Towards a relational understanding of child poverty: Care and adverse inclusion among street-affiliated children in Peru

Abstract

In this article, I draw on insights from relational poverty scholars to show how uneven power to shape representations of child poverty, alongside ongoing political, economic and social relationships, is key to understanding the (re)production of children's poverty in Peru. Representations of child poverty have consequences for children's wellbeing, particular services young people can access, and understandings of the deservingness of particular children (and their families). Young people's contestations of the meaning and categories of poverty reveal limitations of normative poverty discourses about the relationship between children's labor, the streets and poverty. At the same time, young people also internalize and uphold some of the subtler ways in which poverty is (re)produced. Listening to young people's accounts of their own poverty challenge conceptualizations of child poverty as a bounded problem of individuals or whole countries, and instead recognizes the role specific caring relationships can play in challenging, producing and maintaining poverty. A relational analysis of child poverty offers theoretical and practical insights into the (re)production of poverty, and works to unsettle some of the uneven ways in which poverty knowledge is produced. The research is based on 14 months of interviews, informal conversations, engaging in drawing and games, and participatory observation with street-affiliated children in Lima Peru in 2009 and 2010, as well as follow-up research in 2011 and 2014.