Revista Conexiones UG, Vol. 4, No. 1, January - June 2026

e-ISSN: 2960-8147 ISBN: 978-9942-44-827-9

Poor girls, boys, and adolescents. A social reality

Niñas, niños y adolescentes pobres. Una realidad social

¹Fernando José Castillo

Metropolitan University of Ecuador. Guayaquil, Ecuador.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0661-448X

fernandocastillo484@hotmail.com

Received date: 26/03/2026

Acceptance date: 26/04/2026

Abstract

This article focuses on a social reality that has occurred, is occurring, and will continue to occur in South

America, and indeed, in almost the entire world: the despair and anguish that characterize the lives of minors

who endure cruel hardships considered a form of modern-day slavery, without the rights guaranteed to them

by most laws worldwide. This research, presented using an analytical and hermeneutic approach, highlights the

grave situation of this societal group, which is hindering the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals

because this delicate and crucial issue has not been addressed with due seriousness. This equates, according

to some assumptions regarding this unﬁnished delineation of integration, to the increasing weakening of the

family institution as its members are forced to ﬁnd ways to alleviate their situation, including children and

adolescents who are pressured to contribute some income instead of attending school and “wasting time”

there, thus childishly juggling the disruption of their childhood or youthful future.

Keywords: rights, minors, extreme poverty.

Resumen

El propósito del artículo es el enfoque de una realidad social que ha ocurrido, ocurre y seguirá ocurriendo en

Suramérica y por no decir, en casi todo el mundo, es el desconsuelo y la angustia por la cual transcurre “la

vida” de las personas minoriles que soportan las crueles vicisitudes que se considera como una “moderna”

esclavitud sin que priven los Derechos que la mayoría de las leyes en el mundo están dictadas para protegerles.

Esta investigación se presenta en la modalidad Documental, Analítica y Hermenéutica donde se evidencia

la grave situación de este grupo societal que se aleja del cumplimiento de los objetivos planteados en la

Cumbre del Milenio por no haberse tomado con la debida seriedad este delicado y transcendental contenido.

Lo que equivale, a algunos supuestos referidos a este inacabado deslinde de integración, a que cada vez más

se debilite la institución familiar al tener sus miembros que rebuscarse un medio para aminorar la situación,

incluyendo a las niñas, niños y adolescentes que se les inculca la obligación de colaborar con algún ingreso en

vez de asistir a la escuela y “perder el tiempo” en ella puerilizando en malabarismos la ruptura de su infantil

o juvenil futuro.

Palabras clave: derechos, personas minoriles, pobreza extrema.

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Introduction

Taking into account the intricate context of the redeﬁnition of power and the immoral concentration

of wealth among certain individuals, in contradiction with an expansion and spread of poverty and, with it,

hunger, as a consideration of the secular individual-society dilemma, always trusting in the expectations of

a well-being that never arrives, perpetually evocative of great human sensitivity—it is for this reason that

this minority group, composed of girls, boys, and adolescents, needs the necessary assistance to escape or

change this situation. And if such assistance is not provided appropriately, this societal group will not ‘learn to

ﬁsh while being given the ﬁsh,’ which will, paradoxically, lead them to remain poor.

From this perspective, economic misfortune and insufﬁciency must be approached from a myriad of

coincidences or as an emotional disorder that can cause psychosocial failure or decline marked by deprivation,

as a result of the cause-effect relationship. Therefore, it must be considered a multidisciplinary and complex

circumstance from the moment the process of impoverishment begins until, through certain procedures, it

is transformed through the evolution, progress, and development of the groups involved in this economic

situation. Otherwise, these societal collectives will remain in the same situation indeﬁnitely, excluded from the

trappings of progress, from the erosion of institutional frameworks to the fragmentation of the social fabric

and the inﬂuence of external factors. Hence, according to Guerra Velásquez (2009:143), who states: ‘Numerous

are the evaluations and discussions that include historical, economic, cultural, and social analyses among the

causes of poverty in the world.

