3 - Children and Youth in Pursuit of Care

Summary

Introduction

I now turn to the lives of young people who lost one or both parents, many to the HIV and AIDS epidemic, in the Amatikwe neighbourhood of Okhahlamba. In doing so, I trace the ways in which the young people themselves often sought relationships of care with adults, including relatives and neighbours. A focus on everyday life enables an appreciation of the multiple and varied nature of the young people's lives and begins through a description of their relationships; a description that is at odds with the assumptions of passivity and unmitigated vulnerability circulating in discourse concerning ‘AIDS orphans’.

In an essay inviting research to do with children in relation to geographies of political violence and structural inequalities that are in themselves violent, Veena Das and Pamela Reynolds (2003: 1) acknowledge that forms of violence can be most fruitfully considered together. When they are treated separately, being poor is perceived as a condition not unlike an illness. It is constituted as a generalized lack where poor people are rendered passive victims, and yet paradoxically often blamed for their poverty. As a consequence, poverty is depoliticized. In contrast to the idea of considering children as passive victims, Das and Reynolds call upon researchers to ‘focus on the child navigating the everyday with care-giving responsibilities and devising strategies of survival’. Paying attention to children, a task more difficult than is often assumed, allows suspension of ‘the tendency to interpret [their] lives within the languages and scripts we use for understanding adults’, and the shedding of ‘assumptions taken-for-granted about normality and pathology’ in relation to children's survival strategies (ibid: 2). The strength of Das and Reynolds’ approach is to uphold what I shall refer to, for heuristic reasons, as the double nature of everyday life worlds – a consideration of the everyday life of children and youth as holding within them a ‘continuous recreation of both belongingness and survival’ (my emphasis) (ibid: 1).

The spectre of the AIDS orphan, as it has circulated in global discourse across many forms of media, has linked the idea of parental death to various kinds of social pathology. In the most extreme cases, it is assumed that children who lose their biological parents through death necessarily remain without adult guidance, do not receive proper care, become homeless; and are in danger of not being socialized appropriately, and, therefore, of demonstrating criminal, anti-social behaviour.