Who are these 'street children'?

Throughout the course of this study I faced the obligation to constantly define what was intended by the epithet 'street children' as an absolute prerequisite to the research project.

The label 'street child', inherently, a contested image, as its is indeed a socio-economic construction, construed by society, superscribed by economy and sometimes even adopted by culture, admittedly was hard to elucidate. Certainly, levels of equivocation in scholarly writings, the abstruseness of UN definitions- perhaps founded on some desperate desire for global solutions and the more binary legal terms, on my part, all added to an array of provisional interpretations that required periodic re-evaluations, sometimes to be in congruence with, or at other times to drive the project.

Having returned from a period of fieldwork, it is clear to me that while the phenomenon of 'street children' is a universal one, intrinsically it cannot be given universal meanings, for it is a specific socio-economic (sometimes cultural or even political) construction, that is unique to those specific societies, locations and culture. Therefore what it might mean to be a street child in Mumbai is by nature not necessarily what it means to be a street child in Colombo. They might of course share parallels, but I argue that definitions and symbolic imagery should not be governed solely by theses parallels, for more often than not they tend to cover-up and filter social groups rather than elucidate them.

This was indeed the case in Colombo. When inquired, the broader reaction of the general public, policy-makers and academics alike, was one that 'Sri Lanka is not yet plagued by the 'problem' of street children as much as other countries of the region, like India or Bangladesh' and that in reality 'only a very small proportion of street children are perceived to be either, orphaned or living on the streets'. This line of rhetoric is based on two things. Firstly, it promptly assumes that 'street children' are a problem to city and society (society's perception of inner-city children is a discussion for a different time). Secondly, the society's understanding of what constitute being a 'street child' is deeply and subconsciously based on generalised and globalised definitions and imagery based on parallels, pushed by mass media. Furthermore, the first and the second basis are also synchronic, as it assumes that a street existence, which might have debatably grown into a social problem elsewhere, is automatically deduced to be a problem everywhere else.

With this in mind and informed by a set of interviews with children, mothers, teachers, education policy-makers, economists and sociologists (during field work), I argue that 'street children' in Colombo are a group of youth, who instead of being passive recipients of abstract public space, are active space-making agents, discovering, managing and transforming space, sometimes even progressively undermining their intended use. This specific group of children, regardless of any traditional labels and conditions that include or exclude them from being tagged as a street child, such as economic hardships, homelessness, orphanhood, schooling or not schooling, steps-over designated spatial boundaries and create exclusive access to the public space, where on a regular basis they cope, negotiate and may even openly defy the socio-spatial order built upon the relationships of public and private spheres. As a result, these children re-define the values and meanings attached to their age and social status.

To Colombo, these are the street children. This definition is one that is all together purged of resemblance to unwashed, half-clothed, starving children, associated with drugs and other vice. As mentioned before, these may very well be parallels and certainly represent a part of this group- but only as a small constituency of a larger group in Colombo that represents a hybrid culture of urban-rurality or urban-villages, as part of a long process of indigenisation and ruralisation of the city.

This distinction is crucial, as then the discussion, rather than simply portraying itself as a helpless and inevitable by product of poverty, seeps into a broader realm that commands the need to investigate children's cognitive understandings, spatial awareness, progression and the ability to form and build coalitions across categorical divisions. To this extent, this breakthrough re-definition of Colombo's street children adjures adaptation of education into one that will accommodate socio-spatial existence and promote spatial progression and cognitive growth, but also lend itself to be habituated by children. Furthermore, such an analysis of street children interrogates the national approach to space-making, and highlights the need to re-evaluate, urban-planning to truly be stripped off of superficial and commercially driven adaptations of ideals borrowed from distant West. It invites a kind of urban order that lends itself to be transformed from abstract spaces to living spaces. In this way, the phenomenon of street children, and the academic studies and literature surrounding it (or the lack there of) can be informed by a multitude of disciplines and may be discussed as a spatial social science, as a moment where public space, streets, markets, railways, canal banks, schools etc, become spaces that are unlocked by subordinate groups to be deconstructed and redefined by their everyday practices. It will also lend itself to a study of how they transform the same through the production of space for their daily activities and cultural practices.

#streetchildren #urbanchildren #urban #urbanrural