This situation, which leaves very little to address the sectoral needs of its immense demand, increases

the number of ‘boys and girls of and on the street’ as future unemployed individuals, thus perpetuating the

culture of hunger and, with it, life in unhealthy, disorderly shantytowns—yet marked by complexity and chaos—

simultaneously plagued by major disruptions in their changing reality, subject to the contingencies of time

and space in which ‘one lives,’ and further enveloped in uncertainties and dreams of changes concerning the

inequalities and differences that arouse the fears awakened by their altruistic side.

These stereotypes have reached proportions insufﬁciently addressed by the social sciences. Therefore,

each governmental system, with the expediency that circumstances demand, must assume the inescapable

commitment to promote concrete political actions to combat hunger and extreme poverty in this part of the

continent—one as a consequence of the other—and to consolidate comprehensive educational, economic,

and health systems that include and incorporate these individuals into a genuine democratic system of

freedom, so that they may have a future different from the dark present they are currently experiencing.

It is public and well-known that these individuals who survive under conditions of extreme poverty, yet

seek a formulation to build an identity based on facts of which there are thousands of pieces of evidence in this

part of the continent—where it is noted that they sleep on cardboard boxes that the night provides them—

have no hope that their situation will change, nor do they have conﬁdence in themselves or in the authorities

to change it, thereby becoming a harsh, undeniable, and unavoidable reality. This leads to one of the most

dramatic situations in Latin America: ‘boys and girls of and on the street.’

These minors in situations of extreme poverty do not have a suitable place to spend the night; and

if they do, it is an unhealthy shantytown lacking the necessary means of coexistence that the complexity,

multidimensionality, and decline of reality demand. Consequently, they spend their lives on the street searching

for sustenance, even if it comes from garbage. Because most have broken their family ties or these ties are very

weak, they develop street survival strategies such as begging and certain marginal ‘jobs’ like ‘watching cars’ or

selling some product in the informal economy—without this improving their conditions to enrich their reality

or constructing a perspective of ‘family’ integration.

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The particularity of these special societal groups is that they lack formal education, do not surpass

the ﬁrst grades of primary school, or are illiterate; and because they live on the street, they have no ﬁxed

place to situate themselves, simultaneously facing the inherent demands of a premise of openness in the

sense of opening a theory to reality. Likewise, they suffer from inadequate nutrition, and their health is highly

deﬁcient, without achieving a fertile integration of one with the other. Following Mandry Llano (2009:163), who

states: ‘Health and poverty constitute two terms that are associated and closely related; almost always, this

relationship is inversely proportional, that is, the less poverty, the greater the health; an increase in poverty

corresponds to a deterioration in health.’ To that extent, they do not ﬁnd a congruent course of action, where

reality remains perpetually postponed; any attempt to elucidate it is an exercise that cannot be allowed to

succumb to the power of trivializations.

Furthermore, they lack family affection due to not having a nucleus in which to gather, so morality is

not a privilege to be followed; and if it is necessary to beg or steal for sustenance, it must be done in order to

survive. Another point to consider is that, just as they break relations with their family members as a factor of

growth, they also do so with their community or neighborhood, forming street groups through forms of action,

interaction, or contacts aligned with their same interests and subjected to similar risks, maintaining the same

level of poverty and the losses of an aspiration within the warp of reality and the possibilities of the extension

between the real and life itself, in a perpetual closure without openness.

Unfortunately, there is no exact number of how many minors are in this situation of extreme poverty in

Latin America, a response that cannot be constructed because each country has a different rate, in addition

to the individual growth of its population amid the effects of today’s societies—which do not overlook the

crucial nature of the ephemeral but exercise the conﬂuences of the different and the unequal as a force ﬁeld

where the precariousness of the human condition, unjust distances, and pertinent ones continue to coexist as

a construction of differences without possibilities for renewal, change, or ruptures in favor of freedom.

However, what is constant is that the number of people and families in this situation of extreme poverty

is increasingly growing, due to the economic contraction generated post-COVID-19 and the political and

economic situation of most countries in the region. Another consequence to consider is the abandonment

of the father from the family nucleus, possibly due to domestic violence, leaving the mother and the rest of

the offspring without corresponding sustenance, forcing the woman to go out to work or to send the minor

children to the street to obtain some food to survive, she and the rest of her siblings—a situation not exempt

from the apprehension between the implacable game of life to survive and the new searches for certainties

that will not be, nor can be, accessible.

