ancient cities

776 Street Children
See also Buses; Local Government; Transportation; Urban
Morphology
Further Readings
Boone, C. G. 1995. “Streetcars and Politics in Rio de
Janeiro: Private Enterprise versus Municipal
Government in the Provision of Mass Transit,
1903–1920.” Journal of Latin American Studies
27:343–65.
Leidenberger, G. 2006. Chicago’s Progressive
Alliance: Labor and the Bid for Public Streetcars.
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.
McKay, J. P. 1988. “Technology and the Rise of the
Networked City in Europe and America.” In
Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in
Europe and America, edited by J. A. Tarr and
G. Dupuy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Rosenthal, A. 1994. “The Arrival of the Electric Streetcar
and the Conflict over Progress in Early Twentiethcentury
Montevideo.” Journal of Latin American
Studies 27:319–65.
Warner, Sam Bass. 1962. Streetcar Suburbs: The Process
of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
St r e e t ch i l d r e n
Street children should be understood in light of a
growing global discourse on child labor and children’s
rights. The UN Convention on the Rights
of the Child—which stipulates that children have
the right to be protected from hazardous work—
was drawn up in 1989 and was ratified by all UN
member countries except two. Since then there
has been a surge of international interest focusing
on child labor in developing countries, especially
in issues related to the international
economy, globalization, and urbanization. Of
those children who work in urban areas, many
spend their time on the city streets, engaged in a
variety of income-generating activities in the
informal sector. It is these children who are usually
given the generic label of street children.
This entry includes a definition of street children,
providing an explanation of who they are, why
they left home, how they survive once on the
streets, and the various responses to them from
governments, nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), and mainstream society. The entry also
provides an analysis of the different types of
urban spaces street children occupy in their
everyday lives and a brief description of their
social world.
Defining Street Children
A street child is any boy or girl under the age of 18
who lives, works, or does both, on the street or in
any other urban public space, often without the
supervision or protection of an adult. The term
street children includes those children who live
with or without their families and who make their
living on the streets, or in other public spaces, full
or part time. The street children phenomenon is a
global one and although the continents most
affected are Latin America, Africa, and Asia, there
are more and more children living on the streets in
Europe, North America, and Australia.
Nobody knows how many street children there
are. Global estimates have ranged from 100 million
to 150 million, but these figures are not
proven and are impossible to confirm. One reason
why street children are so hard to count is because
they are often highly mobile, traveling from place
to place within a city and from city to city. It is
also because many street children have not been
registered at birth, have no identity cards, and so
officially do not exist.
Boys between the ages of 8 to 17, are the most
visible children working on the streets in major
cities, although there are also street girls, and their
numbers are increasing globally. Street boys earn
their money by shining shoes; selling bottled water,
cigarettes, and other goods; washing car windows
and busking with musical instruments; or by singing
or begging at traffic lights, on buses, and on
the streets.
Street girls are not as visible as boys, and they
usually do not earn their money in the same way,
due to gender divisions of labor in the informal
sector and the socialization of children in the
home. Although less visible and fewer in numbers,
street girls often suffer discrimination on the street,
because they are seen to be violating ideas of femininity
by invading the street, which is considered a
male space in most countries. Street girls may get
money to survive from their boyfriends or other