The Necessity Of Social Work Intervention On Rescue Work Of Street Children

Street begging phenomenon is not uncommon at all times. Those streetbeggars are the vulnerable groups that live at the bottom of the society. Intoday’s society, the phenomenon of street begging and those homelessbeggars have become a disharmony factor of the harmonious society, which isalso a hard to solve social problem. It has a bad influence on society andbrings out various degree of harm on many aspects, such as nationallong-term stability, sustained economic development, urban governance andsocial progress.The street children is one of the special vulnerable social groups thatreceives extensive attention from all sectors of society and internationalorganizations. With the substantial increase of the foreign population in largeand medium cities, the population of urban street children is also increasing.They ran away from home, on the streets, home today and gone tomorrow.Their social image is tagged as socially undesirable people. If their problem isfailed to be handled properly, it could cause personality distortions amongthose street children and disruptions on their intellectual development.Being affected by bad morals and values, some street children may evendevelop antisocial behavior and conduct crime, thus the construction of aharmonious society and its overall image may be damaged.In order to build a harmonious society, safeguard the legitimate rightsand interests of children, the street children phenomenon has become one ofthe national priorities of social problems. Over the past ten years, the Chinesegovernment and the relevant social organizations have carried on usefulexploration and practice on this issue, such as establishing rescue stations,taking various measures to rescue the street children etc, the situation of themhas improved to a certain extent. But, to effectively mitigate andfundamentally solve the problem is not an easy task. To establish amechanism for the sustainable assistance and protection of street children is a more realistic problem that placed in front of us.Combined with the internship experience at a city relief shelter, as wellas the investigation and practice that made in there, the paper tries tocomprehensively and systematically understand the basic situation of therelief shelter and its street children, and for the difficulties that faced and theproblems that existed in the rescuing process, it also elaborates the socialbackground that generates street children in China, and delivers an in-depthanalysis of its specific reasons, which, the author believes, are mainly aboutimproper family education, lack of guardians, imperfection of schooleducation system, uneven social economic development and imperfect socialsecurity system, that caused the problem. Meanwhile, the ways of social workintervention are discussed, on which the author believes that since the aidmanagement system reform in2003, the rescue and protection works of streetchildren are mainly focused on relief, management, education and placementof street children, these works aims directly at returning street children totheir original place of domicile and eventually their family. The conventionalapproach is to provide services and assistances in the shelter, such as food,accommodation, telecommunication, medication and so on, then, aftercontacting relatives and verifying household registration, helping streetchildren to return home through ways such as family members or relativesclaiming, the original place of domicile relief shelter bringing back, orescorting them to home by the relief shelter which received them at the firstplace. For the complex and diverse reasons that caused the problem of streetchildren, the traditional approach may face difficulty in achieving targetedrelief assistance, which may not achieve the purpose of truly returning streetchildren to home and minimizing repeated rescue efforts. At this point, theprofessional trained social workers are needed to share some of theresponsibilities in the rescue work, and through advanced work ethic andprofessional work methods to help those street children to solve problemsthey face and help them rebuild confidence, and recognize themselves, andthrough various ways, by integrating resources, to help them return to school, to home, and eventually to society.