children on the run
©UNHCR/Tito Herrera
At a family community centre in downtown San Pedro Sula, Honduras, three 16-year-old girls share their stories of how they were forced to quit school because of threats and harassment by local gang members.
It wasn’t long before she became pregnant. After giving birth, she was only given a few moments to name her newborn baby boy before he was taken away to an orphanage. To survive the trauma of the separation and the repeated sexual abuse, she began sniffing glue.
Hoping to reach safety, she began travelling across Central America
In desperation, Charleston thought she could flee to the US, where her aunt and uncle lived. “What made you decide to leave the street and escape from the gang?” I asked. And again, her response was linked to death. She told me about the recent deaths of two of her closest friends: one was killed for money, and the other because he crossed an invisible boundary between territories controlled by two different criminal gangs in the neighbourhood. At this point, Charleston realized that death was most probably her fate, too.
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She began travelling across Central America. Recounting how happy she was to escape the violence, Charleston told me that she even enjoyed the trip, a break from her daily dose of fear.
But she didn’t get far in her journey: stopped by a gang in Mexico, she was forced to return to Honduras, where sexual abuse, threats from the gang she had tried to escape from, and sniffing glue, once again became her daily routine.
UNHCR estimates that in 2016, because of threats of violence, intimidation, and extortion at the hands of local mara or pandilleros (gangs), 146,000 refugees and asylum seekers from Guatemela, El Salvador and Honduras fled to neighbouring countries—a seven-fold increase in four years. In the US alone, tends of thousands of children have arrived accompanied by an adult.
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