The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism

Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

Background: Research on homeless youth has shown that this population is at high risk for various mental health problems Previous studies conducted among homeless young adults in Ghana have focused primarily on economic, social and cultural causes of homelessness, their engagement in risky sexual behaviours and the prevalence of STI including HIV/AIDS We are therefore not fully informed of the prevalence of psychological symptoms and their associated factors The aim of the study was to determine the association between psychological functioning and social and health risk behaviours among a sample of homeless youth in Ghana Methods: A cross-sectional survey of a convenience sample of 227 (122 male and 105 female) homeless youth was conducted in Ghana in 2013 An interviewer-administered questionnaire was used to collect data due to low level of literacy among the study population Pearson-moment correlation coefficient (r) and multiple standard regression models were fitted to analyse the data Results: Approximately 87% of the participants in this study exhibited moderate to severe psychosocial symptoms Specifically, emotional, conduct, hyperactivity and peer relationship problems among the participants were 69%, 74%, 54% and 89% respectively Overall psychosocial functioning was predicted by stigma (self-stigma and experienced stigma), violent behaviours and suicidal ideation Substance use and perceived resilience were significantly associated with emotional problems Conclusion: There is a need for holistic interventions to help improve the psychological and social functioning of homeless youth Such programmes should strengthen socio-emotional coping strategies in street youth as well as address contextual risk factors such as stigma and discrimination by the public

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Correlates of psychological functioning of homeless youth in Accra, Ghana: a cross-sectional study.

Although the idea that children are social actors is well-recognised within childhood studies, the structural contexts shaping child agency and the everyday practices that manifest in children’s social relationships with other generations are not fully elucidated. This article identifies and discusses multiple and often contradictory concepts of agency as well as a framework for re-conceptualizing it as a continuum, and as interdependent. The central argument I make is that there is a need to go beyond the recognition that children are social actors to reveal the contexts and relational processes within which their everyday agency unfolds. It is also vital to ask what kind of agency children have, how they come by and exercise it, and how their agency relates them to their families, communities, and others. The article draws on research and ongoing debates on the life worlds of children in diverse African contexts in order to critically demonstrate how their agency is intersected by experience, societal expectations, gender, geography, stage of childhood, and social maturity. In so doing, the contextualized discussions and reflections have implications to rethink childhood and child agency elsewhere.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/3/81/pdf

Reconceptualising Children’s Agency as Continuum and Interdependence

This paper considers the agency of children moving to the streets of Accra, Ghana's capital city. A much used but largely unexamined concept, agency is nevertheless commonly deployed in childhood studies as a means to stress the capacity of children to choose to do things. In the literature on street and working children, and a cognate area of study concerned with children's independent migration, this has involved accounts of children's agency made meaningful by reference to theories of rational choice or to the normative force of childhood. It is our argument that both approaches leave unanswered important questions and to counter these omissions we draw upon the arguments of social realists and, in particular, the stress they place on vulnerability as the basis for human agency. We develop this argument further by reference to our research with street children. By drawing upon the children's accounts of leaving their households and heading for Accra's streets, it is our contention that these children do frame their departures as matters of individual choice and self-determination, and that in doing so they speak of a considerable capacity for action. Nevertheless, a deeper reading of their testimonies also points to the children's understandings of their own vulnerability. By examining what we see as their inability to be dependent upon family and kin, we stress the importance of the children's perceptions of their vulnerability, frailty and need as the basis for a fuller understanding of their agency in leaving their households. © 2013 The Author. The Sociological Review Â© 2013 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review.

Agency as vulnerability: accounting for children's movement to the streets of Accra

This article considers friendship among street children in Accra. Drawing upon the findings of a three-year qualitative research project, the article argues that friendship is a neglected element of research yet cooperation, mutuality and exchange between friends are essential to street children's survival. Living within the extremities of the urban informal sector, the article considers the existence of a strong ethos of 'help' between friends and how street children go about the (re) creation of friendship around those aspects of their lives essential for their daily survival. © The Author(s) 2010.

Asking, giving, receiving: friendship as survival strategy among Accra's street children

This Special Issue of Childhood moves beyond stereotypical images of African children to document the complex ways in which contemporary realities and processes of social transformations shape and are shaped by children’s everyday lives. In this editorial, we bring together perspectives that are drawn from 10 articles that report findings from six countries: Zambia, Rwanda, South Africa, Ethiopia, Uganda and Ghana. The insights generated reveal the importance of looking beyond the ‘deficit’ model of childhood to instead theorize how children, through their engagements in social, economic, cultural and political life, contribute to the reconfiguration of social and generational dynamics that unfolds in Africa.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0907568216649673

Beyond pluralizing African childhoods: Introduction

This article draws upon the use of photography to research the lives of children living in Accra, Ghana. Its aim is to consider method in visual research, and to reflect upon those modes of explanation and understanding that any consideration of method must require. It suggests a role for photography as a 'vector', as something capable of connecting our knowledge and understanding of the everyday with the everyday experiences and reality of others. Drawing upon the photographs and spoken testimonies of children who live and work on the street, and of children who live in a large informal settlement, the article advances an intimate connection between photography and knowledge of the everyday reality of children's lives, most evident in the capacity of children's photographs to surprise and highlight the fallibility of our understandings. © 2010 International Visual Sociology Association.

Unofficial truths and everyday insights: Understanding voice in visual research with the children of accra's urban poor

What is discussed in this chapter is work-in-progress, an opportunity for reflection upon elements of an on-going research project examining the lives of street children in Accra, Ghana. Street children have received much research in recent years but our project is, we believe, distinctive in two respects. The first of these is that access to reliable data on the growing presence of children on the streets of African cities is often problematic. Available research is often diffuse and hard to access, it is more often than not driven by the short-term requirements of specific programmes and interventions and as a consequence can be lacking in depth, rigour and innovation. Without the means to provide a sufficiently self-conscious and critical engagement with accepted understandings of the lives of street children, consideration of the experience of street children in Africa continues to rely heavily on the more capacious and better disseminated research from the Americas (e.g., Mickelson, 2000). At the very least, Africa's specific experience of large population displacements, diversity of family forms, rapid urbanisation, vigorous structural adjustment and internal conflict raise important questions about the appropriateness of such ready generalisations. Judith Ennew (2003, p. 4) is clear that caution is needed in an uncritical endorsement of the “globalisation of the street child based on Latin American work”. She is equally mindful, however, that as far as Africa is concerned the absence of reliable evidence continues to hinder debate.

Yaw Ofosu-Kusi

Papers

Agency as vulnerability: accounting for children's movement to the streets of Accra

Asking, giving, receiving: friendship as survival strategy among Accra's street children

Beyond pluralizing African childhoods: Introduction

Unofficial truths and everyday insights: Understanding voice in visual research with the children of accra's urban poor

Researching with, not on: using photography in researching street children in Accra, Ghana