Children Left Alone In B.C. Become Targets Of Gangs

VANCOUVER, B.C. - Well-off teenaged students living on their own while parents remain in Hong Kong and elsewhere have become targets for gang-related crime, Vancouver police say.

"There are people in our community that do victimize these students because of the fact that they are away from home and seem to them to have good allowances," said Sgt. Tony Needham, who heads the Vancouver police anti-gang unit.

School-board officials acknowledged earlier this week that they're encountering increasing numbers of children who have remained in Canada to attend school while their parents, recent immigrants from Hong Kong and other Pacific Rim countries, have returned there to work.

Needham said the incidents involving extortion appear to have been concentrated most often on visa students, who are in similar circumstances, with their parents overseas.

"We see them as being potential victims because of there being no parental control, no one to talk to, to rely on," he said.

School officials said there are a substantial number of known cases in which the children of such families have been left in Canada to attend school while living alone, or with token supervision, in the family home.

They said children, as young as 12 or 13, come to the attention of teachers and counselors when they run into trouble, such as depression, inattention in school, making undesirable friends or being bullied.

Judy Hayes, regional director for the British Columbia Social Services Ministry, said there is no provincial law stipulating the age at which a child can be left without adult supervision.

Hayes said all citizens are legally required to report to Social Services if they are aware of a child who might be in need of the ministry's protection. She said, however, that instances of the ministry taking action involving children whose parents are working overseas are "quite rare."

Constable Jules Tessarolo, a school liaison officer at high schools in two prosperous Vancouver neighborhoods, said the children who are home alone run two particular risks: getting mixed up with the wrong crowd and becoming involved in crime, or becoming victims of crime themselves, because they are often well provided with large allowances, nice cars and expensive clothes.

Tessarolo said he has been called for help in two cases in which teenagers whose parents were in Hong Kong were beginning to get into trouble with a bad crowd.

Tessarolo said many children of immigrants who have returned to work overseas aren't entirely alone at home. But in some cases the adult is a grandmother who cannot speak English and is herself entirely isolated in the community. "She's lost as well," he said.