Street children as the embodiment of inequality

Roos Keja

Course: Development and Social Change

Lecturer: Dr. P. G. M. Hebinck

Leiden, 9 March 2008

Introduction

It appears that the benefits of present-day globalisation are accumulated by a relatively small
fraction of the world’s population, while poverty and social exclusion continue to increase
(McGrew 2000: 347). As many have pointed out already, globalisation is not a new process,
but a phenomenon that goes back at least to the fourteenth century. However, the speed and
the intensity with which different layers of societies have been changing since the last
decennia are of a totally new order (Van Binsbergen, Van Dijk & Gewald 2004). This process
has not been favourable for everyone, on the contrary. Socio-economical reforms in
developing countries, usually enforced by the World Bank, have worsened the conditions of
the poorest people. In the words of Scheper-Hughes and Sargents (1998: 3), ‘the perennial
losers in the aggressive restating of the new world order were certain categories of
“superfluous” people, among them peripheral farmers, indigenous peoples, and poor
children’.
In families that face many complex problems, children might decide to leave because they
think they will be better off somewhere else. Some end up in the streets of big cities and
become referred to as street children. In this paper, I will consider these children as the
embodiment of inequality, which is linked to social hierarchies and exclusion in society. In
the socialisation of children and in the dominant discourses in society, ideas about how
children should behave are produced and reproduced. The behaviour of street children does
not fall in the scope of ‘normal’ behaviour, which is at the same time the cause and effect of
their social exclusion. The very fact that they are not regarded as ‘competent members’ of
society, creates and sustains existing inequalities. I will discuss two approaches that keep
intact the existing inequalities; street children as victims and street children as dangerous
creatures. The third approach of children as social agents, protagonists of their own life, can
be seen as a counter-discourse that is becoming stronger. This paper feeds into the debate of
vulnerability versus agency, and calls for a breach with the rectilinear approach of children
as victims or as aggressors.

Defining street children

Most of the children accept living in the prescribed system of their society, in which they
have to obey their seniors. This is especially the case in Africa, where the ‘traditional order of
things’ is that children and youth respect and obey the elders (Aning & McIntyre 2005: 78).
Being protected by adults also means having to comply with their rules. However,

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sometimes the rules of adults do not seem to be sufficiently protective, for instance in the
case of societies that are shattered by a war, in families in which there is a lot of violence and
abuse, in the poorest families that are not able to feed their children. Children within the
poorest families are sometimes living in very similar conditions as street children, or worse.
It is not unprecedented that some children chose to leave their homes and try to make a
living on the street. These children are usually referred to as ‘street children’, a concept that
is often criticized because it is hard to define which children are covered by it. To start with,
the category ‘children’ is not as fixed as it may sound, as well as the category street children.
As Dorte Thorsen puts it:

Social categories are fluid and both children and their parents may shift between
seeing an adolescent as a child and as a young adult, depending on the situation. The
transit from one social category to another is therefore not a mono-directional process
nor a wholesale shift. (Thorsen 2006: 110)

The international child’s rights movement has a lot of power in this matter: first, in defining
who is a street child; secondly, by giving a moral judgement derived from the underlying
Western assumptions about childhood; and thirdly, in their attempts to save these immature
victims. Following Judith Ennew (2003), the obscure range of definitions of street children is
bluntly transferred from Latin America to Africa. The underlying assumption is, that there is
a specific category of children, irrespective of their geographical or cultural background.
Ennew prefers to refer to these children as ‘children with a specific relation to the street’, or
simply talks about ‘streetism’. UNICEF has tried to clarify the category by making a
distinction between children ‘on’ the street and children ‘of’ the street, the first ones working
on the street and living with their families, the second ones ‘for which the street has come the
major point of reference’. In this second category, a distinction is occasionally made between
‘children of the street’ and ‘abandoned’ children (Ennew 2003). It is not clear which category
comprises the children who sleep three out of seven nights at their family’s compound, or
children who sleep on the street but are looked after by adults who are not their family.
It is true that the term ‘street children’ might not be the best one, as the boundaries of the
category are not clear. However, in general, there is agreement that the concept refers to
children who are living on the street and are not very well cared for and protected by adults.
They live in very difficult circumstances, often in sheer poverty, usually have a precarious
health situation and struggle to survive. It is important to bear in mind that the term is not
unambiguous and might not reflect the children’s self-identification nor that of the people
surrounding them. However, it is outside the scope of this paper to design a new term,

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which, additionally, would do little to help improve the circumstances of the children in
question. A deeper understanding of their circumstances can be created by discussing the
different paradigms by which these children are considered.

