A/HRC/19/35 According to the Committee on the Rights of the Child, children in street situations are at high risk of suffering violence, particularly torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Indeed, a pervasive thread running through the challenges faced by streetconnected children is their persistent exposure to and direct experiences of violence, whether physical, sexual and/or psychological in nature. Life stories of children with street connections are infused with violence, often from an early age. 26. One result is that children moving onto the street can evidence anything from psychological distress to profound trauma. While the streets can offer respite from domestic or community-based violence, they expose children to other settings for and forms of violence, including daily psychological violence through stigmatization and intimidation of street children; random physical and/or sexual violence by other street inhabitants or members of the public; expressions of violence within street gangs; by organizers of forced sex-selling or vagrancy; by local businesses; through forcible police round-ups; premeditated rapes and extrajudicial killings. In its recent concluding observations on Cambodia (CRC/C/KHM/CO/2), the Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed concern about the “cleaning up the streets” operations conducted by police, such as one in early 2008, during which many children in street situations were sent to rehabilitation centres, illegally confined and subjected to a variety of abuses which, in some cases, resulted in death, including by suicide. 27. During the preparation of this report, the issue of violence against children by the police was repeatedly raised. It should be noted, that many children reported having received friendly advice and support from some police officers. However, abuses by the police are rarely investigated and impunity is commonplace. Without appropriate, childsensitive counselling, complaint and reporting mechanisms to which street-connected children can report incidents of violence, police impunity is likely to continue. 28. Such extensive exposure to violence underlies children‟s other challenges in the street and carries serious consequences for long-term health and personal development through adolescence into adulthood. Children‟s ability to trust and form attachments may be severely damaged, with potential effects for their development of future relationships. The costs to the children, their family and friends and society as a whole are heavy. Understanding the effects of violence is critical to protecting children. IV. Roles and responsibilities 29. Under international human rights law, States, as the principal duty bearers, are accountable for respecting, protecting and fulfilling children‟s rights within their territories. While States play the role of the principal duty bearer for all children – including streetconnected children – other non-State entities, professionals and individuals are also recognized by the Convention on the Rights of the Child as duty bearers in the fulfilment of children‟s rights. They include parents and families, teachers, doctors and social workers, employers and/or probation officers. States have the obligation, as principal duty bearers, to ensure that the secondary duty bearers have the knowledge and means to carry out their specific obligations. 30. Protecting children and preventing experiences of multiple deprivations implies taking a holistic approach that understands children‟s relationships as interdependent and interconnected, and therefore recognizes that rights can be violated – but also defended – by a range of duty bearers within the family, the community and wider society, including the international community. Defending children from violence and other rights violations that push children into developing connections with the streets requires a coordinated and comprehensive approach across government departments (from finance, through trade, 8