Thematic Review: Negotiating Identities of Street Children. A Short Reflection Piece

Summary

This article is published in the journal Papers on Social Representations and is distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license.

This paper presents a review of 171 scientific articles dedicated to the phenomenon of street children in the last two decades. According to Orr’s notion of identity as a social representation, the aim is to examine how scholars, through their research and the resulting international scientific production, represent the street children and therefore contribute to shaping their identity. The complex zone in the case of street children is the street, the place that performs the functions of home (where they sleep, eat, work, play and die), yet it does not fulfil their basic needs, such as proper nutrition or safety. This article discusses how in such situations the findings and approach to research proposed by Orr could be applied as a common thread to analyse the phenomenon of street children, discussing its links with child slavery and human trafficking.