General comment on CRC call about Children in Street Situations
By Marit Ursin
Norwegian centre for Child Research
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway
E-mail:
Phone: 73596243
The following comment addresses question four, ‘Developing rights-based, holistic, long term strategies to prevent children developing street connections and to support children in street situations.’ The following comment draws on a longitudinal qualitative study, stretching over a decade, following a particular street environment as they age into young adulthood. The study includes eight months participant observation in one chosen street ambience in 2005, followed up by four more periods of fieldwork, last one in 2015, carrying out participant observation and repetitive narrative interviews with twelve boys, later young men. Additionally, interviewswith middle class residents, traders and police men in the neighbourhood of study were also carried out, in order to increase our understanding of their perceptions of the young street population (see Ursin, 2013 for a more detailed explanation on methodological and ethical issues related to the study).
The street environment described in this comment is located in the city centre of Salvador, Brazil’s third biggest city.Young people have descended from the encircling favelas to areas of the city centre for the last centuries, in search of livelihood opportunities, recreational activities and alternative living arrangements. The study reveals that the young street dwellers often feel a strong sense of belonging in one particular neighbourhood. When exploring their sense of home, three essential aspects emerged - safety, autonomy and belonging (Ursin, 2011). Their narratives divulged stronger feelings of safety, autonomy and belonging in the street environment than their homes and neighbourhoods of origin. Important to notice in this context is that the wealth of the city centre’s middle class residents, tourists and traders creates more financial opportunities than can be found in their deprived neighbourhoods of origin (Ursin, 2012, Ursin and Abebe, 2016). Thus there should be more emphasis in creating income-generating opportunities for young people, also those under eighteen, in the deprived communities. Their sense of belonging in the city centre is embedded in their strong relations with other users of the city centre, ranging from middle class residents to traders and security guards. When such street connections are already established, they become paramount in the young people’s everyday life and as part and parcel of their sense of self. Working with children and youth at risk, there should therefore be strong focus on developing solid social networks within their local communities, as a ‘backup’ when family relations are fragile and conflictual. This can for instance be done by organising ‘mentorships’ in the communities, strengthening intergenerational bonds.
In regards safety, the study reveals that the majority of the interviewees came from families struggling with domestic violence. In most cases, the young people themselves abandon the family home and seek a new home environment that they find less abusive. Althoughthe street ambience is marked by violent encounters, it appears that some young people are more certain to encounter violent behaviour on a regular basis in the family home and that they reckon the domestic violence harsher and harder to bear (Ursin, 2011). However, one of the things that have gradually changed during this decade of research is the reasons mentioned for leaving family homes and heading to the street. Among those who have stayed periodically or permanently on the street since early childhood (in the 1980s and early 1990s), most told about home environments struggling with economic hardship in addition to domestic violence and parental neglect and/or substance addiction. Yet in the last periods of fieldwork, an increasing number of youth had arrived at a later age on the street, citing their own – not their parents’ – drug addiction and involvement in crime and drug trafficking as reasons for departing from their home communities.
In order to explore how the drug trade has influenced the street environment, it is necessary to understand its interconnections with the favelas, namely the deprived communities in the urban centres of Brazil. The cocaine and crack cocaine supply has increased in Brazil due to changes in international drug trafficking patterns.The distribution of drugs normally occurs in the favelas, as these neighbourhoods consist of informal housing surrounded by a labyrinth of often poorly illuminated streets, alleys and footpaths which hampers police effort to combat crime while facilitates drug dealers’ monitoring of entrances and potential escapes. Moreover, the large numbers of poor, young residents in these areas facilitate the recruitment of both drug users and dealers. The high levels of financial profit and access to weapons have intensified the drug market, making the drug traffickers increasingly willing to use armed violence to combat the police and rival cartels to defend and expand their territory. The presence of drug trafficking is vividly contextualized in the interviews with young people in this research when they recalled their communities of origin (Ursin, 2014). Some refer to this aspect of their local environment in a matter-of-fact way, like Alex (18 years), a former drug dealer in a distant favela:
Lately this neighbourhood has become very violent – what runs things around here is the law of drug trafficking. […] After eight o’clock it’s they [drug traffickers] who are in command. It’s dangerous outside... Some mornings over ten corpses are found.
Antonio (aged10), whodescended to the city centre in the afternoon to juggleat the traffic lights, explained how his neighbourhood was different from the city centre:
Where I live there is a lot of violence, shootings,[...] you have the drug-dealer, people smoking pot, using drugs in front of the children, using arms, cursing others in front of the children. And here it is all quiet, everybody speaks with everybody, sometimes they shut their car windows but except this, it is good here, the police monitoring everybody, so I like it here...
Children and youngsters come down to the city centre to seek more peaceful surroundings. Youngsters who are involved with crime hide from vendettas while waiting for things to cool off in their own neighbourhood. The case of Lucas and his brother illustrates this. Lucas and his brother grew up with their hard-working father. They both became addicted to crack cocaine in their mid-teens. They began committing burglaries in their home community and gradually gained a bad reputation. Afraid of reprisals, Lucas fled to the city centre. Some weeks later his brother, who refused to do likewise, was killed. Lucas eventually ended up in the neighbourhood of this study, minding cars. He knew many who chose the street over family homes because of their drug use, claiming that the street made them more comfortable. In his new neighbourhood, Lucas coincidently met a former neighbour:
He used to live in my street and owed the drug dealer, and that’s why he doesn’t live at home anymore. […] If he goes to their area, they’ll kill him. […] They know he’s here, but it isn’t possible to come here and kill, you understand? This is a place which has security, police everywhere, security guards who like us.
The perceived safety of the city centre must be seen in relation to the risks of the favelas (Ursin, 2011, 2014). Due to political priorities, the city centre stands in stark contrast to the favelas, with several police stations, 24-hour street patrols, private security guards in most of the buildings, street lighting, and a more open and transparent public space.
This reveals how the current drug trade influences the street environment and pushes young people into homelessness. Furthermore, it highlights the importance to improve the safety in young people’s everyday lives in the poor neighbourhoods riddled with drug- and gang-related violence. To sum up this comment, there should be increased attention on working preventative with young people residing in deprived urban communities – both on a familial and a community level – to ensure that they do not seek the street and develop street connections in the first place.
Ursin, Marit and Abebe, Tatek (2016) Young People’s Marginal Livelihoods and Social Transitions in urban Brazil: A Tale of Four lives. In Geographies of Children and Young People.Labouring and Learning, edited by Tracey Skelton, TatekAbebe and Johanna Waters.UK: Springer.
Ursin, Marit (2014) “Crack ends it all?” A study of the interrelations between crack cocaine, social environments, social relations, crime, and homicide among poor, young men in urban Brazil.Contemporary Drug Problems 41 (2).
Ursin, Marit (2013) ‘The place where I buried my bellybutton’ – A longitudinal study of transitions and belonging among young men on the street in Salvador, Brazil(PhD thesis).Bodø: University of Nordland, Norway.
Ursin, Marit (2012) ‘The city is ours’: the temporal construction of dominance among poor young men on the street in a Brazilian elite neighbourhood. Journal of Latin American Studies 44(3): 467-493.
Ursin, Marit (2011) ‘Wherever I lay my head is home’ – Young people’s experience of home in the Brazilian street environment. Children’s Geographies 9(2): 221-234.