The CPCS Alliance is a global movement of partners and NGO’s serving children and youth in street situations around the world. This alliance aims to realise the recommendations contained in the General comment No. 21 (2017) on children in street situations prepared by the Committee on the Rights of the Child (https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/crc/pages/crcindex.aspx)
The CPCS Alliance defend and uses an Interactionist approach to understand how children and youth in street situations negotiate their social identity while confronted with dynamics of domination, labelling and violence. We acknowledge that their capability to survive on the street determines their career, which is also influenced by their capacity to play with the institutional network supposed to help or control them. We approach those life stories with a deep analysis of: their inherited identity (e.g., cast, religion, family and community background); the identity developed by street situations (e.g., survival group, regular activities, drugs, physical, moral and sexual violence); and their projected identity (e.g., dreams, expectations, projections).
Inspired by the work of Pr. Daniel Stoecklin (University of Geneva), we use the Actor System (Stoecklin, 2000) and the kaleidoscope of experience (www.self-acting.com) as tool boxes to understand the meaning, children are giving to their realities.
The CPCS Alliance and its members defend a rigorous methodological approach but recommend meanwhile to include and involve children and youth concerned, by useful, realistic and respectful interventions.
The paradox between the institutional discourse, which presents the child as an actor of his life and rights, and the reality on the ground, where intervention tools integrate little of the individual’s perspectives and the interactional context surrounding concerned subjects is a crucial concern. Public authorities as well as NGO’s should refuse the neo-liberal approach institutionalizing children rights in a “culture of quantitative results” and promote a systemic, comprehensive approach where the child, the youth is empowered as a real social actor.
Taking into account the child/youth best interest, reinventing a child protection system recognizing him/her as a subject of rights, ensuring partnership with various networks, organisations like-minded, those are the priorities of our Alliance.