Not-Quite-Friendship: exploring social relations between child domestic workers and the children of employing families

ABSTRACT

Child domestic workers, many of whom are female and ‘live in’, are distinctively characterised by complex and ambiguous relations with employing families, situations which are often motivated and made acceptable by notions of kinship, community obligation and reciprocity. Evidence has tended to emphasise the household conditions of child workers, the causal factors underpinning their situation and the challenges they face in the urban environments where the large majority work. Based on interviews and group discussions conducted with current and former children on both sides of the serving-served relationship in Mwanza (north-western Tanzania), intra-generational household relations from both working and employer child perspectives are examined, offering new data on the interdependence and power-laden nature of peer relationships in this context. For the first time, the research reveals the existence and nature of ‘not-quite-friendships’ between child domestic workers and children from employing families and how these relationships – bounded by place, space and time – are constituted and manifested. The study of children’s relations in the context of child domestic work also offers a new, geographical, dimension to the study of friendship and, more broadly, the role of specific spaces in shaping relationships – an understanding which could usefully be applied to other contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Child domestic work
• children’s social relations
• friendship
• employing households
• relationality

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge Professor Lorraine van Blerk and Dr. Edward Hall at the University of Dundee for their support, and to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Ethical Approval

Ethics approval for the research upon which this article is based was obtained from the School of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Ethics Committee, University of Dundee [approval number: SREC PhD-025].

Notes

1 Here, the use of ‘Majority World’ is an acknowledgement of where the majority of the world’s population, poverty, land mass and ways of life lie, and seeks to challenge the privileging of Minority World views (Punch and Tisdall 2012).

2 The term ‘children from employing families’ refers to relationships between children and their adult biological kin, including their parents and/or close family members such as uncles, aunts and grandparents. The shorthand ‘children of employers’ is sometimes used. In quotes later in this article ‘parents’ was often used by children to refer to the adults with whom they live.

3 Here, as in all quotes in this article, names have been changed to preserve the anonymity of participants.

4 ‘Dada’ is a Kiswahili term approximating to ‘sister’ which children of employers in particular used widely during the course of this research to refer to the child domestic workers living with them.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council: [Grant Number 1983810].