Global Studies of Childhood

Volume 1 Number 3 2011

www.wwwords.co.uk/GSCH

COLLOQUIUM

The Vulnerability and Resilience of Street Children

NELLY ALI
Birkbeck College, London, United Kingdom

This colloquium discusses the importance, when assessing resilience, of understanding the context
of the street child’s home life before they start the transitional period of moving to the street. It will
suggest that the presumption in the literature that street children are somehow different and less
vulnerable than home children is not empirically or theoretically justified. It does this by reviewing
the academic literature available on the topic of street children and resilience. It is important that
this discussion takes place for reasons that range from understanding the correct support street
children need in different stages of their move to the street, to realising that if it is in fact the case
that children who migrate to the street are more resilient than those who stay at home, then
greater support is needed for the children who do not make this move.
Resiliency is ‘the capacity of individuals to face up to an adverse event, withstand
considerable hardship, and not only overcome it but also be made stronger by it’ (Sondhi-Garg,
2004, p. 70). There is perhaps no better place to observe children’s resilience than on the street;
what Conticini & Hulme call a ‘display’ of coping strategies (2007). Swart-Kruger points out that
contrary to popular belief, street children are not necessarily society’s drop-outs, and that ‘they
should be recognised for the exceptional fortitude, creativity, and astute knowledge of human
nature that they must possess to survive on the street’(1988, p. 71).
The research on street children, despite the range of geo-cultural settings, shows that being
young and living or working on the street seems to produce remarkable cross-cultural similarity in
children’s capacities. Researchers working in settings as diverse as East Africa, Brazil, China and
India have described the resilience, ingenuity, spatial awareness, creativity, determination and
shrewdness of their research subjects (Felsman, 1989; Aptekar, 1990a; Patel, 1990; Leite & De
Abreu Esteves, 1991 Lucchini, 1996; Hecht, 1998; Verma, 1999; Hussein, 2003; McFadyen, 2004;
Orme & Seipel, 2007).
If it is true that social support builds resilience then it does not follow that street children
were resilient before they left home. Rather, the social networks that they construct and enter into
on the street may generate resilience in street children. Alternatively, it maybe that the children
who are resilient are the ones that take to the street, e.g. adolescent boys who generally do not cite
sexual abuse as their reason for leaving home. Whether vulnerability or resilience drives exile or
exile generates vulnerability or resilience, the classic division between street children and home
children may not be warranted.
The positive adaptations to street life and why different children adapt differently is an area
still left to work on. Raffaelli (1997) differentiates this from seeing whether children at some point
start liking being on the street (Felsman, 1989; Aptekar, 1994; Lucchini, 1996; Hecht, 1998). The
choice of ‘self-removal’, to borrow Veeran’s term (2004, p. 361), as a means to escape difficult
circumstances is a fact that Fahmi (2007) highlights is missing from the discourses on street
children. The idea of choice might not be so straightforward. Schimmel, suggesting that children
should be removed by force from the street for their best interest, brings to attention Maslow’s
theory of the hierarchy of human needs and his analysis of the ways in which human beings

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prioritise these needs and pursue the most fundamental ones, illustrating that street children do not
choose the street. Rather, they are generally forced into moving to the street because they perceive
it to be (and it often indeed is the case) the only place where they can achieve some of their basic
needs and extricate themselves from the oppressive experiences from which they are suffering at
home (Schimmel, 2006, p. 224).
The transitional period from vulnerability to resilience and how it happens is not an area well
explored in the literature (Aptekar, 1989; Sondhi-Garg, 2004; Nalkur, 2009), although descriptions
of resilience are now more or less commonplace. Evans reports that during drawing activities with
street children in South Africa, pictures depicting the positive images of street life were produced
(2002, p. 59). The move to resilience is attributed to social support networks on the street that
provide not just support but also acceptance, companionship and understanding (Le Roux & Smith,
1998). A recent study in China confirmed their hypothesis, based on the Adaptation Theory, that
the longer street children remained on the street, the greater their ‘subjective well-being’ was due
to habituating themselves to the harsh life conditions (Cheng & Lam, 2010, p. 355).