Street children as victims or as dangerous creatures

In the dominant vision on childhood, children are not supposed to live in the streets without
the care of their parents. They have the right to be protected by adults, not to take care of
themselves. In this ideal Western image of childhood, children are supposed to go to school
and play in a safe environment. They are innocent and have no ‘real’ worries, because that is
something for adults (Ruddick 2003: 337; Zelizer 1994: 10). As a consequence, vulnerability is
often considered as one of the most important characteristics of a child. This makes that, in
the international child’s rights discourse, street children are generally talked about as
victims. They need to be saved from their harsh life, they need to be removed from the
streets and be reintegrated in their families or into another institution; in a place where
adults are thought to provide protection and care.
Following Holland (1992: 148), the ideal concept of childhood would not be complete
without the image of the unfortunate child. The ideal childhood is demarcated and
reinforced by all opposite childhoods, for instance child labour, street life and child soldiers.
Usually, it is said that these children do not have a childhood, or a ‘lost childhood’. A drastic
consequence of the exclusion of these children from the category ‘child’ is, that their
protection is no longer taken-for-granted (Hecht 1998; Stephens 1995). The inclusion of these
children in a deviant category can even lead to the extreme case of the Brazilian death squads
for street children. Men, who were security officers during the day, were paid to murder
numerous street children by night, with the tacit approval of a large part of society (Hecht
1998: 22). Only when considering a child not as a real child but as a kind of vermin, a similar
treatment becomes possible.
Children who do not fit in the ideal image, are usually a source of shame for society. A
street child exposes the inability of society to take care of its children. It is easier to take on
the idea that certain children are simply not really children than to accept one’s incapacity.
The violence that these children display adds on to this. A common way for a child to make a
living on the street is to address oneself to activities that are designed as being criminal, like
stealing, drug-dealing or prostitution, regularly coinciding with violence. It is not surprising
that some people in their environment come to think of them as dangerous. In Lubumbashi
for instance, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, violence is a

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part of the daily reality of the children who are living on the street. If a street child is brutally
attacked by an adult, other citizens turn their back and ignore them as much as possible.
They see these children as dangerous creatures (Tabu 2005). Street children incarnate the
opposite of the ‘socialised’ children as they display behaviour that does not reproduce the
standard frame of their society. Hecht describes this incongruence as follows:

The problem with street children is precisely that they are so visible and yet so difficult
to control. It may be easy for the elite to ignore hungry children tucked away in the
favelas, but they cannot do this with the children who might hold them up at gunpoint
as they ferry their own progeny to private schools. […] They embody the failure of an
unacknowledged social apartheid to keep the poor out of view. (Hecht 1998: 213-214)

Street children have been used to illustrate the vulnerabilities of childhood, but they have
also been perceived as a threat to the social order of things. By employing violence, they
come into the territory of adults, who are usually unable to control them and are afraid of
them (Ibid). As has been displayed, the ambiguity of adults can result in appalling behaviour
towards these children. It can be argued that the majority of governments, citizens and
international aid agencies display an incapacity to approach street children as children.
Considering street children as social actors might shed another light on their way of living.

Agency of street children

Although these children are living in very harsh circumstances and are living among the
bottom layer of society, an element that is often overlooked is that they are able to make
decisions and reflect on their own life. This view is reflected in the approach of seeing
children as protagonists of their own life, who indeed do have agency (Van Dijk, De Bruijn &
Gewald 2007). By employing the idea of agency, one moves away from the image that is
produced by approaching people as passive victims of processes that are beyond their reach.
Agency encompasses human creativity, inventiveness and resilience, and refers to the ability
of individuals or groups to negotiate about their perceived social and physical space (Ibid.).
Ennew and Swart-Kruger (2003) state that ‘street children construct and reconstruct the
meanings of their daily reality, whether or not they sleep on the street, in the widest sense of
the word’. De Bruijn (2007) describes the reflexivity of street children in N’Djamena, Chad, of
their situation. They are highly aware of their situation, in which they do not consider
themselves as passive victims. They are capable of making a living on the streets of the city,
referring to each other as their friends, by linking up with older people living on the street
and forming an alternative ‘family’. However, the environment in which they live is

