Street Kids

Street outreach workers comb public places such as parks, vacant lots, and abandoned waterfronts to search for young people who are living out in public spaces, if not always in the public eye. Street Kids opens a window to the largely hidden world of street youth, drawing on their detailed and compelling narratives to give new insight into the experiences of youth homelessness and youth outreach. Kristina Gibson argues that the enforcement of quality of life ordinances in New York City has spurred hyper-mobility amongst the cityOCOs street youth population and has serious implications for social work with homeless youth. Youth in motion have become socially invisible and marginalized from public spaces where social workers traditionally contact them, jeopardizing their access to the already limited opportunities to escape street life. The culmination of a multi-year ethnographic investigation into the lives of street outreach workers and OCytheir kidsOCO on the streets of New York City, Street Kids illustrates the critical role that public space regulations and policing play in shaping the experience of youth homelessness and the effectiveness of street outreach.

In cities across North America, teenage runaways are struggling to stay alive. Some don't make it to adulthood. Some do, but their lives rarely rise above the despair that brought them to the streets in the first place. A few manage to beat the street, to get their lives back on track. In this disturbing account Marlene Webber draws on extensive interviews with these kids to explore the realities of street life, its attraction, and its consequences. Street kids like to project an image of themselves as free-wheeling rebels who relish life on the wild side. All brashness and bombast, they strut around inner cities panhandling, posturing, and prostituting themselves. Labelled society's bad boys and girls, they often live up to their image. But as sixteen-year-old Eugene tells us, the street forces bravado on homeless adolescents, 'but underneath, a lot of kids are plenty scared.' Eugene is only one of many street kids who talked to Webber in major cities across Canada. She lets her subjects tell their own stories; their voices are sometimes brave, sometimes bitter, often heartbreaking. Webber cuts a comprehensible path through the tangle of forces, including family breakdown and social-service failure, that accelerate the tragedy of Canada's runaways. She suggests measures that might help more of them beat the streets.

Examines the statistics on the low percentage of Latinos graduating high school, using the "role identity theory" to explain the stigmas surrounding the labels of "school-kid" versus "street-kid."

Adventures of several children in a largely Hispanic, but still diverse, neighborhood.

The present work in three volumes provides a comprehensive analysis of the problems of street children. These volumes discuss their problems and solutions. Street children have become a social menace and given birth to many crimes. It is a useful reform tool and will help sociologists, researchers, policy makers, child welfare agencies and all who are working for the empowerment of street children. Vol. 1 : Selection and Enumeration of Street Children, Vol. 2 : Delinquent Street Children, Vol. 3 : Street Children and Future Direction.

James Daniel Nelson first hit the streets as a teenager in 1992. He joined a clutch of runaways and misfits who camped out together in a squat under a Portland bridge. Within a few months the group—they called themselves a "family"—was arrested for a string of violent murders. While Nelson sat in prison, the society he had helped form grew into a national phenomenon. Street families spread to every city from New York to San Francisco, and to many small towns in between, bringing violence with them. In 2003, almost eleven years after his original murder, Nelson, now called "Thantos", got out of prison, returned to Portland, created a new street family, and killed once more. Twelve family members were arrested along with him. Rene Denfeld spent over a decade following the evolution of street family culture. She discovered that, contrary to popular belief, the majority of these teenagers hail from loving middle-class homes. Yet they have left those homes to form insular communities with cultish hierarchies, codes of behavior, languages, quasireligions, and harsh rules. She reveals the extremes to which desperate teenagers will go in their search for a sense of community, and builds a persuasive and troubling case that street families have grown among us into a dark reversal of the American ideal.

This book illuminates how panhandling acts as the embodiment of the experiences of street life for kids as well as how the streetscape functions as the interface between street kids and the mainstream.