These human groups in critical poverty come from overcrowded households in slums and deprived

areas, bounded by apprehension and need, unable to enter into the concept of a social structure. They are

mostly found in nearby urban centers where formal or informal commerce is generated, where there is greater

vehicular and pedestrian trafﬁc to counteract the limitations of possibilities as a perpetual dynamic with an

illusion of singularity.

This gives them guarantees of obtaining some sustenance from pious individuals who collaborate with

them by offering some food or clothing upon seeing their condition of begging, as they are unkempt and

wearing dirty, deteriorated clothes within the sphere of immediacy. In this sense, within this group remain

minors who, due to not possessing an adequate education—that is, being illiterate—will join the ranks of the

unemployed or underpaid workers with no expectations of improvement. Therefore, it is most likely that they

will possibly increase the ranks of juvenile delinquents.

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Hunger in the yotuh sector

The dehumanization of poverty and its dramatic expressions is a practice created to justify segregation

and ethnic stereotypes, accepting an alleged tolerance of economic inequality, produced in its fully constitutive

dynamism without exteriority, since the economically poor have always been linked to delinquency and

violence by criminal justice, in addition to being associated with criminality in a denigrating manner. This

signiﬁes transversal referents and structural dimensions of complexity within the general conceptualization.

Another of the serious complications manifested by youth unemployment is the deployment of

violence, crime, and the consumption and trafﬁcking of prohibited substances, because they are recruited by

criminal groups to join and increase criminal gangs, since they have no other means of survival in a society that

discriminates against them for the mere fact of being poor and belonging to a humble family. This leads to,

according to Alvarado Chacín (2003:433).

Corruption of various kinds that became widespread (...) along with economic recession, the

constant decline of economic and social indicators, the deterioration of living conditions for the

majority, and exclusion that even generated processes of social violence and anomie, sharpened

contradictions, inequalities, and discontent, and led the collective to demand from the powers

that be not only an end to poverty and exclusion but also the restoration of their hope through

the construction of an inclusive political project, in which they would be taken into account and

recognized as human beings and as citizens.

This impact, both at a personal and family level, notably affects Latin American countries, both

individually and collectively, due to the absence of borders caused by human trafﬁcking that occurs between

different States, as populations seek to cover their basic needs by any means necessary, regardless of where

they might achieve or obtain them.

Under these parameters, unemployment—as a worrying priority for this sector of the population—has

increased even further, subsequently compounded by the health factor as a consequence of COVID-19, also

being considered as the lack of jobs. This has been severely estimated among young citizens who have already

completed their secondary education, causing a disincentive to achieve higher levels of education and better

remuneration in the future, taking into account the daily processing of lived experience from the past and that

which is constructed in the present.

This, without taking into consideration the extensive elucidation of the large percentage of young

people who abandon their studies upon reasoning that it is useless to study if later they cannot escape poverty

in the future or if they must dramatize it, because they cannot know what the immediacy of the next day holds

for them or their ﬁnal destiny, although always with the illusion that each one, in their diminutive solipsism,

harbors a favorable change in their life—which almost mostly leads them to commit crimes to achieve, or at

least momentarily, cover their primary need: ‘hunger.’

Therefore, it is the limited access to the goods and services necessary for survival that causes the

absence of minimum standards of well-being, such as health, education, housing, and full employment, which

gives rise to—without this conduct being justiﬁed—their members committing crimes and being imprisoned

with greater force than other social groups, with girls, boys, and adolescents being the most affected by

‘inhabiting’ an environment of poverty, delinquency, and misery.

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The Latin American societal group comprised of persons under twenty years of age suffers the same or

worse consequences as the rest of the low-income population, with the additional problems of unemployment,

lack of education, and criminalization by authorities and the rest of the ‘decent’ population, who view the

increase in juvenile delinquency with concern without addressing the main causes that provoke it. This problem

of youth unemployment presents itself as a catastrophe for the economies of most countries in this part of

the continent, due to the social and economic repercussions both for these individuals and for their families,

aside from the consequences for the different governments, which will see an increase in violence due to

the desperation of not being able to obtain sustenance for their maintenance, leading to regional political

instability.

