ABSTRACT

Child domestic workers, many of whom are female and ‘live in’, are distinctively characterised by complex and ambiguous relations with employing families, situations which are often motivated and made acceptable by notions of kinship, community obligation and reciprocity. Evidence has tended to emphasise the household conditions of child workers, the causal factors underpinning their situation and the challenges they face in the urban environments where the large majority work. Based on interviews and group discussions conducted with current and former children on both sides of the serving-served relationship in Mwanza (north-western Tanzania), intra-generational household relations from both working and employer child perspectives are examined, offering new data on the interdependence and power-laden nature of peer relationships in this context. For the first time, the research reveals the existence and nature of ‘not-quite-friendships’ between child domestic workers and children from employing families and how these relationships – bounded by place, space and time – are constituted and manifested. The study of children’s relations in the context of child domestic work also offers a new, geographical, dimension to the study of friendship and, more broadly, the role of specific spaces in shaping relationships – an understanding which could usefully be applied to other contexts.

摘要

童工，其中许多是女性并且“住在”，其特点是与雇佣家庭的关系复杂而模棱两可，这种情况往往受到亲属关系、社区义务和互惠概念的推动和接受。证据往往强调童工的家庭条件、支撑他们处境的因果因素以及他们在大多数人工作的城市环境中面临的挑战。基于对姆万扎（坦桑尼亚西北部）服务-服务关系双方的现任和前任儿童进行的访谈和小组讨论，从工作和雇主子女的角度研究了代内家庭关系，提供了关于在这种情况下，同伴关系的相互依赖和充满权力的本质。该研究首次揭示了童工与雇佣家庭的孩子之间“不完全友谊”的存在和性质，以及这些受地点、空间和时间限制的关系是如何构成和表现的。在儿童家庭工作的背景下对儿童关系的研究也为友谊的研究提供了一个新的地理维度，更广泛地说，是特定空间在塑造关系中的作用——这种理解可以有效地应用于其他背景。