Abstract
The number of street children in the world, probably around 150 million, is contested, mainly because ‘the street child’ can be defined in various ways (children of the street, children in the street, street-working and street-living children). Recently, scholars have conceptualised the street child positively in terms of agency, rather than as victims of inequality. This trend is problematic.
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Notes
- 1.
In both Lima and Cusco, photography workshops with disposable cameras were organised at two open street child shelters. In total, 20 street-living children participated. They were asked to photograph their daily lives on the street, especially things they do and don’t like about street life. Afterwards the photos were discussed with the children individually in the form of semi-structured interviews.
- 2.
Children working on the streets but living at home, children helping family members on the street, children working at markets, children living with family on the street, children sleeping in night shelters, children without any family contact, children sleeping temporarily or permanently on the streets, children in youth gangs, etc.
- 3.
The rejection of analytical distinctions is defended with the argument that street children do not form a clearly defined, homogeneous population (this argument, we feel, may be valid for any analytical category), but instead refer to a subject constructed through discourse and thus may be captured by any number of definitions, dependent on the dimension of street life that is focused upon (see also de Benitez 2011: 8; Nikitina-Den Besten 2008 for a synopsis of the new child paradigm, based on agency and the social construction of categories).
- 4.
Literally: those who want to regulate child labour and those who want to abolish it. The former believe that children should have the right to work and that work is a part of life in many cultures. According to them, the focus should be on improving working conditions instead of eliminating all forms of child labour, which is exactly what the latter propose (see e.g. Liebel 2004; Weston 2005; Bourdillon et al. 2010; they reject the distinction between working children and child labour and regard the latter as a pejorative stigmatisation). The latter approach, replacing a specific analytical category (‘child labour’) by a general and descriptive category (‘working child’) has found many followers, particularly in the NGO world. For a critical assessment of their theory in practice, see Van den Berge (2007).
- 5.
We regard agency of street children as a subsidiary activity, imposed upon the child by developments and circumstances outside its autonomy. It is an agency prompted by an iniquitous system. By following the life track of the individual child, from a place within an impoverished and crisis-ridden family to the livelihood as a child of the street, we have clarified the subsidiary nature of their agency, the agency of the marginalized and unprotected. On the contrary, the abstraction of agency, isolating it from the material circumstances, is typical for the functionalist school in sociology, which focuses on personal traits and social functioning rather than on social conditioning.
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Lieten, G.K., Strehl, T. (2015). Victims and Agents. In: Child Street Life. SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality of Life Research, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11722-5_1
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