102 Book Reviews
and are doing to assist refugee women. She also provides a list of international
organisations that are involved in work with refugees.
Throughout the book the author stresses the need for refugees to participate
actively in decision-making in all matters that affect their lives and she sees their
participation as a tool which can empower refugee women to sustain development.
She manages to capture the lives of refugee women vividly and highlights the
common, but untalked about problems that refugees experience, such as sexual
harassment and rape. However, because the author addresses many issues she does
not go into a lot of detail on these. Her ability to suggest solutions to some of the
problems makes her book very useful to anyone interested in work with refugee
women. The book is written simply and her case studies enable the reader to
conceptualise and appreciate the problems that women face. I view it as an eyeopener
and hope that anyone involved in development work will have a chance to
read the book which covers the gap that was existing ,in as far as literature on
refugee women is concerned.
Reviewed by Perpetua Gumbo, Director of Fieldwork, School of Social Work,
Harare
Homeless Children: The Watchers and the Waiters, Nancy A Boxill (ed), The
Haworth Press, New York, 1990, pp 156. (ISBN: 0-86656-789-5). No price listed.
This book is a unique collection of eight articles about homeless children in the
United States of America. The relevance of this book cannot be overstated as
homelessness is a growing problem in all societies; developed, developing and
underdeveloped. Itis more so in the latter two where resources are usually meagre.
The authors have viewed homelessness and its impact on children from several
perspectives. Each author presents a professional discourse of the phenomenon of
homelessness and caps this with recommendations on policy and practical
intervention. Thus, this book is ideal foc use by field workers and policy makers
tackling the issue of homelessness and in particular homeless children.
Inthe first chapter Leanne G Rivlin sets the tone of the book by presenting an
analysis of the impacts of various forms of homelessness on children and the
meaning of personal space and personal place in the lives of children. Rivlin
outlines the significance of the environment to children's social, emotional and
cognitive development. The author takes the reader into a discussion of the
powerful and enduring impacts that environmental experiences have on children,
considering implications of shelters, welfare hostels and street environments to
children's welfare and lives. The author offers the concept of attachment to place
and underlines the direct functions of attachments, stabilising children's lives and
rationalising their stimulation and preventing alienation.
BooicReviews 103
The second chapter explores the specific psychological effects of growing up in
shelters and welfare hostels and discusses various coping strategies that homeless
children have developed to adapt to the stress ofhomelessness. The authors present
quantitative and qualitative data resulting from psychological measures and
assessments conducted on homeless children in Massachusetts. They make an
interesting conclusion that emergency sheltering facilities exacerbate the children's
existing problems and create new ones. This should provide food for thought to
emergency relief agencies who provide shelters to deslocado communities in the
Zimbabwean context.
In the third chapter, the reader is taken through the experiences of children on
the move, a transient group of children and tlieirfamilies or friends who are moving
across the country and are not yet living in shelters. This group of homeless
children live in vehicles, buses or train stations and is highly mobile, changing
location more often than the sun's daily changes in horizontal position. The
authors, Hall and Moza, conclude their article outlining intervention strategies and
implications for policy, public education and short and long-term solutions that
address the economic, social and psychological needs of the homeless.
In the fourth chapter, BoxiII and Beaty challenge the reader to reconsider
conceptions of mother-child relationships among homeless women and their
children. The authors describe how the delicate and important dyad of mother and
child is affected and distorted by shelter-living, volunteer and "professional"
intervention. This brings to fore the critical usefulness of the concept of popular
participation in programme planning and implementation. Boxill and Beaty
conclude their article with concrete recommendations based on data obtained
through participant observation and phenomenological inquiry.
The fifth chapter by Wright takes the reader away from psychosocial issues to
the physical health problems of homeless children, youth and women seen in the
National Health Care for the Homeless Programme (HCH) during the Programme's
first year. Homeless people stand out as being more ill and children suffer from
chronic physical disorders at about twice the rate of occurrence among similar
ambulatory patient populations.Wright attributes the health problems directly to
the conditions of a homeless existence.
The sixth chapter by Rosenman and Stein focus the reader on concrete
programme problems and public policy failures. The authors describe the great
hardships and inadequacies created by under-funded, less coordinated and politically
unpopular programmes for homeless children. The authors highlight the various
social service needs of homeless children and they present recommendations for
effective intervention. They emphasise the need for a national policy to address the
problem of homelessness.
104 BookReviews
In the seventh chapter, Battle explores povertj in the context of homeless
women and children and how national policy has affected the lives of families in
the United States. The author takes the reader on a journey tracing social welfare
policy from Elizabethan Poor Laws through the New Deal, the War on Poverty and
up to Reaganomics. Battle notes that national social welfare policy has over the
years either succeeded or failed to alleviate the plight of the poor because of sociopolitical
factors in the United States at different points in history. This brings to fore
how powerful interests may water down policies and programmes with noble
intentions.
The eighth and final chapter by Connolly caps the volume by looking at the life
style of street children in two of South America's cities. The author offers a moving
discussion of a comparison of street children in Bogota, Colombia and Guatemala
City. Connolly concludes the chapter by suggesting a national policy review to
avoid a similar scenario in the United States. The chapter provokes serious
thoughts and raises critical comparative analysis. The reader is forced to consider
how Zimbabwe is different from the Latin American countries that Connolly writes
about. In Zimbabwe there are already indications that street children are a growing
phenomenon and the critical question is and will be: what is our response to street
children?
The volume raises moral questions about societal responses to homelessness,
distribution of resources and national policy formulation. It offers concrete
solutions to how and why we should respond to homelessness. However we must
all agree that children are not" watchers and waiters". Children are active
participants in the biggest game called life. We need to appreciate the role children
play in influencing the final outcome of the "game".
Reviewed by Backson Muchini, former Field Coordinator, Children and War
Program, Save the Children Federation (USA), Chambuta Refugee Camp,
Zimbabwe.