Children of the Street: A Re-interpretation Based on Evidence from Durban, South Africa

Summary

Much of the research to date on street children has taken the form of largely quantitative surveys which have sought to establish numbers of street children, the reasons for their presence on the streets, their demographic and household characteristics, and their survival and criminal activities. A constant temptation in broadly quantitative research of this nature is to formulate a ‘composite profile’ of street children. It is from such a generalising approach in the post-apartheid Southern Africa context that this paper takes its departure, for this study investigates the extent to which generalisation may actually impede our understanding of street children in South Africa.