The Street as a Place of Violence
2.1 Street Children as Victims of Violence
In cities throughout the world, street children negotiate violence in the context of their daily lives. They face abuse from police, contempt and hostility from the public, and violence from peers or adults.
In many regards, this violence has come to define street children in mainstream literature (Panter-Brick 2002). Much early research on street children assumed, almost by definition, that such children were victims of violence. One study began by stating that “street children are maltreated, imprisoned, and in some countries, killed” (le Roux and Smith 1998, p. 683). Another study defined street children as “among the most deprived,” viewed as worthless and subject to violent measures to remove them from the streets (Scanlon et al. 1998, p. 1596). Within this literature, some articles focused on reforming the behavior of street children or their families, while others emphasized how structural factors such as increased unemployment, poverty, and structural adjustment policies had contributed to children’s presence on the streets (Aptekar and Stoecklin 2014). Yet, authors shared the assumption that the street itself was a place of violence and danger for children.Beliefs that children in the streets are victims of violence are linked to the spread of modern discourses that promote childhood as a time of play, schooling, and innocence, to be spent in the space of the home or school (Ennew 2003). Thus, children who are in the streets are viewed as “out of place” (Ennew and Swart- Kruger 2003). Much national and international legislation regarding childhood is based on this model and focuses on protecting street children, who are automatically assumed to be at greater risk in the street, and placing them back in the context of the family. Geographers and childhood studies scholars have argued that such beliefs are actually relatively new and are specifically linked with modernization and industrialization (Ruddick 2003).
Yet, they have become the model for understandings of global childhood and provide the justification for various efforts and interventions to remove children from public spaces. In particular, ideas of modernity and development also combine to render certain groups of people, such as street children, as out of place and thus expose them to more violence. Street children are frequently removed from public spaces in diverse cities around the world, ranging from Lima, Peru, to Kampala, Uganda, in efforts to remove visible signs of poverty from city streets (Aufseeser 2014c; Young 2003). Such street cleansing is especially common before big public events, such as international sports events or political meetings (van Blerk 2011). The very presence of children in the street serves as a sign of embarrassment and more specifically as an indication of a lack of “modernity” (Beazley 2002). Yet, efforts to remove street children are often justified by appeals to discourses of streets as dangerous places (Aufseeser 2014a).In many situations, street children do experience violence in the streets (Herrera et al. 2009). They are more “at risk” for suicide than are other children their ages (Jones et al. 2007) and are often victims of assault or sexual violence (Aptekar and Stoecklin 2014). Police violence is also extremely common in cities throughout the world. In addition to physical violence by police, children reported being asked for bribes or having the materials they use for their livelihoods taken from them (Aptekar and Stoecklin 2014; Ali 2014). They also report experiencing frequent harassment, verbal abuse from the public, and exclusion (Bourdillon 2006). While street children do experience violence in the streets, then a number of scholars have challenged discourses that present children as victims, arguing that such constructions of children’s lives actually stigmatize them and their families (Young 2004). Further, studies that exclusively focus on violence in the streets have been critiqued for failing to recognize the multiple spaces of violence in children’s lives and the way in which violence needs to be socially contextualized and addressed more holistically (Montgomery 2014).
2.2 Street Children as Perpetrators of Violence?
While much literature on street children presents them as victims in need of rescuing, another strand of thinking regards street children themselves as perpetrators of violence. Much of this literature focuses on older children, using different language to convey the threats they pose. For example, articles will refer to street children as gang members, delinquents, or criminals instead of as children or will talk about the potential risk that children in the street face to become criminals (Aufseeser 2014c). Ursin (2011) discusses how, at some point, children transition from being seen as victims who need help to instead being seen as threats. Street children are very aware of the different discourses regarding their presence in the street, which can further their feelings of anger and exclusion. In one study of street children in Brazil, Butler (2009, p. 24) found that adolescents’ constant exposure to those who assumed they were criminals led to shame and sometimes “an acute experience of exclusion, discrimination and violence.” In such regards, understandings of childhood constitute a form of symbolic violence that has material effects on children’s well-being (Bourdieu 1989). Symbolic violence “refers to assaults on human dignity, sense of worth, and one’s existential groundedness in the world” (Scheper-Hughes 2004, p. 14). In this case, as older children face more limited opportunities to earn money through informal vending or begging, they may be drawn to more criminal activities, such as robbing or assaulting, an assertion backed up by multiple studies of street children (Beazley 2003). While street children may in fact engage in violent or criminal acts, state responses to them are often disproportionately violent (Aptekar and Stoecklin 2014). Children are frequently incarcerated or detained by police, despite posing no real danger to society (Pinheiro 2006; Aufseeser 2014a).