Another of the main problems presented by hunger in the youth population is the lack of capacity for

them to access the educational system in their respective countries, because they cannot be incorporated due

to ‘budgetary constraints,’ which notably affects future economies due to the lack of training of the workforce

that will be required for the implementation of new technologies. Therefore, these particular societal groups are

discriminated against and categorized as ‘evil-doers and delinquents’ by the rest of society without any general

reason or due to particular and individual responsibilities, additionally suffering extreme and discriminatory

mistreatment, which exacerbates confusion and distorts the original meaning of poverty, which is considered

to be categorized and composed of outcast and incorrigible persons, regardless of whether each individual,

alone or separately, and even within the participatory axis, is considered to form part of the shared foundation

of poverty. Consequently, this generalized attitude generates fertile ground for stigmatization.

In this sense, the forgetfulness, disinterest, and neglect of the phenomenon called ‘hunger’ as a

consequence of extreme poverty must not be accepted as an unsolvable social and economic situation for this

segment of the population. Therefore, it is necessary for these groups to demand the attainment of Collective

Rights in order to overcome once and for all, or at least minimize, the social and political discrimination and

exclusion to which this sector of society is subjugated and subordinated. Thus, this cultural denigration to

which this mistreated and invisibilized societal group is subjected by its own kind can be eliminated or at least

attenuated through structural policies of improvement.

This, without taking into consideration the large percentage of young people who abandon their

studies upon reasoning that it is useless to study in this useless and maladaptive system if later they cannot

escape poverty, which leads them to perform precarious and underpaid jobs, or worse yet, to commit crimes to

achieve, at least momentarily, covering their primary need, which is to satisfy or at least mitigate the suffering

of hunger. The perspective of each of these beings is fundamentally a non-trans-situational subsistence, in the

same proportions in which survival in all its forms manifests itself as ‘their way of life.’

Although the family institution is considered a group united by consanguinity or law, in addition to

mutually providing affection, love, and protection among its members, unfortunately the critical economic

situation has almost made this bond disappear in these societal groups that are in critical poverty, which means

that the entity of the family is increasingly weakened because all its members must scrutinize even garbage as

a means to alleviate the lamentable situation of an uncertain and ungraspable future, given the extension of

its factual fabric.

Under these parameters, girls and boys who participate in obtaining some sustenance are included,

as they are instilled with the obligation to collaborate with some income instead of attending school and

‘wasting time’ there, according to their parents, which accentuates their condition of vagrancy—a condition

that carries the particular signiﬁcance for understanding the multiple effects of the radical differentiation and

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distance between individuals and society. This situation and its forms of concretization increase the behavior of

‘boys and girls of and on the street’ as future unemployed individuals, perpetuating the culture of hunger and

need that rests upon a relationship of immediate belief that leads them not to believe in nor accept ‘another

comfortable world,’ and thus to maintain survival in unhealthy shantytowns.

Indeed, it is public and well-known that these individuals who survive under conditions of extreme

poverty and with the notion of an admittedly imperfect society—facts of which there are thousands of pieces

of evidence in this part of the continent, where it is stipulated that these people sleep outdoors on sidewalks,

wherever the night ﬁnds them, lying on cardboard boxes—have no hope that their situation will change, nor

do they have conﬁdence in themselves or in the authorities to change it, in a kind of diffuse generalization of

realities integrated into the processes of connection with the context, thereby becoming a harsh, undeniable,

and unavoidable reality. This leads to one of the most dramatic situations in Latin America: the formation of

boys and girls of and on the street.

