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Thousands of children live on Southern Africa’s city streets. These children have commonly been referred to as ‘street children’. Although South African NGOs and human rights organizations asked for this phrase to be rejected as negative labelling during revision of the Child Care Act it has been retained but a specific description has been appended.1 The children arrive on the streets due to a perceptible array of social problems, most of which tend to be directly or indirectly attributed to poverty. However, social research and especially studies on child labour, have shown that families do not necessarily collapse under the stress of undefined ‘poverty,’ nor are children from poor families inevitably abused, abandoned or discarded; cultural understandings have been little explored in relation to this phenomenon (Ennew and Swart-Kruger 2003).