Systematic Review of Studies on Street children in Iran in recent Decade: Poverty, a Risk Factor for Becoming A Street child

Regarding the studies on street children and necessity of evidence based decision making to use the results of studies and planning for purposive studies in future seems a priority. This study tries to classify and evaluate these studies on economic situation of street children in Iran in recent decade according to their strengths and weaknesses in order to use their results in policy making and planning for street children. We used systematic review method in this study. By searching Iranian and international databases, many universities and related organizations in Iran, we found 48 researches and after evaluating their quality by a researcher made quality evaluation form, findings of 40 researches were classified, described and analyzed. Meta analysis (weighted average) of results of studies shows that 90/6% of street children are boys. %82/9 is illiterate or has an education level under high school. %85 has relationship with their families and %85/3 is come from families with more than 5 persons. %91/3 of their fathers and %85/5 of their mothers are illiterate or have under high school education. %80/9 of their families has incomes less than 1000,000 Rials and about %80/18 of children have a kind of job. Some results like low family income and education, high prevalence of working in streets and relationship of most children with their families reveal Relationship between family poverty and becoming a street child. The studies reviewed are mainly focused on epidemiologic properties, etiological factors and outcomes of problem of street children. Studies are mainly descriptive and the rare analytic studies suffer from methodological problems. Some findings of epidemiological properties of street children is in coordination with primary percepts regarding them but because of the few sample size or methodological weaknesses of analytical studies, obtaining net results about etiological factors, outcomes and interventions’ evaluation is difficult. Although a few analytic studies have focused on relationship between poverty and becoming street child, according to high prevalence of economic factors of children and their families, it seems that poverty is an important factor for becoming street child.