STREET WORKING CHILDREN, CHILDREN'S AGENCY AND THE CHALLENGE OF CHILDREN'S RIGHTS: EVIDENCE FROM MINAS GERAIS, BRAZIL

Drawing on data from the first large scale survey of street working children in Minas Gerais, Brazil, this article calls for a debate around how to support street working children. Street working children experience multiple human rights abuses; yet anti-poverty programmes do not target sufficiently their needs and fail to engage with their perceptions of their lives or consider the choices they make as salient for policy making. Using insights from the new sociology of childhood, we argue that policy makers need to come to terms with the agency of child street workers and adjust their policies accordingly. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.