HELPING KIDS ON A CITY'S MEAN STREETS

A young man is crouched on the edge of the roundabout, leaning into
the traffic. Cars literally whiz past his nose, circling between
Acland Street and St Kilda Esplanade.

In one of these cars are Leanne and Melroy, child protection workers
from the Department of Human Services who beat the streets of St Kilda
and the city looking for kids on the slide.

With them tonight is the Minister for Community Services, Ms Christine
Campbell. She wants to see what they do, and here it is in front of
her - the man reeling from too much heroin, or perhaps a bad hit mixed
with alcohol.

He is older than the people the Streetwork Outreach team is employed
to deal with, but they stop and call an ambulance anyway. They sit and
talk to him; roll him on to his side when he slips to the edge of
consciousness and fend off a hyperactive kid who wants to know what's
going on.

This is Melbourne's "hard edge", says Streetwork's manager, Mr Steve
Mumford. "The city and StKilda are more than just a drug trade. It's
more complex than that."

About three quarters of the young people the Streetworkers deal with
are already part of the child protection system. They can be found
lingering at Flinders Street station or on a St Kilda street corner or
pacing the mean streets of Russell and Bourke. For the other 25 per
cent, the aim is to keep them out of the welfare system. If a child is
in serious, immediate danger, he or she will be taken to a safe place.

The trick is to get to the kids early, before they get comfortable on
the streets and get a habit. It is intervention", and why she says she
is committed to diverting young offenders away from the juvenile
justice system wherever possible.

Around the corner from the man on the roundabout, behind St Kilda's
Peanut Farm Reserve, male prostitutes are doing business. But tonight
Melroy and Leanne are looking for a 17-year-old girl who has been
missing for several weeks from her residential placement and is
prostituting to support her addiction. Word is that she recently
"dropped" on heroin, was brought back with a shot of Narcan, and is
getting careless with her syringes, leaving them in her bag with the
caps off.

Mr Mumford said there had been a dramatic rise in the number of
teenagers - some as young as 13 - working as prostitutes in StKilda in
the past three years. He blamed it on the surge in heroin use.

Last year 295 of the contacts made by Streetwork related to
prostitution - 72 of them in the CBD and the rest in St Kilda. The
workers estimate this year's figure will be 650.

There are some girls who come in on the train from Frankston. At
10.30pm they land at the St Kilda crisis centre to collect condoms and
exchange needles. They want to fit in another couple of jobs, then
catch the last train home.

Leanne says the kids don't realise how vulnerable they are to
violence, blood-borne disease or paedophilia.

Of Streetwork's 982 contacts made in the city centre last year, 404
related to substance abuse, 200 to criminal behavior and 45 to
paedophilia. Two-thirds of the kids were missing from home or
residential care.

The kids are not as streetwise as they think, and most of them want to
be helped. When the team stop at Flinders Street station earlier in
the night and encounter two tough-talking teenage boys, one of them
later confides to the minister that he would like to be a graffiti
artist, and the other agrees to phone his grandmother.

What does Ms Campbell make of her night at the coalface? She says the
culture in St Kilda is "predatory" and the number of young, fragile
people working the streets overwhelming.

Back in StKilda, the man nodding into the intersection has made it to
a nature strip. When the ambulance officer tries to ruin his high with
Narcan, he lurches to his feet and asserts, not very convincingly,
that he is fine. He stumbles away into the darkness, and the
Streetworkers move along in search of the next kid in need of help.
They say it has been a quiet night.