Abandoned Children (review)

"Abandoned children" is a highly malleable notion that has long been used to establish claims to victim status and compensating sympathy and care. This set of essays-authored by historians, anthropologists, social workers, and psychologists-reveals the large number of conditions to which the label "abandonment" has been applied or, as several authors argue, misapplied. The authors contend that many of the foundlings, street children, child prostitutes, and children displaced by war or exile do not lose all ties to their natal families. They often operate within a family-based order that allows them to contribute to their parents and siblings either directly or indirectly (by removing a mouth to feed). The authors accuse the mass media of sensationalizing the condition of street children and calling down on them either penal solutions or the intervention of social agencies and accompanying misguided programs of assistance. These options are unfortunate, according to the authors, because they rest on a Western middle-class idea of childhood and parenting of little relevance to the inherited practices and economic conditions of the people affected.

According to this book, childhood has many faces. In the world outside of Europe-and in the European past-it is (was) perfectly normal for children to separate from their families at an early age and fend for themselves with only occasional visits home. Outside help, based on notions of middle-class parental responsibility and enduring dependence of children, often disrupts family coping mechanisms in developing countries, where children play a key role in the family economy. In short, this book represents an effort by cultural relativists to counter what they see as a hegemonic Western idea of childhood.

The quality of the chapters varies. Excellent short studies of child abandonment and foundling homes in historical Europe are followed by an essay revealing an abysmal ignorance of history. Conspicuous by its absence is a single chapter on Russia, where in the 1920s 6 to 7 million children lived in the streets; smaller waves followed after collectivization in the 1930s and the war in the 1940s. The chapters focusing on current issues and policy include discussions of street children in Brazil and Nepal, child prostitutes in Thailand, and refugee children from Bhutan, plus a different kind of piece about Chilean children who spent a long period in exile in England and, as a result, suffered peculiar problems of identity formation.

By far the most interesting aspect of this collection is the argument it makes for understanding the coping strategies fashioned by poor people in developing countries. Instead of the uncaring parents and abandoned, abused waifs of mass-media portrayals, these pages present parents displaced by industrialization, war, and migration, and savvy children working the streets to contribute funds and goods to their families, to escape the boredom and brutality of home life, and to ease the burden on their parents. According to the authors, many of the children are not abandoned; they have voluntarily left their parents for personal independence. They should not be rescued so much as empowered. Fair as this argument is, however, it is hard to see how children sold into prostitution by their parents and held as debt slaves can be regarded as free, and empowered as such, although this may be a limiting case.

Finally, Heather Montgomery finds another use for the term abandonment. She argues that we should place less blame on parents for abandoning their children than on the states and societies that have abandoned families, driven them from the land and deprived them of their traditional means of earning a livelihood, while providing no adequate means of support in the shanty towns. In these conditions, parents and children have few options and can hardly be blamed for grasping whatever opportunities they can find to survive.