Concluding Remarks
The above discussion has shown that street children do negotiate significant violence in their everyday lives. Yet, there continue to be a number of inherent assumptions about what the lives of street children are like that are based on narrow understandings of childhood, the street, and violence.
Ironically, such limitations may expose children to more abuse and violence than would otherwise be the case. The diversity of street child experiences and the range of responses and strategies that individuals use to negotiate everyday violence speak to the importance of research and policies that include children’s perspectives and voices and call attention to the need for historically and spatially situated studies and policy responses.Yet, even some of the studies that recognize children’s agency question insufficiently whether the goal of preventing children from going to the street should be the main policy focus. Many policy makers and even activists continue to focus on preventing children from moving to the streets (Conticini and Hulme 2007). This author would urge that efforts instead focus on reducing children’s exposure to violence and improving their well-being overall, while not assuming that sending them back to their homes or stopping street migration is automatically the way to do this. Davies (2008) argues for the importance of using some of the positive attributes that result from street child subcultures, such as friendship and play, as a starting point for programming, rather than automatically discouraging them. In particular, activists should work with street children to identify their needs, without necessarily removing them from their peer groups or limiting their freedom (Davies 2008). Such an approach would require a reconceptualization of the types of childhood that are acceptable in contemporary society. However, meeting children half-way, rather than dismissing their coping strategies, although not easy, is an important place to start.
At the same time, researchers need to recognize that even though street children do exercise agency, they nonetheless need support and resources in order to combat larger issues of structural violence.
The tensions between acknowledging individual initiative and situating those efforts in wider societal contexts move beyond childhood studies and connect to debates within critical poverty studies and participatory development more generally.As Thomas de Benitez (2007) points out, in order to improve the well-being of street children, it is essential to understand both the violence to which children are exposed as well as the ways in which they respond to that violence. As mentioned, children’s response to violence is shaped by the social context in which that violence occurs and how unjust they interpret that violence to be. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on physical violence, research and programs should seek to better understand children’s perceptions of violence and the pain, both emotional and physical, that it causes them. In particular, more critical analyses of the ways in which discourses shape material realities of children’s everyday lives, their exposure to violence, and their responses to that violence are necessary. Further, many current policies tend to overlook the multiple spaces in which street children are exposed to violence. A more holistic approach would allow programs to more effectively address the challenges in children’s everyday lives (Montgomery 2014).
In conclusion, this author would endorse efforts that examine the tensions between children’s agency and their ability to exercise that agency, looking not just at physical violence but at the structural violence to which young people are exposed and the ways in which they negotiate and rework the constraints of their everyday lives.