They think we are children with a ‘street-mind’: Report on participatory workshops with children living on the streets of Durban

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They think we are children with a ‘street-mind’: Report on participatory workshops with children living on the streets of Durban

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).

ENUMERATING STREET CHILDREN

Retrak Enumerating Street Children Oct2014.pdf

Understanding the size of the street children population in a city or country can help inform the policy and practice designed to assist these children.

It can also form a baseline from which to track the impact of interventions and enable learning about the quality and appropriateness of interventions. This information is greatly lacking at the moment and many studies that do exist are not able to establish the accuracy or reliability of their results. This paper presents an approach to counting children on the streets which is methodologically reliable and accurate and takes into account the challenges of such an undertaking.

This paper is a contribution to building the evidence base of good practice in determining the number and characteristics of street children. Our aim is to outline an approach to counting children on the streets that is methodologically reliable and accurate and take into account the challenges outlined above.

APPROACHING OUTREACH WORK

Retrak Outreach Work Oct2014.pdf

ENUMERATING STREET CHILDREN

This paper outlines principals of outreach work with street or homeless children. 

These principals include: Following a rights based aproach; Understanding each child and his/her situation; building relationships; being flexible; building in reflection and ensurging staff care and protection. 

These principles provide the foundation to which outreach workers can return as they apply Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in their work. The aim in using this SOPs is to get to know children on the streets and begin to build trusting relationships with them, so that they can be safer on the streets and choose to access further services which could lead them to an alternative to street life.