This situation of helplessness of minors in critical circumstances is due, for the most part, to the absence

of public policies that authorities and systems must dictate to control this scourge, regardless of the fact that

governments are created for the improvement of countries. Although legal regulations in almost the entire

world establish the duty to respect the right to security and protection of these minors as special subjects

corresponding to their superior well-being precisely because they are boys, girls, and adolescents, in addition

to human ﬂourishing and the duty to maximize their prosperity and satisfaction as a deliberate end, the increase

in extreme child and youth poverty and the change in the proﬁle of the affected population are alarming. This

is a relationship of complementarity between individual identity and collective identity.

In this regard, unfortunately, at present, the extreme situation of these minors means that more boys and

girls from urban areas, previously middle class, now live in a considerable and relative poverty. It is public and

well-known, as already noted, that these groups of minors in situations of excessive scarcity and destitution do

not have an adequate, appropriate, or suitable place to spend the night; and if by chance they ‘coexist with

their family’—probably fragmented—they do so in an unhealthy shantytown without the necessary means of

coexistence and under an identical sameness.

Therefore, most of ‘their lives’ are spent on the street searching for some sustenance, even if it is from

garbage to satisfy their hunger. Most of them ‘survive’ alone or with a similar group, since most have broken

their family ties or these ties are very weak; therefore, they develop street survival strategies such as begging

and certain marginal ‘jobs’ like ‘watching cars’ or selling some product in the informal economy—a situation

that escapes the order of its problematization, and most of these little beings suppose that ‘this happens to

others and not to them,’ as a multiple consciousness in the lifeworld.

The particularity and intelligibility of the real and the social is that these child and youth societal groups

lack formal education, do not surpass the ﬁrst grades of primary school, or are illiterate; and because they live

on the street, they have no ﬁxed place to situate themselves. Likewise, they suffer from inadequate nutrition,

and their health is highly deﬁcient, which means a problem whose questions and answers are devised but not

resolved by governmental spheres.

Furthermore, most lack family affection and love due to not having a nucleus in which to gather, so

morality is not a privilege to be followed; and if it is necessary to beg or steal for daily sustenance, it must be

done in order to survive.

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Another point to consider is that, just as they break relations with their family members as a forced factor

of involution, they also deﬁnitively separate themselves from their community or neighborhood where they

were born or raised, forming street groups through forms of action, interaction, or contacts aligned with their

same interests and subjected to similar risks, maintaining the same level of poverty. However, what is constant

is that the number of people and families—not only boys, girls, and adolescents—in this situation of extreme

poverty is increasingly growing, due to the economic contraction generated by the political situation of most

countries in the region.

Another consequence to consider is the abandonment of the father from the family nucleus and, on

some occasions, the mother as well—though not always—possibly due to domestic violence, which means

leaving, in that case, the mother and the rest of the offspring without corresponding sustenance, forcing the

woman to go out to work or to send the minor children to the street to obtain some food to survive, she and

the rest of her siblings. This situation becomes a Matiscentrada, that is, a society centered around the mother.

This quality does not guarantee possibilities for solving the problem, nor does it culminate the rupture that

derives from an awareness of its partial condition.

These groups in critical poverty, without intentionality or awareness of their situation, come from

overcrowded households in slums and deprived areas, and are cyclically and mostly found in nearby urban

centers where formal or informal commerce is generated, where there is greater vehicular and pedestrian

trafﬁc, forming a natural relationship that immediacy implies. This gives them guarantees of obtaining some

sustenance from pious individuals who collaborate with them by offering some food or clothing upon seeing

their condition of begging, as they are unkempt and wearing dirty, deteriorated clothes given their objectiﬁed

condition that is neither transferable nor transmissible.

In this sense, within this societal group remain minors who, due to not possessing an adequate

education—thatis,beingilliterate—jointheranksoftheunemployedorunderpaidworkerswithnoexpectations

of improvement. Therefore, it is most likely that they will increase the ranks of juvenile delinquents, having no

glimmer of hope for change due to that experiential transit, with a consciousness permeated in representation

of their own limits in an inadequate economic situation, with the condition of subjects who assume the

problematization of the world in which they live under expectations that do not consist of a particular rationality.

