No safe place: an ethnography of violence in the everyday lives of street connected girls in Cairo, Egypt

Ali, Nelly (2024) No safe place: an ethnography of violence in the everyday lives of street connected girls in Cairo, Egypt. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

Street Girls and young street mothers are rarely found in the academic literature concerned with street children. This thesis provides an ethnographic narrative of the violence that permeates the lives of Egyptian street connected girls in Cairo. The girls’ experiences of violence were collected through ethnographic methods, spending time with them and understanding their experiences, their struggles, their negotiations and stories of their choice, agency, and resilience, including participant observation, fieldnotes, groups sessions and unstructured interviews. The young participants were all connected with Hope Village Society. Other participants were the adults that form part of their social worlds. This ethnography addresses the significant gap in the extant research on street children about street connected girls experience of violence. It makes a significant contribution to our understanding of gender-based violence, street children, agency and resilience and describes the lives and intimacies of street girls. My research findings align with those of Tobias Hecht and Christopher Kovats-Bernat, who both identified violence as playing a central role in street children’s lives, but I go further to ask how violence is gendered, exploring its significance in the girl’s day to day lives and to share how it is experienced differently by them and in turn, resisted. I explore the integration of interpersonal, institutional, and structural violence towards the girls to advance the understanding of the violence the street girl’s experience and go beyond the existing literature which describes the violence street-connected children experience but does not analyse what it means for girls and for the societies of which they are part.

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