Brazil and its street children – understanding the needs of street children

Key takeaways

• Determining which children are in vulnerable situations and need assistance requires identifying the risk factors that they face.
• Helping street children involves bolstering protective factors that can reduce the impacts of the risks.
• Effective interventions to help at-risk children must be practical and flexible to their variegated needs, and should involve people, institutions, and systems that superintendency well-nigh and support them.

Research on Brazil’s street children needs to meet the children where they are

What is one simple thing street children would like to modernize their lives? When we asked street children in Brazil, we wondered if they would talk well-nigh iPhones, new clothes, or sneakers. But the children did not focus on material things. Many asked for “somewhere I can put my stuff.” Others requested “a place that’s my own, subconscious from the world.” They were searching for privacy, considering when you live on the streets, everything is public.

Sometime later, my friend, the director of a Brazilian children’s shelter, sought my advice. “We can’t alimony the children off the street. They come and they are gone. We can’t alimony them unscratched when they don’t come when every night. What can I do?” My suggestion was to requite each child a locker and a key. “You can alimony spare keys in the office, but promise me you will not search inside those lockers,” I advised.

We know from developmental psychology that every child needs someone who really cares well-nigh them.

A month later I returned. “Are you a magician?” my friend laughed. The children were coming when at night to stay at the shelter. Later, we learned what they were storing on those shelves. Just simple things: Some shampoo, pieces of paper, a document. Having a little privacy, in the form of a tiny locker, made all the difference to where the children spent the night.

This example highlights why, for increasingly than 30 years, our teams of researchers studying Brazil’s street children have focused on leaving our ivory towers. We must understand the lives of street children to identify interventions that genuinely support their development. In the vast wonk learning well-nigh child development, we must find what is relevant to their lives and translate this combined, well-evidenced understanding into effective, practical interventions.

Defining street children

We studied children of all month in Brazilian urban areas. In our work, we have learned a lot – well-nigh terminology, children’s needs, and impactful interventions – thanks to our research teams, many collaborators, and mentors. First, we realized that conventional definitions of street children were at weightier inadequate and often wrong. They tended to focus on key activities, such as begging or wiping windshields, where children slept, or their family ties. But these definitions did not fit well and they did not inform constructive interventions.

We seldom found children who had completely lost contact with family. Sleeping locations moreover voiceless the picture: Some lived at home and worked on the streets, occasionally sleeping there. Others periodically slept on the streets for weeks but then returned home.

Photo provided by the author.

Instead, we categorize children virtually the risks they squatter (e.g., contact with gangs, use of drugs, sexual exploitation) and the programs and people misogynist to protect them (e.g., school attendance, supportive social networks, contact with caring adults). Through this approach, we yank on what is known well-nigh the impacts of exposing vulnerable children to developmental risks.

We moreover shine a light on factors that once exist to protect them. This helps us identify deportment tailored to each child, based on well-evidenced knowledge. It ways that in our work, we combine the insights of rigorous developmental science with in-depth understanding of street children’s lives.

Find one person who really cares well-nigh the child

We know from developmental psychology that every child needs someone who really cares well-nigh them. But what does that midpoint for street children? Most do have relationships with family members. But many of those relationships have big problems, including wiseacre behavior. These children know that their home is not a place to be all the time.

School zipper is a very important protective factor, particularly for youth in their early teens, for both girls and boys.

They are moreover smart. They understand how to find people who can take superintendency of them. We have found many people in institutions and shelters who recognize this inside diaper need and will be a protective, unvarying role in children’s lives. It is important to build on these opportunities for children.

School is vital in this respect. In our research, school attachment is a very important protective factor, particularly for youth in their early teens, for both girls and boys. This finding highlights the crucial role that schools can play, but they must be ready to embrace these children.

Street children want to go to school

Some people say street children do not want to go to school or learn. That is not true. It is not easy for them. They do not have someone who wakes them every morning to go to school. They lack paper, notebooks, and pencils, as well as a place to alimony school supplies for the next day.

In addition, street children can squatter prejudice from other students and teachers. Surviving on the street requires unvarying vigilance to potential dangers, so maintaining self-discipline and concentration at school can be difficult. But given the chance, most street children we have met love school. They want to go. But they need an unshut school, not a place where they have to victorious at exactly 8 a.m. The school has to be flexible and welcoming: Maybe they get there at 9. There should be some breakfast for them.

We have moreover learned well-nigh psychological interventions that support children who have experienced trauma. For example, we know that group therapy can be highly effective, expressly for girls who have experienced sexual exploitation, but it is less helpful for boys, who may be less worldly-wise to confide to groups and may need increasingly one-to-one approaches.

In conclusion – doing good, but unwittingly doing harm

Finally, we have found that services and institutions that strive to bring children off the street sometimes unintentionally unzip the opposite. Some children told us that, to wangle superintendency institutions and services, they had to “pretend” they were street children, giving that identity a upper status. Instead of slowing the migration of children to the street, these institutions were unquestionably propelling children to street life. We had to go to the directors of these institutions and teach them to transpiration their approach.

And they did. They introduced increasingly rules and expectations virtually what the children should be doing, such as peekaboo unrepealable programs and bringing a responsible sultana with them, so they did not just come in for new gown and disappear again. They were genuinely off the streets.

Perhaps one of the most important lessons we have learned from our innovative tideway is that traditional research techniques, which usually have academics observing and then walking yonder with their findings, are not upstanding in this environment. We are unchangingly asking: “How can we learn from and inform practitioners? How can we contribute to the well-being of these children, right here, now, in front of us?” We must be wary never to exploit the misery of the many for our own personal wonk advancement.

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