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STREET KIDSSALESIAN PROJECT | |
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QUESTIONING POINTS The reality of the "children of the streets" or "street kids" puts on discussion many and difficult questions. Here we want to share some reflections on themes which are related with this reality. Certainly we want that the reflection began from the educational experience and that it may help to involve many people to work on behalf of childre of the streets who are on special riks situations.
The Street Traditionally the domestic space, according to their size and width which is conserved still in many rural areas, although not with the desirable quality, ha been the space where they were carried out and developed most of the socialization processes. At the present time, this space has decreased and narrowed in the urban areas. In fact, most of the houuses have reduced spaces. Because of this, the public thing, the Street has became more important than before. Particularly in the popular sectors of our big cities, the domestic space is not any more a space to share with the family. Instead, poor families expel children and adolescents who should take refuge in the street. In the streets they spend a good part of its free time when they are not in the school, in the work or in the same home. The intensity of use of the street on the part of the children increases with the age, as they grow. Children remain in the street around fifty percent of its free time, according to several studies of cases carried out in 8 Latin American countries and sponsored by UNICEF. �For the children the street is game place, encounter and freedom place and in occasions transgression, danger and deviation place too�. For the working male children to remain at home may be a synonymous of vagrancy and for the girls, synonymous of trial. The girls spend much less time in the street, approximately twenty percent of their free time and, contrary to what happens to the male children. This use diminishes as they grow and they arrive to the adolescence. "The girl uses the street in a traffic relationship, the boy in an appropriation relationship". She goes down the street, he can remain in the street.� �In general the public space is not women's space, nevertheless they carry out productive activities that force them to leave home The use that women do of the public thing has the stamp of a temporary and necessary act. Woman comes out to the market to buy, to the street to move to the work, to go to the school, to visit a relative. It is, in general, only a means to refuge in another closed space. For the women the public space is more traffic space than a participation space.� This biggest confinement in the girls that the adults justify as protection measure and care, spreads to be made more severe for the growing insecurity than it prevails in the streets and public spaces, that which impacts negatively in its social, cultural and economic development. On the other hand, the biggest freedom movement that children have, their possibility to consent to more diverse and more varied activities, their early abandonment of the home activities, place the children of popular sectors in situation of risk toward the vagrancy and the delinquency. The children have to face a social enviroment for which they are not prepared.They are exposed by long hours to the abuse, to the drug and the fatigue. But, the confinement and oppression against the girls finish, contradictorily, saving them of the violence and the prevailing social decomposition in the public spaces. These dangers and risks, however, are present in the domestic space. Given these contradictory situations, you can not reach a definitive conclusion about if the boy's situation is better or worse than the girl's situation for the fact that one remains more time in the street and the other more time in the home. Anyway you can conclude that the street has acquired an enormous importance in the socialization processes of the children who work or wander in the streets. |