Street Children

This article takes a relational approach to the production of street life in a coastal suburb of Cape Town. It’s concerned with the way street and family life are integrated and discovers that children are not isolated on the street but rather situated relationally ‘in between’ street and family life building relations within and across spatial boundaries. In Southern Africa families are fluid and divergent from the western-centric view of family as a nuclear arrangement. Richter (1991) suspects that street children are rather a product of the need for individuals to ‘pull together’ in situations of poverty. This article similarly highlights how the street children group together for additional support and protection and they view their peers

l., 2012. Agency does not mean freedom. Cape Verdean street children and the politics of children's agency. Childrens Geographies, 10(4), pp. 413-426.

The author proposes, based on the fieldwork on street children and child protection policies in Cape Verde, an account of the interplay between children and youth and social interventions, exploring the tension between calls for agency and the right to autonomy at the theoretical level and enduring disciplinary ideas about child protection. Bordonaro (2010) states the issue of child protection and the potentially dangerous attachment to the street that children may develop has become central in Cape Verde, which symbolizes the increasing anxiety about child and youth deviance and criminality.

This article similar to Archard (2004) proposes that children’s ‘agency’ should be acknowledged as a political project rather than an inborn feature of individuals, that they have the capacity for agency to the political questioning of what their status in society is and what kind of agency do children and youth are expected to reveal. It states that reintegration in centres or within the family in most cases has failed due to redeeming children with a longer history of contact with the

Homelessness, Poverty, and Risks to Health: Beyond at Risk Categorizations of Street Children. Children's Geography Journal, 2(1), pp. 83-94.

This article focuses on whether ‘homelessness’ is the most significant factor for the health of street children in countries of the developing and the Western world. The main argument is that the category ‘homelessness’ obscures the most important problem which is endemic poverty.

This article took a different approach than the previous. The author refers to street children as ‘homelessness’, which could be argued as many street children consider living on the streets as their ‘home’. Ennew (1994) defines street children as ‘those for whom the street more than their family has become their real home’. There is a continuous blanket of generalization and categorical thinking about these street children which reflect them as being ‘in need’ and ‘at risk’. These are ambiguous rather than analytically helpful and lead to a global narrative about groups of children. The author emphasizes how street children are so visibly out of place, disturbing the predominant Western construct of childhood as a protected state which leads to tremendous focus being placed on them in contrast to the children who live at home in extreme poverty, whether in rural towns or distant slums are easily overlooked. It concludes that homeless children may be more vulnerable in terms of physical or psychological health when comparing