Initiation to street life: a qualitative examination of the physical, social, and psychological practices in becoming an accepted member of the street youth community in Western Kenya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The objective of this study was to describe the physical, social, and psychological initiation practices of street connected children and youths, in Eldoret, western Kenya. METHODS: This qualitative study was conducted from August 2013 to February 2014. A total of 65 SCCY aged 11-24 years were purposively sampled from the three referral points: 1) A dedicated study clinic for vulnerable children and youth at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH); 2) Primary locations in which street children reside "bases/barracks"; 3) Street youth community-based organizations. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were used to collect data. All data were audio recorded, transcribed, translated to English, and a content analysis performed. RESULTS: The overall median age was 18 years (IQR 14-20.5 years) and 69.2% of participants were male. None had gone beyond primary level of education. The majority (81.5%) reported to be sexually active. The street community had well-defined structures and rules that were protective of members and ensured survival on the streets. To be fully accepted children had to go through an initiation ritual that had important gender differences. Common rituals between males and females included interrogation, smearing of black soot, and payment of tax. Ritual practices unique to boys were physical abuse, theft of personal possessions, volatile substance use, being forced to eat garbage, and sodomy among the physically weak. Rituals unique to girls were being forced to 'become a wife or sexual partner', rape, and gang rape. Physical and psychological abuse during initiation was normalized and there were no clear mechanisms of dealing with these forms of abuse. CONCLUSION: There were important gender differences in the initiation practices of SCCY. Normalization of physical and psychological abuse during initiation contributes to the high health risks faced by these SCCY. Appropriate interventions need to be developed in collaboration with SCCY.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".