Vulnerabilities that Remain

Despite displays of resilience, evidence of choice and agency, it is hard to ignore the fact that those
qualities which might get them through from day to day will not guard children against the streets,
which can ultimately claim their life at an early age due to the inherent dangers of the street
(Connolly, 1990, p. 145; Bibars, 1998, p. 207; Lalor, 1999, p. 768). Is a shorter life span to be taken
for granted where street children are concerned? Neither is the existence of streetwise behaviours
and remarkable survival skills equated with invulnerability or mature emotional development
(Kilbride et al, 2000, pp. 6-7). Constant talk of resistance and resilience gives a strong indication that
there is constant struggle. It is this struggle, faced when moving from moving from one vulnerable
situation to an unpredictable other, that needs to be further investigated and explored in terms of
vulnerability and resilience.
Children’s accounts of their first few nights on the street might be evidence that it is not those
who are most resilient that leave their homes. Hussein’s study of street boys in Cairo is full of
interviews where the boys spoke of crying and running all night for the first few nights on the
street (Hussein, 2003), and Conticini & Hulme found that children’s feelings of protection and
security on the street were influenced by the social networks which they developed once they
started to adapt to the street (2007, p. 213). Those who leave for the street may not be more
resilient than those who remain, but perhaps their habituation and adaptability are the qualities
that help them to survive. As Schimmel observes, ‘Their happiness is not a testament to the quality
of their living conditions, but a manifestation of an adaptive coping mechanism’ (2006, p. 225).

Romanticised or Demonised
For some researchers it is their primary task to celebrate the strength and success of street
children’s choice and resilience. Felsman (1989) studied children in Columbia who refused to
continue life in difficult family circumstances and found that for the children who were able to
make this choice, life on the street was their opportunity to develop resilience and in doing so, they
maintained better mental health than those who could not make that move. This does not
necessarily mean that those who left home had more courage, but perhaps they did not readily
have access to their strength and built this once they moved. Aptekar’s findings in 1988 further
illustrate that street children are not abandoned children; instead, he found that they were the
children who had abandoned their homes, and living conditions which they were no longer able to
tolerate. He found these children to be emotionally stronger and their self-management skills were
proof of doing better than those left behind. The validity of these findings could have increased if
the same children had been studied before the move to the street, or during the transition phase, or
indeed if they had been compared to siblings who shared their environment and circumstances
before the move. Veale’s 1992 cross-cultural study found that the move to the street was a rational
choice for children who were looking to satisfy their needs and ensure survival. Also, street
children valued the hard choices they made and thought they were ‘good persons’ because of

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them, as De Oliveira et al found in their study in Brazil in 1992. Conticini & Hulme (2007, p. 204)
further cite Monteiro & Dollinger (1998), who found that children in street situations develop
strong characteristics of initiative and positive identity, while Lugalla & Mbwambo (1999) found
that Tanzanian street-living children are ‘highly organised in groups of peers who share resources,
strategies, assets and care’. All these testaments to how resilient children on the streets are found to
be miss out an investigation of whether they displayed these characteristics as a result of being on
the street, or whether moving on to the street was a result of these characteristics.

Survival Strategies
Berman suggests that street children learn to cope with their fates by placing survival, as the
elimination of hunger and physical constraints, and the acceptance of the social order of the street
above all the horrors of victimisation. The different survival strategies the children employ, such as
group solidarity, autonomy and control, and creative, effective problem-solving, even
manipulation (DiCarlo et al, 2000; Young & Barrett, 2001; Orme & Seipel, 2007), generally
characteristics attributed to adults more than they are to children, are well noted (Donald et al,
1997). It would be interesting to carry out a comparative study with the children who do not leave
for the street to try to understand if these skills are developed in homes where conditions of threat,
poverty and danger often do not differ too much from those on the street. Hussein argues that ‘it is
the constant exposure to violence that puts pressure on the children to find ways of enduring pain’
(2003, p. 44), but are not there many households where street children have left behind siblings
facing the same fate? Looking at academic studies and commissioned non-governmental
organisation reports, we see incredible displays of resilience by children on the street, so streetwise
that perhaps the average adult would not know how to perform as they do to ensure safety from
one moment to the next. However, it would be naïve to assume that the street alone is where
these characteristics need to be developed or displayed. Research needs to be done to investigate
whether children at home are not less resilient, often having to conjure up much courage and
methods of dealing and coping with challenges and risks that surpass those on the streets. This
suggests that future research needs not to further contribute to the construction of what the street
child is, but to break down that construct.
Despite claiming not to romanticise the children’s lives, there is a danger of doing so by
focusing on short-term survival without supporting longitudinal studies that investigate the street’s
long-term effects on emotional and physical well-being. Some authors, like Aptekar (1990a, b) and
Fahmi (2007) take this a step further by suggesting that the children’s very presence (along with the
street community) is a political action. In contrast, Schimmel cautions that ‘Certainly some street
children will become resilient street dwellers, able to make a living and find food and shelter with
some regularity. But children’s capacity for resilience in the face of adversity should not lead one to
conclude that living on the street is in the best interest of the child’ (2006, p. 225).
This discussion would be more fruitful if supported by longitudinal and comparative studies.
In my research I propose to make clear distinctions between how children use the street and how
they are situated in it. This will involve distinguishing between runaways, street workers, young
migrant workers, and children playing on the street, for example. We need to move forward by
deconstructing the term ‘street child’ and situate the child within the wider ecology of poverty.
The contrast between the street child and the home child may not be as great as the current
literature suggests.

