Abstract
CSS employ innumerable strategies to overcome their everyday challenges. This chapter investigates the skills CSS deploy for that. The children’s capacity to draw on their available symbolic resources in order to adapt to the conditions of street life is often more important than their physical resources for their well-being. Four types of survival strategies – coercion, concealment, persuasion, accomodation – are identified. The capacity of CSS to create opportunities is illustrated with examples from Brazil. Street life is ambivalent, presenting a combination of constraints and liberties, of violence and complicity, of dangers and survival opportunities. It does not prevent, however, the children to resort to more elaborate strategies, such as stealing, or camouflage with changing the name and inventing identities. To protect themselves, CSS often resort to the code of silence and controlled visibility. A protection strategy depends on the social influence that a child is able to exert on others and on the points of references building up a street career.
This chapter is translated from Lucchini, R. (1993). Les stratégies de survie, in: Riccardo Lucchini. Enfant de la rue. Identité, sociabilité, drogue (pp. 58–73). Genève/Paris: Droz. It is translated and published in English with permission.
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Notes
- 1.
See Chap. 7.
- 2.
‘Ninguem mexia comigo.’
- 3.
‘Moço toma conta de mim, nao diexa ninguem mexer nao!’
- 4.
The average retail price of objects stolen and sold by children in our case study is between 1000 and 2000 cruseiros ($3.20 and $6.40)
- 5.
‘Toda realidade é pra ser dita até um certo ponto.’
- 6.
‘Meu inimigo é minha sombra’
- 7.
See Chap. 7.
- 8.
‘Quem apanha lembra. Quem bate esquece!’
- 9.
In Chap. 7 we will see how children talk about violence on the street.
- 10.
See L. Aptekar’s critique in: op. cit. pp. 17–37. This interesting work on underprivileged children’s language skills in Rio treats the question of cognitive skills in an indirect manner. It does not, however, only relate to street children. See also: Monica Rebello de Castro, O Avesso la Logica: Aspectos da relaçào eniso-aprendizagem na escola da Tia Ciata, unpublished document, Rio de Janeiro, 1990.
- 11.
‘O que tà sabendo?’
- 12.
‘Conversei com um monte de moleque’
- 13.
‘Botei capoeira là dentro.’
- 14.
‘Se sentira machào, com maior mulherào do lado dele.’
- 15.
See Chap. 6.
- 16.
See Chap. 7.
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Lucchini, R. (2020). Survival Strategies. In: Children in Street Situations. Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19040-8_5
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