*** TRIGGER WARNING OF VIOLENCE***
Many of the young people we support at Play Kenya have had tougher lives than you can imagine. Living on the streets is complex and frightening. The boys will talk openly about the violence they receive from all areas, including when they are arrested and kept in the police stations. This following account is hard to read, and we are certainly NOT saying this happens in all police stations, but we are saying this is a common story from our boys.
Being arrested is a usual thing when you have no home. You know that at certain times of the day the police will start to clean up the streets. That means chasing down me and my brothers. If they catch us, we know we will be beaten and mocked. We know we need to stay quiet and not shout out or the beatings will be worse.
I can tell you a hundred times or more, when we are at our base for the night, tied up in a hessian sack to try and stay warm; huddled together to share the warmth of our thin, bony bodies, when suddenly you feel a horse whip across your threadlike limbs. The pain and the shock make you jump up and try and escape. But you are tied into a sack, so you are a sitting target. The pain of the whip and the beating attacks your fragile self and your mind disappears, like smoke in the wind, and you become an empty shell, ready and able to take what comes your way.
Often the beating is all that happens, but it’s not unusual for me and my brothers to be bundled into a van, or frog marched through the cold, unforgiving streets to the police station. We are packed into tiny cells, probably made for 4 or 5 people, but can sometimes have up to a hundred male bodies, all broken and stinking. Several have just arrived; some serving a sentence of weeks to months. There is no energy just the stink of the open bucket for all of us to use, and some poor person to empty. It’s a good arrest if that job doesn’t fall my way.
In the morning we are shackled together to appear in court, unaware of what our crime is, but knowing we will return to the stinking cell later that day for our sentence, and we do.
I have learnt to sit quietly and lose my mind into the dark corners of my existence. I can do that for weeks or months if I need to. And if I am in the police cells, I need to. I can block out the screams that come from the small dark room next door, knowing but not acknowledging, even to myself, that my time will come for my discharge ‘meeting’. I can’t tell you about the grey, slimy, distasteful substance that is called food, but I can remember the hunger as I await the one ‘meal’ a day we are given. I sit. I blank out life. I have no happy place in my head to visit so I just stop. I stopped hoping a long time ago. My mind becomes a void. It’s how I survive. I speak to no-one; I see nothing, and I feel even less.
And then one day my name is called and my blood, that is pumping so slowly, turns to ice as I am manhandled to the room next door. There, my tiny frail self, is subjected to the final part of this torture, of this living hell. I am laid down on my stomach with my knees bent, and for my own good I believe I’m told, the inside of my meatless legs are beaten with wires. I am told not to shout out. To take my punishment like a man. The voice tells me that when the door is open to run like hell and not look back. I am told not to come back here or my ‘medicine’ will be worse. I am told not to repeat my crime and yet I do not know what I have done. I found a place to rest my dirty stinking body. A place where the lice will crawl all over me and hope people will stay away. I call it home. 
I shut my head tighter. I can hardly breathe. I ignore the intense, sharp, and yet deep pain. I will not surrender any more of me to the barbaric system where I am punished for being a child living without love. I will keep hold of myself and take their beating like the man I am not. And when the door opens, I take my bleeding, shaking body. I run as fast as my smashed leg with open wounds will take me. I run until I find my base again with my family of street boys. And I sit. I wait. I breathe in the glue that takes me deeper away from myself. And I wait until I am arrested again. It will come.
I am 11 years old and this is my 6th year in town.