Vietnam's Children in a Changing World

Five

Children on the Streets 109 Five Children on the Streets 109 The first children I did fieldwork among in Hanoi worked on the streets in the center of the city. In this chapter I discuss some of their experiences , in particular their responses to the different types of formal and informal support services available to them. My findings show that children who had already been on the streets for a number of years were wary of establishing contact with any type of adult-led formal services, preferring to rely on informal support from within their peer group or from among adults who did not challenge their current lifestyles. There is a tendency to offer children associated with the street very uniform types of support, the assumption being that “street children” are essentially all the same. Most of you reading this are probably familiar with the term “street child.” My use of the term may have conjured an image in your mind of lonely, unsupported children living on the streets because they have no home, or are orphaned: begging, selling wares, or running makeshift streetside stores. All such images are legitimate, but they are also stereotypical. The children I met could not be so readily categorized. Another problem facing the children I knew is that the wider society associates the life of a street child with deprivation. As I argue in chapter 1, we do such children a disservice when we treat them as a homogeneously 110 Vietnam’s Children in a Changing World disadvantaged subgroup separate from mainstream society. As I show in this chapter, most of the children I did fieldwork among did not consider themselves disadvantaged and would have probably felt it was patronizing for anyone to treat them as such. As Tim Bond, writing about children working on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, points out so clearly, “By living on the street, a child is automatically guilty of challenging and breaking society’s most basic rules, and is reminded of the fact every day by the attitudes and acts of a whole range of social workers. Most people believe or want to believe that all street children yearn, deep down, to return to a normal life. This is a comfortable and complacent belief, reflecting the unquestioned rectitude of conventional morality. To think otherwise would be to challenge things best left unchallenged” (1994, 1). Bond observes that “street children” are often stigmatized by wider society, but he also questions the generally held orthodoxy that street children would rather not be living the way that they are, that they do in fact want to return to living in a normal home, headed by adults. Rather, he argues that some children genuinely want to stay where they are and prefer to be earning their income on the streets. He notes that this life choice is beyond the comprehension of members of the wider society because it entails recognizing the benefits of life on the streets for some children and therefore raises unsettling questions about childhood in general and the limitations placed on children’s lifestyles by well meaning adults. He is suggesting, as do I, that we underestimate children, their coping strategies, and their abilities to make decisions for themselves. By joining forces with Bond’s argument I am not suggesting that we do nothing to help “street children” but rather that we listen properly to each child and respond empathetically to his or her wants rather than automatically and sweepingly make decisions on each child’s behalf. Problematizing the term “street child” creates a dilemma: should I have entirely abandoned the term? Even though I originally decided to drop the term in my own work I came up against difficulties when trying to write about the children whose experiences are discussed here without referring to the street. This is because when engaging with existing literature and social policy on this issue it becomes virtually impossible to do so without using the dominant terms of reference already adopted by practitioners and academics alike. On reflection, then, the term “street child” has some use Children on the Streets 111 but only as a very loose generic, so while I use this term, I do so with reservation . I am not alone in reaching this compromise. Even though the anthropologist Tobias Hecht uses the term “street child” in his ethnographic study of children living on the streets in...