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LAB's Summary of the publication
"On Third World streets or First World televisions, Latin America's
children are seen but seldom listened to. Child labourers, street
children and shanty town kids are portrayed in the West as
helpless victims - passive , big-eyed and hungry , besieged by
poverty and violence. Talk to the children themselves and a
different picture emerges, on of children as active, energetic and
resourceful fighters, struggling to improve their lives, get an
education and earn a living.
Building on the concept of children's rights enshrined in the 1989
UN convention on the Rights of the Child, Hidden lives explores
the lives of children through their own eyes and voices,. It argues
forcefully that child participation is both a right and a necessity if
child-centred social programmes are to succeed. More broadly,
harnessing the energy of children could help the region tackle
pressing environmental and social problems.
Duncan Green talks to children across the continent., watching
them at work and play, on the streets or in the home. He
interviews children in Brazil , Jamaica , Peru , Columbia, Honduras
and Nicaragua as well as teachers , welfare workers and other
adults involved in their lives. Comprehensive background
research supports his findings, while powerful photos from top
international agencies illustrate the text."
Extracts From the Introduction
Any visitor to Latin America and the Caribbean is struck by the
number of children. They are everywhere - hanging out in gangs
on street corners, darting between shoppers' legs in crowded
streets and squares, dragging protesting younger brothers and
sisters in their wake, quietly working on market stalls, thrusting
hands through car windows in search of a few coins, sniffing glue
on park benches or confidently setting off to school in immaculate
uniforms. It is not just the numbers (37 per cent of the population
of Latin America and the Caribbean are under 16, compared to
just 21 per cent in the industrialized world), but their visibility. In
the North, most children inhabit a relatively private world, at least
until their teens. They spend most of the time at home or in
school, and if they venture out in public, they are generally
accompanying adults, or being ferried to and from friends' houses
or various activities. Such a closeted world also exists in middle-
class Latin America, but that only accounts for a small proportion
of its children. Most children are poor, and for them, the street is
part of daily life from the time they can walk.
Hidden Lives may therefore seem a perverse choice for a title, but
although children are ever-present, their lives largely remain
invisible. They are seen, but not heard and almost never listened
to. Consequently, adults have little idea of what their lives are
like, what choices they make, how they see their futures or what
they want. Unfortunately, this even applies to milany adults who
play an important role in determining policies which affect
children's lives. Save the Children likens this 'invisibility' to the
situation regarding women and society two or three decades
ago, before the increasing awareness of women's specific
economic and social contribution began to transform planning and
policy-making?
About this book
This book is written in the spirit of the Convention and its new
approach to the lives of children. At its centre is an attempt to
portray the lives of children through their own words, based on
visits by the author in 1995 to Jamaica, Honduras, Nicaragua,
Peru, Colombia and Brazil, backed up by previous visits to other
countries, secondary sources and interviews. Giving children 'the
word', as people say in Latin America, entails a different
approach. It means trying, as far as any adult can, to see their
lives through their own eyes, suspending judgement in order to
understand what their lives feel like from the inside.
Hidden Lives is about poor children, the most hidden of all. It
does not dwell on the lives of middle-class children, although they
constitute a sizeable number (although always a minority) in
some of the more developed Latin American countries. Both
outside and within the region, poor children are the least
understood; their opinions on work, education and child rights
are seldom given a hearing.
Listening to children makes it impossible to portray them as a
single 'object', whether as hero, victim or villain: children's
experiences are multi-faceted. Most of the stereotypes are
wrong. Street children argue, laugh, play, have sex, steal and
sniff glue, as well as lie awake at night in fear of their lives. Many
of them are on the street not because they have been'
abandoned, but because they themselves have decided to
abandon impoverished or abusive homes. Working children often
insist on going to school, even when many parents feel (not
without reason, given the state of the Latin American education
system) that they learn more from work than from sitting in class.
One of the aspects of life in Latin America and the Caribbean
which continues to inspire outsiders is the energy, inventiveness
and solidarity with which poor communities confront the
difficulties that surround them. Given the failings, corruption and
incompetence of many state services, such self-help is often
essential to survival. Hidden Lives tries to give at least a taste of
that daily battle, and the extent to which Latin Americans are
helping themselves. In particular, the book looks at some
examples where these self-help initiatives are involving children
in fighting to improve their lives.
