Street Children

The Case of Simon

Aptekar and Ciano (1999) have written about Simon, a Kenyan child 15 years of age, who was murdered by a police reservist. He was shot five times at point-blank range, kicked into the gutter, and then spat upon. He had stolen a signal lens from a parked car, nothing more. What was it about this boy that aroused such anger? It appears that the reservist construed a scenario about street children that did not include loving parents or good character. In fact, Simon, like most street children, had loving parents who, like other parents faced with their children dying like this, were full of grief and present at his funeral.

Simon, like street children in nearly all cultures in the world, was treated with such fury because he received the moral judgment given to those who violate the norms of their culture concerning acceptable behavior for children. Street children do this by not living under the same roof as their parents, by working instead of going to school, and by assuming the right to enjoy the fruits of their work as they choose (such as consuming alcohol or drugs).

Street Children and National Values

The understanding of street children (and better treatment toward them) is linked to beliefs and values about childhood, which commonly mirror the social, cultural, political, and economic underpinnings, and often the conflicts, of a specific country or region. In 1989, the United Nations ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, bringing into force an international standard for children by which the situation of street children could be measured. However, because this document accepts the Western concept of childhood based on an ideal child who is seen as innocent and in need of protection, it fails to meet its goal. The concept of childhood and the value society places on this stage of development is extremely diverse. One label for all obscures the complex reality of street children's lives and does not describe the systemic factors that have resulted in their presence on the street nor the beliefs that reinforce these systems.

A persistent problem for street children is that punitive laws regulating their behavior are often based on the values of members of the localities' higher social classes, who often have different family traditions than those of the poor. In Latin America, for example, the families of the elite and the masses have different family traditions. Among elite Latin American homes, fathers are present and powerful. Boys learn to respect paternal authority. In contrast, among the poor in Latin America, it is common to have women at the center of families. Boys in these families are raised not so much to respect authority as for an early independence from home. Much of the negative attitude toward the street children in Latin [Page 1066]America comes from the social class bias that street children are not beholden to proper male adult authority (Aptekar, 1988).

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