The group comprised of persons, most of the time under twenty years of age, likewise suffers the same or

worse consequences as the rest of the low-income population, with the additional problems of unemployment

and underemployment due to lack of education and training, in addition to criminalization by authorities

and the rest of the ‘decent’ population, who view the increase in juvenile delinquency with concern without

addressing the main causes that provoke it, and without taking into account any adequate analytical reﬂection,

but rather taking into consideration the representations of immediate experiences of the social world in which

they dwell.

This problem of youth unemployment presents itself as a catastrophe for the economies of most

countries in this part of the continent, due to the social and economic repercussions both for this societal

group individually and for their families, aside from the consequences for the different governments, which will

see an increase in internal violence due to the desperation of not being able to obtain adequate sustenance

for their maintenance, leading to regional political instability. This afﬁrmation corresponds to the order of

representations that do not transcend the political order nor the possibility of structural change from an

economic-social point of view.

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Another of the main and serious problems presented by the despair in the youth population as a

consequence of hunger and lack of capacity are the limitations in accessing the educational system in their

respective countries—without falling into absolute limitation—in that it is almost always due to ‘budgetary

constraints’ that they cannot be incorporated, which notably affects their future economies due to the lack

of training of the adequate workforce required for the implementation of new technologies, as a ﬁnite and

circumscribed starting point to solve a project with a futuristic vision as a conception of a multifactorial society

in coexistence with one another.

However, even though education constitutes a factor of vital importance for individual and general

personal development of each country, each young person must make the decision to study or not, with

knowledge of the monetary costs that represent a signiﬁcant portion of the meager income they may earn,

which means: if they study, they do not eat; and if they eat, they cannot study—a secular issue of the question of

the genesis of the social that cannot be resolved outside the consideration of the individual-society bipolarity.

This school dropout is notably and negatively reﬂected in the skilled workforce, as the labor market increasingly

demands greater and better knowledge.

Another factor, which is not a random indicator to consider, is that most educational systems in the

southern part of the American continent do not train students ‘for work’—a forging constructed within the

territory that each person fashions as a vital action from their own condition of the possibility of their existence,

which barely transcends the boundaries of the family. Unfortunately, without implying a clear delimitation

of boundaries or distancing from reality, neither a university degree nor a higher technical degree offers

guarantees of access to employment; moreover, a young person who is illiterate has a greater probability of

working than one who has completed primary or secondary education. This is due to the type of work that can

be performed and the economic income to be received.

Another of the serious complications manifested by youth unemployment is the deployment of violence,

crime, and the consumption and trafﬁcking of prohibited substances, because young people are recruited by

criminal gangs to join and increase criminal groups, since they have no other means of survival in a society that

discriminates against them for the mere fact of being poor and belonging to humble families. This primary

stage of this relationship is articulated from different sides and through different forms that begin in the most

immediate exteriority, which barely transcends the residential boundaries where the family ‘dwells.’

This social impact, both at a personal and family level, notably affects Latin American countries, both

individually and collectively, due to the absence of borders caused by human trafﬁcking that occurs between

different States, as populations seek to cover their basic needs by any means necessary, regardless of where

they might achieve or obtain them, through the various forms in which the surrounding world and its referential

contexts intervene in family spaces. This irregular situation leads to regional political instability because

no government in the world is prepared to exercise control over such formidable immigration in a state of

desperation.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), young people must choose between working

in any lawful activity to somehow overcome extreme poverty—most of the time earning a meager wage,

working long hours—or joining the informal economy by selling any dry goods or fruits, suffering climatic

calamities and those caused by other people, or simply deciding not to work and dedicating themselves to

criminal activities.

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This panorama is the exclusion and poverty suffered by this population segment not only in this region

of the continent but worldwide, which condescends to new structures as some substantial changes take place.

This situation reﬂects the enormous magnitude of the intense crisis and uncertainty expressed in this sector of

society. This youth behavior is intimately related to the rest of the Latin American population.

The poor who live in a human relationality where fear and hope converge with dignity have apparently

become a governmental concern, having as a common denominator the desperate expression of this societal

group, expressly singled out in electoral speeches as the most disadvantaged, but always promising social and

economic well-being for all, without these programs being fulﬁlled or fully satisfying social demands.