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extremely violent to them, which makes the youngest ones very insecure. Tabu (2005: 111-
113) describes the initiation of novice children in the streets of Lubumbashi as a very violent
act, in which children are severely abused by other street children before being accepted by
them. Boys are usually beaten up, while girls are usually sexually abused. The objective of
this violent ‘rite of integration’ is to assess the physical endurance of the novice, and to help
adapting to the harsh circumstances of the street. When the child surmounts these events, he
is usually taken in by a group in which he will at least have a bare minimum of protection.
The initiation of these children is a shocking case, but it is even more shocking that this
society has created an environment in which citizens let this happen. Instead of protecting
these children, they equally distrust each other and feel vulnerable and insecure. The social
exclusion of these children turns them into the dangerous creatures that everyone fears.
Often, street children are not easily ‘saved’ by development institutions, as they use
several institutions as their social network but do not consider them as a viable alternative
for the street. The streets do provide a ‘home’ for these children, in which they have found a
space for themselves, unsafe and unprotected as it may be. Street children can be said to be
living in a ‘semi-autonomous social field’ with its own rules of behaviour (Moore 1973). As is
just described, these children sometimes display excessive behaviour, and their violence
might be frightening for people surrounding them. However, in the social field that is theirs,
rules do exist. Far from being chaotic, the world of street children tends to have its own
networks, groups and hierarchies (Ennew & Swart-Kruger 2003).
Furthermore, when they are given enough attention, these children are not as anti-social as
one might believe. Ennew (2003) gives the example of a 12-year old boy in Addis Ababa,
who has drawn a self-portrait with a hat, having a fruit basket in his hand. When asked to
explain, the boy told her that the fruit was rotten and the hat was to cover his shame for
being seen eating such bad food. Would she not have asked him for an explanation, she
would have believed he was simply depicting himself selling fruit on the street. It is
unfortunate that in most societies, even as in the majority of the international development
institutions, the ability of self-reflection and agency of these children is generally ignored.
With the exclusion of these children in the decision-making process about which
interventions to employ, a sustainable solution seems a long way off.

Conclusions

In this paper, I have discussed the social exclusion of children who are living on the street.
Thinking along the lines of inequality has proven to be useful for getting a better

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understanding of the complex ways of interaction and negotiation between street children
and larger society. Children are often seen as the first victims of a deteriorating situation, and
they are indeed among the most vulnerable groups. Vulnerability, however, does not equal
victimhood. In the dominant discourse on child’s rights, street children are displayed as
pitiful creatures that have to be saved, by which their agency is all too often ignored. In
another strong societal discourse, they are sometimes seen as very dangerous, anti-social
beings that have to be cleared out. There are no clear-cut answers as to what extent some
children are indeed mere victims of their situation, and to what extent others are dangerous
aggressors who would kill without mercy. One should not choose between vulnerability and
agency, but take in both paradigms when analysing the complex processes that are defining
and are defined by the behaviour, ideas and circumstances of these children.
In fact, street children display the major shortcomings of their societies, who are failing to
protect some of their most vulnerable members. Street children can be seen as emblematic of
major inequalities in society, in which chances and possibilities to make a decent living are
only reserved for a minority of the population. Inequality exists in different layers and is
displayed in power relationships on the international, national, local and interpersonal level.
Society in general, international organisations, governments and citizens, have not been able
to protect this group of children, who have in turn resorted to living and behaving in a
deviant way. The response to disregard these children by excluding them from the category
‘child’ is understandable, but will not resolve existing problems. The harsh inequality that is
embodied in these children will be maintained as long as larger society turns its back on
them and the families from which they originate. A limited focus on this very visible group
implies a resort to treatment of symptoms, rather than a way forward in tackling the
underlying inequalities that these children represent.

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