Street Children and Everyday Violence

Summary

This is a chapter of Skelton T., Harker C., Hörschelmann K. (eds) Conflict, Violence and Peace, published by Springer. The chapter has been made available to read online by the author.

Abstract: This chapter reviews key debates about street children and everyday violence, drawing on both geographical and wider social science literatures. It shows that there is often an assumption that children face greater violence in the streets than they do elsewhere. Street children continue to be viewed as either victims or delinquents and are considered “out of place” on the streets. A growing number of studies have challenged such conceptualizations, emphasizing children’s agency and the way they choose to move to the street as part of an active strategy to mitigate or avoid some of the violence in their lives. These contributions also point to the diversity of the experiences of street children and the importance of considering the spatial context and a range of other factors that shape children’s encounters with everyday violence. Yet, in celebrating children’s agency, such literature may indirectly downplay the very real risks that young people face in the context of the street. The chapter goes on to review key contributions that examine the streets as contradictory spaces of both opportunity and violence. The chapter moves beyond a focus on physical violence to look at children’s exclusion and marginalization as important factors affecting their well-being. It argues that discourses based on the binary of street children as either victims or delinquents may inadvertently contribute to the persistence of other forms of violence, namely, by failing to consider children’s own experiences, the contexts of their everyday lives, and the structural factors that affect their well-being. Social policies and programs continue to be formulated on the basis of narrow conceptualizations of street children, with the ultimate goal to remove children from the streets. The chapter concludes by suggesting the importance of incorporating more recent research insights into policies, in an effort to address the everyday violence in young people’s lives. It further emphasizes the need for a more holistic approach to analyses of violence and street children