This uncertainty translates into an impertinence to an imposition of adverse forces and to the increase of

complexity as a despotic metaphor of the future. Therefore, these programs do not constitute a state policy to

deﬁnitively end poverty but rather to somehow increase the country’s economy, hoping that some devastated

and helpless areas classiﬁed as extremely poor can develop economically.

It is necessary to have higher educational levels and less human deterioration due to nutritional and

health problems so that youth groups can enter the labor market and try to escape poverty, although each

individual refers to a unique and unrepeatable yet manifestly plural sociability when considering all these

individual beings as a whole. However, education alone does not solve poverty; it certainly helps greatly if

adequate economic conditions exist in the country. Therefore, one of the main problems in solving poverty—

not the only one—is the training and job preparation of these youthful persons, because the uncertainty of

youth unemployment as a consequence of their inexperience is assuming dangerous proportions in many

countries, where their economies and educational systems cannot incorporate the number of young people

who should annually enter the labor market.

Youth unemployment is an urgent issue that has demographic, economic, social, health, environmental,

political, and legal repercussions, both for the State and for the individuals involved, and especially for families,

if not properly addressed, given the referential entry point to possible security within the limits of daily life—a

context in which a network of situations involved in generally changing particular and global relations is

totalized. Additionally, gender gaps in labor inclusion, determined by the unequal distribution of the workload

that falls on young women or not, must be taken into consideration.

With the lack of employment, the youth societal group, feeling psychically and emotionally unstable,

being rejected and socially expelled, will increase crime, violence, and everything that entails toward the

margins of the law, both to survive and to express their discontent and abandonment. Consequently, it is

imperative that the young sector of society be incorporated into governmental policies, providing them with

employment opportunities and sustainable, digniﬁed, and decent means of livelihood to overcome poverty

through honest work.

In these countries, young people must choose between working in the informal sector or not working

at all. Due to various factors, they are not trained to perform the tasks demanded by employers; therefore,

they must study and prepare for them, or perform long workdays for a meager income precisely because of

their lack of knowledge. Labor inclusion is key to combating poverty, reducing informality and inequality, and

advancing toward inclusive individual or general social development. Another factor excluding young people

from employment is that, due to their economic situation, they ﬁnd themselves outside the Formal Educational

System; therefore, only a minimal number manage to complete basic or primary education due to dropout

rates and survive in the informal economy, always carrying need on their shoulders.

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Moreover, the system does not educate for work, as it does not teach the use of technical tools,

technological equipment, and instruments that adequately train and empower individuals to perform special

functions or speciﬁc trades. Likewise, very few—without being exclusive—due to their capacity, intelligence,

and skill, and also being competitive, manage to establish themselves as independent workers or set up their

own prosperous business, thereby demonstrating their own transcendence and self-improvement.

‘Boys and girls of and on the street’ are those under 18 years of age who do not maintain contact with

their family members or these ties are very weak; they have broken all relations with their community and take

the street as a natural habitat, displacing the family as an essential factor of growth and socialization. To this end,

they develop diverse survival strategies that expose them to various types of risks and degradations, assuming

their life as ‘an established or imposed reality.’ The population of this youth and child group does not remain

static as partisans of certain forms of relativization that presuppose imbrications and mediations, because due

to socioeconomic factors, it grows increasingly larger, which increases the deterioration of the quality of life of

this societal sector, further advancing the progression of poverty and violence in these countries. According to

what was established in the ‘National Forum: Poverty’ (2003:31): ‘All Venezuelans share the conviction that the

crisis we are going through today is deep, complex, and of enormous magnitude. It is expressed to us daily

and in different ways, intensity, and faces, above all, youthful faces.’

Most of this social group is not on the street by their own initiative; rather, circumstances have led them

to abandon ‘their homes,’ constituted on the basis of a destitute situation, suffering intra-family and extra-

family violence and extreme poverty, with traditional domestic overcrowding, in addition to enduring hunger

and helplessness. This results in deﬁcient health, without being able to undertake a path of reconstruction

due to their complex experiential environment—although this does not imply assuming the notion of society

except as an aggregate of individuals. This group comes from slums and hamlets depressed by need, which,

due to their reality, form around urban centers where the economy and commerce ﬂow. Furthermore, there are

no public or private schools in the sector nor health centers to care for them.

