Why we do Surveys ?

Rehabilitation of a child who has moved out of its home can happen in couple of ways. Reintegration of the child back home with parents is one approach. Many NGOs say that the reintegration of the child back home is the first priority.

If one see the number of children actually repatriated by NGOs, is very small compared to the number of children the NGO has handled. That is so because the NGOs believe that in case of majority of the children, reintegration of the child back with parents is not feasible as the family could be dysfunctional and reintegration is not the best option compared to other options. Sending a child back home when the home is not good, may result in the child moving out of the house again and our efforts are wasted.

SATHI’s experience is that the reintegration of the child back with parents is feasible very often. There is the question of whether it is the best option needs to be further explored. At SATHI we thought that, after we reintegrate the child back home, if the child continues to stay back at home for considerable time period, and the child says it is happy, then the home placement in that case should be termed as successful.

The onus to check if the home placements we do are successful and whether the child continues at home or not after the repatriation lies with us. So we did the surveys to check if the children we are home placing are actually at home or running away again. We went back to the child’s home to check whether the child is there and whether both the child and the parents are happy.

While we accept that these sampling for these surveys may not stand the rigors of “research methodology", it is a detailed genuine information that is collected from time to time.

We have been doing these surveys for quite some time now.
Initially we did survey of all the children home placed , within 200 km
Then we did survey of the children covering Karnataka, AP
The next survey was of only those children who were out of home for 1 yr or more.
That was followed by survey of children home placed at Bihar
We also did a survey of the children who had a difficult home situation
The last we have done is of the children who had attended de-addiction camps.

After some 5 such  surveys over the last5 years , we have noted that some 65% to 80% of  the children continue to stay at home. It re-affirms our fundamental belief that a large percent of the street children can be placed back at home.