Growing Up in Crisis: How Sudan’s Conflict is driving Streetism and Homelessness among Children

Abstract

Street, homeless, street connected, of the street, street involved, street working, from street families, or in street situation, etc..all are terms applied in a way or another to children who are dependently connected to streets, whether for permanent or temporal living; all share the fact of staying for long durations away from families and un-supervised by responsible careers. (1) These phenomena can be described as streetism, which will be referred to frequently in this paper.

Streetism refers to a situation where children are strongly and frequently linked with streets for living and/or working without access to basic needs, including education and parental supervision. It commonly indicates a weak family bond (some live on the street and go back to their families at night), inadequate child protection mechanisms, caused by several unequal socioeconomic predictors, including poverty, family breakdown, displacement, weak holistic national social protection systems, etc. (2,3)