In many regards, views of street children as perpetrators of violence directly contrast with discourses of street children as victims.
What these two strands of thinking have in common, however, is that they construct the street as a site of violence from which young people should be removed. Programs tend to view street children as a social problem, rather than addressing the larger challenges that they face in their daily lives. While a tendency in policy circles to view children as either victims or threats remains strong, research indicates that such a dichotomy bears little resemblance to street children’s actual lived experiences and own identities (Thomas de Benitez 2007, 2011).2.3 Diversity of Street Child Populations
Part of the tension over whether children are victims or perpetrators of violence has to do with who exactly is being researched. There has been a lot of debate about how to define the street child population (Ennew 2003; van Blerk 2014). The term “street child” has been used to describe older homeless street youth as well as younger children who work on the streets during the day and then return to familial homes at night, as well as various groups in between. However, as has been pointed out by multiple studies, street child populations are often quite fluid, with children moving on and off the streets (van Blerk 2014). These fluid identities are important for assessing the everyday conflicts and tensions that young people have to negotiate. However, the diversity of the population makes it challenging to design effective legislation. While the word “child” often refers to those who are under age 18, children of different ages tend to evoke different reactions. Various studies indicate that younger children are much more likely to be viewed sympathetically when contrasted with adolescents (Butler 2009; Ursin 2011), despite both being subject to laws that regulate childhood more generally (Aufseeser 2014d).
Many of the inherent assumptions about street children are modeled after the experience of street children in Latin America. However, critics have pointed out that these conceptualizations do not always apply to the situation of street children in other places, such as sub-Saharan Africa (Ennew 2003).
A number of studies have drawn attention to the importance of considering socio-spatial context and, in doing so, challenge universal narratives of street children’s lives. Civil war and the AIDS epidemic provide a very different context for understanding street life. In Uganda, for example, children lost whole families due to violence, a factor that is directly linked to some children’s presence in the street (Young 2004). In other contexts, there are very few street children who are actually orphans. Further, in some countries, children may not experience violence in their own homes but instead may flee because of fear of abduction or rape by soldiers, or may escape from situations of trafficking or forced military recruitment. Children who migrate in such contexts are often labeled as internally displaced and are eligible for more services to help unite them with their families (Young 2004). In this sense, the way children are labeled has very important implications for their material well-being, as well as how stigmatized they feel.Further, part of the inherent assumption is that street children are mostly a problem of the global south. Yet, street children also exist in the context of the global north, although often categorized as homeless children and youth (Gibson 2011; Pain and Francis 2004; Ruddick 1996). As is the case among street children in the global south, violence, especially parental abuse and rejection of one's sexual orientation, is key to understanding children's presence in the streets in the global north (Aptekar and Stoecklin 2014). Finally, studies of street children initially tended to focus on male street child populations, although this has been challenged over the years (Beazley 2002; Ritterbusch 2013). Overall, multiple factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, geography, and social context affect children's experiences of violence and risk in the streets. Geographers and childhood studies scholars have done much to illuminate details of street children's specific encounters with violence.
However, the diversity of these experiences is often overlooked.Spatial context becomes especially important when thinking about what counts as everyday violence. Wells and Mongtomery (2014) describe everyday violence as violence which is routine, inescapable, and mundane, in the specific contexts in which children live. Thus, what is considered everyday violence for street children, and the way they view this violence, varies. In extreme cases, street children have been the victims of police extermination and social cleansing. In Brazil, for example, street children were killed by extermination squads (Butler 2009), an event that galvanized international attention and the perception that something is needed to be done to stop the plight of street children. Human Rights Watch has reported similar violence in places like Guatemala and Colombia (Thomas de Benitez 2007). In some situations, the high levels of societal violence have led to extreme forms of violence becoming part of the everyday reality of street youth. Ritterbusch (2013) describes how in Colombia bodies are disposed of daily, with death used as a form of social control on a somewhat regular basis. In Haiti, street children face multiple forms of violence, police abuse, and attacks from other children and youth, which have intensified with the proliferation of hand guns in the area (Kovats-Bernat 2014). Such situations indicate the ways in which extreme forms of violence become part of street children's everyday encounters. However, not all street children experience these forms of violence. Some children use the streets as a source of livelihood and socialization, building meaningful relationships that actually improve their well-being (Abebe 2008). While more longitudinal studies are needed, in some situations, children are even able to use their experiences in the streets to reintegrate into “dominant society” and find jobs (PanterBrick 2004; Aufseeser 2012). In the context of the United States, street children are a more “invisible” population, which comes with its own risks and challenges. It is these factors that shape the ways in which youth experience and negotiate life on the streets and their encounters with everyday violence.
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