Street child spaces: belonging, conflict and resistance in the city of Durban through the eyes of street youth

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned with the everyday ‘spatial tactics’ deployed by children in a street situation in order to deal with notions of public space that define them as ‘out of place’, marginal and deviant. Using photovoice, we reconstruct former street children’s definitions of and feelings about their spaces in the city, bringing into view a complex set of social problems, attitudes and strategies that moves beyond the traditional binary notion of street children as either deviants or victims. This work points to the importance of finding ways to ensure the voices of marginalized and disadvantaged children are heard and presents the narratives that are important to our understanding of their worlds. Analyzing their spatiality in contexts of conflict, belonging and resistance, we found that children and youth in a street situation are mainly concerned with empowering themselves and resisting dominant labels and police repression.

KEYWORDS:

• Street children
• street child spaces
• belonging
• resistance
• conflict
• photovoice

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my colleague Prof. Dr. Margo De Koster who provided insight and shared her expertise during this research and in the writing process of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Marijke Van Buggenhout http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3532-0827

Notes

1 Throughout the article we use the concepts ‘street children’ and ‘children and young people in a street situation’. We approach these concepts by adhering to a broader understanding of the term ‘street children’. Therefore we relied on the words of our participants who constructed concepts such as street kids in a rather broad way indicating the social heterogeneity of young people in street situations, complex relationships with urban street environments and social environments.

2 Fictive names are used in order to safeguard the confidentiality of the research participants.

3 Surfers Not Street Children is an awareness raising organization. At the time of this empirical study the surf team existed of eight former children in street situations that aim at changing the way society perceives and treats street children. They promote the use of surfing to empower children to leave street life around the world. SNSC considers psychological support and mentorship as the best tools in order lead street youth into independency (https://www.surfnotstreets.org/). In the ethnographic study I worked with the whole surf team (former street children between the ages of 16 and 24). This article focusses on the visual narratives created by two participants, Lwazi and Njabulo. By focusing in depth on these two stories from the streets, we can fully acknowledge the voices of the two former children in a street situation.

4 ‘Photovoice is a process by which people can identify, represent, and enhance their community through a specific photographic technique. Photovoice has three main goals (1) to enable people to record and reflect their community’s strengths and concerns, (2) to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important issues through discussion of photographs, and (3) to reach policymakers’ (Wang and Burris 1997, 369).

5 Laura Lundy has written extensively on what it means to conduct ‘righs based’ research and has developed a model of child participation (Lundy and McEvoy 2012, 2011; Lundy, McEvoy, and Byrne 2011). In line with Hart’s (1997) argument on the ladder of participation, Lundy (2007) observes that ‘tokenistic or decorative participation is not only in breach of Article 12 but can be counterproductive’ (Lundy 2007, 938). It is arguments as such that point out the distinction between passive voicing and active participation of children in research.

6 This word points out past and current reactions to street children and homeless people. In South Africa the word is often used to refer to repressive policies towards these groups of people in order to ‘clean’ the streets.

7 South African Municipal Polices Forces.

8 2010 FIFA World cup in South Africa

9 ‘emplacement’ referring to a place becoming a meaningful place.

10 Cool Runnings is a bar where people dance and play the drums. The pictures depicts the wall of Cool Runnings.

11 A local word for a drug.