawn and carry their heavy load in a large bag over their shoulder. Rag-pickers can be seen alongside pigs and dogs searching through trash heaps on their hands and knees. Other common jobs are the collecting of firewood, tending to animals, street vending, dyeing, begging, prostitution and domestic labour.
Children that work are not only subject to the strains and hazards of their labour, but are also denied the education or training that could enable them to escape the poverty trap.

Gender Discrimination:

In Indian Society females are often discriminated against. Their health, education, prosperity and freedom are all impacted. The problem is worse in conservative Rajasthan than almost anywhere else in India.
The ratio of female:male homeless children is 1:10. This is explained by the awareness among young girls that they are very vulnerable to exploitation: violence, sexual abuse or being sold into prostitution where many will die of AIDS or simply "disappear" out of sight.

Health:

Poor health is a chronic problem for street children. Half of all children in India are malnourished, but for street children the proportion is much higher. These children are not only underweight, but their growth has often been stunted; for example, it is very common to mistake a 12 year old for an 8 year old.
Street children live and work amidst trash, animals and open sewers. Not only are they exposed and susceptible to disease, they are also unlikely to be vaccinated or receive medical treatment. Only two in three Indian children have been vaccinated against TB, Diphtheria, Tetanus, Polio and Measles; only one in ten against Hepatitis B. Most street children have not been vaccinated at all. They usually can not afford, and do not trust, doctors or medicines. If they receive any treatment at all it will often be harmful, as with kids whose parents place scalding metal on their bellies as a remedy for persistent stomach pain.

Child labourers suffer from exhaustion, injury, exposure to dangerous chemicals, plus muscle and bone afflictions.
There is much ignorance about reproductive health and many girls suffer needlessly. A girl made infertile by an easily-preventable condition may become unmarryable and so doomed to a life of even greater insecurity and material hardship.
The HIV/AIDS rate amongst Indian adults is 0.7% and so has not yet reached the epidemic rates experienced in Southern Africa. However, this still represents 5 million people, or about 1 in 7 in of those in the world who have the disease. The rate amongst children is lower, but because street children are far more sexually active than their Indian peers and because many are even prostitutes they are thus hugely at risk of contracting the disease. AIDS awareness, testing and treatment exist, but less so for street children than other demographic groups.

Homelessness:

Street children in India may be homeless because their family is homeless through poverty or migration, or because they have been abandoned, orphaned or have run away. It is not unusual to see whole families living on the sidewalks of Jaipur, or rows of individual children sleeping around the railway station.
Homeless children have the odds stacked against them. They are exposed to the elements, have an uncertain supply of food, are likely miss out on education and medical treatment, and are at high risk of suffering addiction, abuse and illness. A single child alone on the streets is especially vulnerable.

Poverty:

Poverty is the prime cause of the street children crisis. Children from well-off families do not need to work, or beg. They live in houses, eat well, go to school, and are likely to be healthy and emotionally secure.
Poverty dumps a crowd of problems onto a child. Not only do these problems cause suffering, but they also conspire to keep the child poor throughout his/her life. In order to survive, a poor child in India will probably be forced to sacrifice education and training; without skills the child will, as an adult, remain at the bottom of the economic heap.