PhD students: Growing up on the Streets

Anne Louise Meincke 2020-2027 (part-time)

Expressions and experiences of violence growing up on the streets of African cities 

In 2017, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC) published General Comment No. 21 (GC21) focused on children in street situations. GC21 identified violence as a critical issue in street children’s lives and called on States to take preventative and remedial actions. In 2024, the 1st Ministerial Conference on Ending Violence Against Children took place in Bogotá, Colombia, with States committing to take action. Despite these efforts, street children and youth continue to face widespread and often severe violence, inflicted by authorities, communities, and peers. For them, violence is a constant presence, experienced and expressed in various ways as victims, witnesses, and even perpetrators.

Building on the Growing Up On The Streets (GUOTS) project, this research draws on the concept of violence as part of broader social inequalities, exclusion and marginalisation. It involves secondary data analysis and conversations with key policy stakeholders to support the follow-up and implementation of GC21. The findings will provide actionable recommendations to guide global policies and practices in addressing the violence faced by street children and youth,  as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals agenda on ending violence against children. 

Keywords: violence, street children and youth, social inequality, UN Sustainable Development Goals, End Violence Against Children, General Comment 21.

Kate Sargent 2022-2025

Intersections of waste and unwanted materials and the lives of African street youth

For young people on the streets the ability to endure hardships and resist oppression is often considered to be facilitated through alliances with each other and older adults, but the role of (waste) materials is often overlooked.

This secondary data analysis of Growing up on the Streets identifies and explores the nuanced interactions between street youth, waste materials and their contexts; and how these relations can enhance and/or restrict the delicate balance of street youth’s capacities to act in the pursuit of valued life courses.

Although street youth’s entanglement with waste materials mediates their survival strategies, it can also contribute towards their marginalisation. This can leave street youth subject to discrimination and at risk of state efforts to ‘clean up the streets’ threatening both their rights and their access to the street materials that simultaneously mediate their capacities to act and contribute towards reproducing their inequalities.

Keywords: street youth, waste materials, survival strategies, capacities to act, inequality.

Janine Hunter 2018-2025 (part-time)

Lasting, Loving, Relationships: Expectations and Experiences of Intimate Partner Relationships for Street Youth in Ghana

Academic research has tended to ignore young people’s relationships, and if examined at all, usually in respect of negative experiences. None more so than street relationships, which are presumed to be transactional and violent.

Adopting a unique relationship feature framework and using interviews with street youth and social workers who interact with them, plus secondary data drawn from coding of street relationships in Growing up on the Streets, this project explores enduring intimate partner relationships among young people living in informal settlements and street settings in Ghana.

Findings indicate that amidst poverty and precarity relationships can and do endure. Street youth partnerships both influence and are influenced by family, culture and tradition and relationships play multidimensional, holistic roles in street youths' lives.

In sharing this multidimensional nature of street relationships, including lasting, loving relationships, the project aims to challenge preconceptions and change perceptions and attitudes to street youth by contributing to a fuller understanding young street people’s lives.

Key words: Ghana, street youth, intimate partner relationships, love, enduring, culture.

Eva Krah 2015-2018 

Between Shadow and Solace: The Spiritual Lives of Street Children in Bukavu, the Democratic Republic of Congo

This thesis explores the role of spirituality in the everyday lives of street children and youth (aged 14-20) in Bukavu, The Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Despite growing scholarly attention to street children’s everyday lives and lived experiences, the topic of spirituality has remained underexplored. This study’s focus on spirituality – religion and witchcraft – is inspired by the findings of Growing up on the Streets, a longitudinal, comparative research across Africa, revealing the prominence of spirituality in street children’s everyday lives (see Briefing Paper 9 below). 

To access and interpret children’s inner (spiritual) lives, this study complemented ethnographic fieldwork with creative, participatory methods including pictorial interviews, theatre and drawings, designed to facilitate reflexivity and dialogue.

Research findings indicate spirituality is employed in the context of children’s quest for everyday survival on the streets, exposing and explaining the centrality of spirituality for children’s survival on the streets, enabling children to experience power and create meaning. 

Key words: street children, Democratic Republic of Congo, spirituality, religion, witchcraft, ethnography.

Spirituality on the Streets - Briefing Paper, December 2016.