The Contradictory Space of the Street
A desire to emphasize children's agency and resilience may ironically obscure a focus on certain risks or violence that street children face. There have been extremely important advances in incorporating street children's own interpretations of their lives and environments into both academic analyses and social policy.
Studies have challenged the idea of street children as victims and highlighted their resourcefulness and agency. However, such studies only pay limited attention to children's exclusion, as well as the ways their lives are connected to wider societal factors (Van Blerk 2014, p. 192). Some of the strategies in which street youth engage may actually indicate high levels of stress, expose them to risks, and possibly indicate suicide ideation (Jones et al. 2007). Drug use is also a frequent way in which young people try to withstand violence and exclusion in their daily lives (Aptekar and Stoecklin 2014). While it does numb the pain, long-term drug use may also wreak havoc on young people's bodies (Jones et al. 2007) and can further their exclusion in other ways (Aufseeser 2014c).In such regards, children's decisions to move to the streets may have contradictory or ambiguous results in terms of their overall well-being and exposure to violence. Many young people do report negative aspects of street life, revealing some of the contradictions in their decisions. For example, in the case of street children in Kampala, Uganda, occupying marginal spaces allowed them to escape and play. At the same time, children were exposed to various health risks in these spaces (Young 2003). Similarly, in Peru, while children's attempts to avoid police persecution by moving to more marginal areas or renting rooms inside were largely successful, they also furthered their own marginalization by making themselves invisible and cutting themselves off from much needed social services (Aufseeser 2014c). Such studies contribute to an important body of work within childhood studies that is more critically analyzing the idea of children's agency to focus on the ways in which it may be negative or ambiguous (Bordonaro and Payne 2012). There is still a need for more studies that acknowledge children's active attempts to address the violence in their daily lives while also looking at some of the constraints on these efforts. Van Blerk (2014) emphasizes the importance of connecting accounts of children's lives with wider societal factors. Although it has been more than three decades since street children received widespread international attention, violent efforts to remove them from public space and policies to protect them formulated on the basis of narrow conceptions of childhood and street life continue to exacerbate the violence in their lives (Van Blerk 2014; Thomas de Benitez 2007; Aufseeser 2014a).
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