A girl stabs her own father to death. Another shoots her stepfather. A third is a thief. They’ve all lost something, or never had it in the first place: parents who loved them enough, an environment that supported them in times of trouble. “Why do such people like my parents need a child?” asks Sabina with a trembling voice. “They can fuck but can’t give love or tenderness.” Sabina has spent three years in a detention home for adolescent girls. She was only four months old when her parents first put her in an orphanage, and spent her life shuttled from one orphanage to another.
Her father once worked as a mechanic and her mother also had a job. Then they both started drinking and the family fell apart. In 2004 Sabina and her three brothers and sisters were taken away by the government and put into a home. At that time she was the only breadwinner in the family, and she called her job “Shopping Malling,” which meant stealing from shopping malls. Sabina was 10 years old when she began to steal. Then the drugs came, starting with sniffing glue and ending up on heroin. She was eventually busted for armed robbery; she and her two friends held girl at knifepoint and ordered her to give over her wallet. The girl only had 35 bucks and a ragged cell phone.
Sabina thinks that her crime was nonsense. But she also says that she had no other choice. “My mother and father left me. Where else could I have turned?” Today she is clean and leads a normal life in the detention home. When she is free, she plans to go to a care-house with her brothers and sisters.
I have always been interested in situations in which one can experience the extremities of life. The people I photograph and their fates are not often spoken about. They live their lives, they try to survive, and the only time they come into our consciousness is if they commit a crime. Nobody cares why they did what they did. Nobody thinks there could be reasons for their behaviour. I committed myself to these children to show what the beauty of life means for them, what their dreams and hopes are. And the answer is so simple. They wish to be what they are: children.