Hidden Lives starts where children begin their lives, in the family -
not the neat nuclear myth which dominates even Latin American
television advertisements, but the messy, fluid, multi-faceted
families of the poor, where children grow up and learn their
values. One of those values is the need for hard work, and
Chapter 2 deals with the thorny issue of working children,
intentionally steering clear of the term 'child labour', with all its
negative connotations, until the subject has been better explored.
Although the majority of working children are domestic servants
or work on the family farm, the most visible child workers in Latin
America and the Caribbean are those who work on the street,
and Hidden Lives goes on to explore the myths and realities
surrounding the 'street children' of the region, whose sufferings,
particularly at the hands of police and the death squads in Brazil,
have provoked world-wide condemnation. With both working and
street children, talking to the objects of all the interest leads to
unexpected, and perhaps controversial, conclusions.
Children in Latin America and the Caribbean live in a violent
world, and the book goes on to explore two causes of that
violence: crime and politics. Children commit crimes as well as
suffer from them, and Chapter 4 investigates the lives of child
criminals such as gang members and under-age prostitutes, both
male and female. It also shows the treatment meted out by
authorities to under-age suspects. Hidden Lives then examines
one of the more brutal ways of dealing with child criminals and
other 'undesirables' - murder, otherwise known as 'social
cleansing'.
Latin America has long been associated with political violence in
the shape of military dictatorship and guerrilla warfare, and
Chapter 3 looks at the effect of political violence on children,
whether in 'displaced' families fleeing the violence of Colombia's
paramilitary hit squads, as child combatants in guerrilla armies, or
as victims of military anti-guerrilla campaigns in Central America or
the Andes.
Children's lives are deeply affected by the economic policies
pursued by governments, and Chapter 6 explores the impact on
children of the current wave of free market reforms sweeping
across Latin America and the Caribbean. Chapter 7 then focuses
on the state of children's health and education, examining the
challenges facing the region's dilapidated social services, is well
as particular issues such as the spread of HIV/AIDS. Even with A
fight restrictions on spending, improvements can be made, and
Hidden Lives explores some of the many exciting new
experiments in community and child-run health and education
schemes which are trying to overhaul existing systems.
Much literature on children in the Third World falls into the trap of
devoting inordinate amounts of space to projects run by
innumerable NGOs. All too often, the formula is: outline a
problem, and then describe the project that will solve it. While
they can help challenge and improve government practices and
bring much-needed help to a limited number of individuals, NGO
projects on their own can never hope to cater to the mass of the
region's children - there just is not enough money. NGOs
increasingly believe that acting as advocates for children and
lobbying governments, rather than simply running small projects,
is more likely to make a difference at the national level. Projects
can also help in testing out new techniques which, if successifil,
can then be adopted by state structures. Hidden Lives tries to
avoid excessive reference to projects.
However, Chapter 8 is an exception, revealing some inspiring
results of the new approach to children's rights, in the shape of a
new generation of projects run by children, rather than for them.
The chapter explores the debate over children's rights and
participation in the decisions which affect their lives, before going
on to examine the UN Convention and its impact in the region.
In many ways, writing a child-focused book is an impossible task -
adults cannot see through a child's eyes without to some degree
projecting their own anxieties, values or needs. But other adults
all over Latin America and beyond are busy prescribing solutions
for the many difficulties faced by its children, and if they want
them to be effective, they have to try and put themselves in the
children's shoes, learning to listen and suspend judgement in
order to understand their lives, choices and desires. Children in
Latin America and the Caribbean do not face a neat choice
between a 'normal' protected Western childhood and their own.
Instead, they must grapple with the daily threats, opportunities
and choices taking place in their own worlds. Unlike adults,
children are rarely outraged or discouraged about the lives they
lead, and invariably have clear ideas about how they could be
improved. They need empathy and support, not pity. In trying to
uncover the hidden lives of children, this book is intended as a
contribution to that effort.
Owner: Duncan Green