References
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Aptekar, L. (1990a) How Ethnic Differences within a Culture Influence Child Rearing: the case of the
Colombian street children, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, XXI(1), 67-79.
Aptekar, L. (1990b) Street Children of Cali. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Aptekar, L. (1994) Street Children in the Developing World: a review of their condition, Cross-Cultural
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Bibars, I. (1998) Street Children in Egypt: from the home to the street to inappropriate corrective institutions,
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Connolly, M. (1990) Adrift in the City: a comparative study of street children in Bogota, Colombia, and
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DiCarlo, M.A., Gibbons, J., Kaminsky, D., Wright, J. & Stiles, D. (2000) Street Children’s Drawings: windows
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Donald, D., Wallis, J. & Cockburn, A. (1997) An Exploration of Meanings: tendencies towards developmental
risk and resilience in a group of South African ex-street children, School Psychology International, 18(2),
137-154. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0143034397182003
Evans, R. (2002) Poverty, HIV, and Barriers to Education: street children’s experiences in Tanzania, Gender
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Fahmi, K. (2007) Beyond the Victim: the politics and ethics of empowering Cairo’s street children. Cairo: American
University in Cairo Press.
Felsman, J.K. (1989) Risk and Resiliency in Childhood: the lives of street children, in T.F. Dugan & R.E. Coles
(Eds) The Child in Our Times: studies in the development of resiliency, pp. 56-80; this work arose from a
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Hecht, T. (1998) At Home in the Street: street children of Northeast Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University
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Hussein, N.H. (2003) Street Children in Egypt: group dynamics and subcultural constituents Cairo: American
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Kilbride, P.L., Suda, C. & Njeru, E. (2000) Street Children in Kenya: voices of children in search of a childhood.
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Lalor, K.J. (1999) Street Children: a comparative perspective, Child Abuse & Neglect, 23(8), 759-770.
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Leite, L.C. & de Abreu Esteves, M. (1991) Escola Tia Ciata: a school for street children in Rio de Janeiro,
Environment and Urbanization, 3(1), 130-139. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/095624789100300112
Le Roux, J. & Smith, C.S. (1998) Causes and Characteristics of the Street Child Phenomenon: a global
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Lucchini, R. (1996) Between Running away and Eviction: the child leaving for the street, Childhood, 3(1), 60.
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Patel, S. (1990) Street Children, Hotel Boys and Children of Pavement Dwellers and Construction Workers in
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Further Reading
Aptekar, L. (1988) Colombian Street Children: their mental-health and how they can be served, International
Journal of Mental Health, 17(3), 81-104.
Aptekar, L., Kironyo, W. & McAdam-Crisp, J. (2005) The Theory of Resilience and Its Application to Street
Children in the Minority and Majority World, in M. Ungar (Ed.) Handbook for Working with Children and
Youth: pathways to resilience across cultures and contexts.
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ioh&AN=3769749&site=ehost-live (accessed
April 30, 2010).
Ennew, J. (2003) Difficult Circumstances: some reflections on ‘street children’ in Africa, Children, Youth and
Environments, 13(1). http://www.crin.org/docs/Difficult%20Circumstances%20-
%20Reflections%20on%20Street%20Children%20in%20.pdf
Morrow, V. & Richards, M. (1996) The Ethics of Social Research with Children: an overview, Children &
Society, 10(2), 90-105.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0860(199606)10:2%3C90::AID-CHI14%3E3.0.CO;2-Z
Panter-Brick, C. (2002) Street Children, Human Rights, and Public Health: a critique and future directions,
Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 147-171. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085359
Pare, M. (2003) Why have Street Children Disappeared? The Role of International Human Rights Law in
Protecting Vulnerable Groups, International Journal of Children’s Rights, 11(1), 1-32.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/092755603322384001

NELLY ALI is a doctoral student at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has a Master of
Laws in Human Rights and is currently working on an ethnography of street children in Cairo,
Egypt. Her research interests include health-seeking behaviour of street children, the experience of
resilience and shame and how gender is constructed and experienced on the street. She is also a
core member of the Economic and Social Research Council seminar series on young childhood and
pedagogy. Correspondence: nelly.ali@gmail.com

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