Street Children in the Developing World: A Review of their Condition

Summary

The article reviews the literature on street children and points out why there are street children in certain cultures and not in others. The reasons for their existence are related to poverty, abuse, and modernizing factors. Street children are defined and distinguished from working and refugee children. Details about the family structure of street children are given. How the children cope and their level of psychological functioning are discussed. The article gives reasons for why the children are treated with such violence and gives attention to methodological research problems that include the children’s ability to distort information, the researcher’s proclivity to under- or overestimate the children’s emotional condition, distortions of facts created by the press and international organizations, and general cross-cultural research issues.