Criminalising Survival: Images and Reality of Street Children ARNON BAR-ON* (Received 25.5.95; Accepted 30.8.95) ABSTRACT Street children might not be securely lodged in the life-patterns that the middle class impose on young people, but their reward from trying to maintain a minimum standard of living that their parents and govern- ments are unable to provide them is infinitely preferable to living in the absolute poverty that surrounds them. Based on a critique of our current knowledge of the maturation of children, which is informed primarily by Northern mores and ‘scientific’ proofs whose findings derive from this normative framework and feed back into it, this article seeks to explain why we find child streetism so abhorrent and take it for granted that cer- tain norms can, and should, prevail in the South just because they are found in Northern societies. Upon embarking on a career in social work, a friend and I were advised by her father to defer our choice until we turned forty when, in Jewish tradition, we should reach the age of sagacity. A survivor of the Holocaust who lost his entire family to the Nazi atrocities, he suggested that social workers have a morbid fascination for painting everything dark: ‘Even in the poorest of families, children laugh and play, but social workers look only at their bellies and seek signs of neglect.’ This was in the late 1960s, when few young people listened to anyone over thirty. Yet I have often been reminded of these words, most recently when pursuing the literature on street children that, with a singular exception (Oliveira et al., 1992), systematically ignores its own findings in favour of predetermined conclusions grounded in Northern, middle- class mores. This article highlights a number of these discarded facts on street children, suggests why they are neglected and consequently draws somewhat different recommendations on child streetism than those com- monly propagated by the caring professions. The material draws mainly on three studies in Africa – two by the late Peter Taçon (1991a, 1991b) which cover Namibia and Zambia, and one * Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Work, University of Botswana. Jnl Soc. Pol., 26, 1, 63–78 Copyright © 1997 Cambridge University Press 63