Introduction
It is commonly believed that street children are exposed to significant violence in the course of their everyday lives. Yet, the causes of that violence, and the various strategies that children use to negotiate their daily situations, are not closely interrogated.
In order to address the needs of children in street situations, it is crucial to more closely examine the specific types of violence that children face in various spaces and to consider the ways in which they are not only exposed to greater violence in the streets but also use the streets to resist or escape from violence.This chapter reviews key debates about street children and everyday violence, drawing on both geographical and wider social science literatures. Early accounts of the lives of street children tended to be descriptive and established a framework that still provides the basis for much policy work and research on street children today. In the context of this chapter, street children broadly refers to children for whom the street (or other public spaces, such as plazas and markets) is a main reference point or plays a central role in their lives (Thomas de Benitez 2007). The term itself, however, is linked to violence in many people’s minds. Street children were conceptualized as either victims of violence or as delinquents and themselves perpetrators of violence. Such understandings have been reinforced by the spread of global discourses of childhood, which position children as belonging in the home or in school (Ennew and Swart-Kruger 2003). If they are in the “street,” then their childhood is seen to be violated in some way (Aptekar and Stoecklin 2014). Studies that begin from such a premise assume that to address the violence in children’s lives, it is necessary to remove them from the street.
A significant strand of literature, building on trends from the new childhood studies of the 1980s, challenges this idea of street children as victims and instead focuses on their agency.
This research examines the ways in which streets may offer children and young people alternative sites of identity formation and social networks that they are unable to find in more abusive home situations. By choosing to move to the streets, then, children can actively avoid some of the abuse and violence that they face in the home. Such studies emphasize the ways in which young people may create subcultures or niches for themselves on the street and find some level of acceptance, rather than just exclusion (Beazley 2002, 2003). This research also draws attention to the diversity of the street child population, and the importance of historically and spatially situated studies. It highlights the ways in which the street can also serve as an important space in children’s livelihood strategies. By incorporating children’s own perspectives on violence and their everyday lives, newer research has also revealed the ways in which children distinguish between “just” and “unjust” violence (Conticini and Hulme 2007), as well as the ways in which exclusion and marginalization can be as painful as some physical violence (Butler 2009). Such insights reveal the importance of incorporating broader, more holistic understandings of violence into analyses and programs directed at street children (Thomas de Benitez 2007).However, there is still a great need for research that connects structural violence, or violence that results from inequality, poverty, and other forms of oppression, with child-centered analyses (Wells and Montgomery 2014). While children clearly demonstrate agency in moving to the streets, the majority continue to encounter very significant levels of violence and marginalization in the contexts of their daily lives. The chapter reviews key contributions that examine the streets as contradictory spaces of both opportunity and violence. It broadens understandings of violence beyond direct physical abuse to also consider forms of exclusion, marginalization, and structural violence.
Research on structural violence acknowledges the “constraints and burdens that inequality places on the lives of the poor are a form of violence” (Wells and Mongtomery 2014, p. 5). This includes psychological hurt, such as alienation and deprivation (Winton 2004), as well as more “concealed” forms of everyday violence, including structural adjustment programs, poverty, and discrimination (Wells and Montgomery 2014). While these types of violence are often neglected in more traditional analyses of violence, they are extremely important for understanding street children’s lives.Despite these insights from research, global discourses that present children as “out of place” on the streets, and thus in need of rescuing, continue to inform many policy efforts. These discourses can in and of themselves constitute a form of violence by failing to accurately reflect children’s identities and needs and have provided the justification for various street cleansing efforts (Aufseeser 2014c). The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of utilizing research on street children’s everyday lives to inform international discourses of childhood and current policy agendas. It also suggests the need for more research that acknowledges children’s agency while recognizing the very real constraints placed on that agency.
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