The survival strategies of these minors in poverty are based above all on begging, informal street

vending, occupation in marginal activities, committing petty thefts and robberies, and accepting donations of

food, clothing, and other belongings offered by charitable individuals or passersby in the environment where

they ‘dwell,’ without assuming the notion of community. Poverty reduction requires time, effort, and political

disposition from governmental authorities and civil society to combat it and minimize it to its greatest extent.

Meanwhile, hunger requires immediate solution to prevent malnutrition in this population segment.

Conclusions

Children, girls, boys, and adolescents in situations of poverty—which could be described as begging with

its dramatic expressions—represent an extreme situation of weakness and vulnerability that requires priority

and urgent attention oriented toward confronting a multiple social challenge due to its complexity. They are

found everywhere, but especially in urban centers, notwithstanding the questions and doubts regarding their

own paradigms if their problems are considered within the indeterminacy of Chaos Theory.

Thisgroupmaintainsprecariousandminimalhealthduetothelackofadequatefoodandthemistreatment

of all kinds they receive daily from the rest of the general population, as well as from members of their own

groups. Unfortunately, the impact of poverty results in the creation of a trauma from which recovery is almost

impossible and which increases as time passes if there are no signiﬁcant changes, becoming a psychosocial

syndrome whose origin is based on having been raised in a destitute environment under conditions of extreme

poverty.

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Under these principles, España, L. (2004:29) states that ‘from the cultural point of view, human behavior

is not biologically determined. What we do, think, say, and feel is not brought with us at birth, but rather is

constructed throughout life.’

This new generation of poor individuals—composed of girls, boys, and youth of or on the street—will

ﬁnd themselves enveloped in a situation of hatred and resentment against the rest of the population that is

‘not so poor,’ due to the absence of goods and services that ‘others’ possess but that are denied to them. This

may be the most stimulating example that can be found in the imaginary of childhood regarding child and

youth rebellion, as a way to release the conﬂict that may harbor within them from an early age.

This is without considering the ‘rights’ that members of the middle and upper social classes possess,

which ‘they do not share with the poor,’ forcing the latter to live in mediocre conditions of inferiority. This

transmission of poverty from generation to generation leads to its perpetuation in saecula saeculorum [forever

and ever], without any possibility of glimpsing social change in the future.

Therefore, no explanation is needed for the predisposition of younger members to follow the example

of their progenitors, as well as the environment where their initial life unfolds. And if the observed model is the

conformity of being poor, along with ‘getting by day to day by any means necessary’—whether by asking for

help, performing ‘street work,’ rummaging through garbage, or committing minor illicit acts—that ‘tradition

will be followed’ without signiﬁcant changes, which will increase even more with each family cycle as ‘the

family’ grows but does not evolve.

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References

Alvarado Chacín. N. (2003). Pobreza y asistencialismo en Venezuela. En: Revista de Ciencias Sociales. Volumen

IX. Nro. 3. Septiembre-diciembre 2003. Universidad del Zulia.

Asamblea Nacional. Foro Nacional: La Pobreza. República Bolivariana de Venezuela. Noviembre, 2003.

España N, L (2004). Las causas de la pobreza en Venezuela. En: Detrás de la Pobreza. Universidad Católica

Andrés Bello. Caracas. Venezuela.

Guerra Velásquez, J. (2009). El proceso de empobrecimiento global. Una conspiración propia de la Modernidad.

En: Estudios Culturales. Volumen 2. Nro. 3. Enerojunio. 2009. Universidad de Carabobo. Venezuela.

Mandry Llano, E. (2009) Salud y Pobreza en Venezuela. Un intento de aproximación histórica a su relación

con el poder. En: Estudios Culturales. Volumen 2. Nro. 3. Enero-junio. 2009. Universidad de Carabobo.

Venezuela.

Translation Note: Special thanks to professor Fabricio Rodríguez Cazón (University of Guayaquil) for the academic

translation of this manuscript into English.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4509-7227

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