Human Waste: Child Beggars in Türkiye Newspaper in the 1990s

Yvonne Jewkes observes that the murder of the three-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys was a threshold for British news media, when “the notion of childhood innocence gave way to themes of childhood horror and evil”[i] There is no threshold as such in Turkey’s media comparable to the Bulger case, but the demonisation of children living or working on the streets, and specifically the example of “paint thinner addicts” served a similar purpose. Children living on the streets who inhaled toxic materials as psychoactive drugs were labelled as “paint thinner addicts,” and presented as a source of terror. Interestingly, this derogatory term was not as commonly used in the media as one might assume, but its impact was more powerful than its prevalence.

There are not many examples of articles that specifically used the term in relation to crime; a search in Milliyet database reveals that there was only one violent crime committed by young adults (and not children) while under the influence of these substances in the 1990s.[ii] On the other hand, there were plenty of articles which referred to children addicted to toxic substances as “paint thinner addicts,” both in tragic human interest stories or in children’s health reports. By using the same label in both crime reports, and other news stories about children living on the streets, the newspapers established a symbolic link between those children and crime. Thus, through their misrepresentations, all children living on the streets were stigmatised as merciless evil beings, and the horror attached to their images was engraved in the collective conscious.

Moreover, a link with crime was not a prerequisite to demonise disadvantaged children; in some cases their mere visibility was more than enough. Many articles did not see beggars, poor children struggling to get to the front of queues at in-kind relief organisations, and children living or working on the streets as victims of social insecurity, but as signifiers of degeneration and spectres of unsafety for the rest of the population. This attitude is best exemplified by Türkiye’s depiction of child beggars. In the late 1990s, the newspaper participated in a media frenzy over beggars on city streets who “exploited people’s compassion.” In these articles, the children were either dehumanised, described as instruments, machines, even “robots” used by their families for “emotional blackmail.” In other examples, they were called tricksters and exploiters who masked their lies behind their innocent faces in order to exploit upright citizens’ conscience to get more than they deserve[iii].

To understand the news media’s explicit hostility to these children, we should take into account two observations. The first of these is offered by Loïc Wacquant in Punishing the Poor. Wacquant interprets the last three decades as a transition from the welfare state to the penal state. He then elaborates this statement by asserting that this new type of government finds its legitimacy not in providing social security, but in inciting the sense of insecurity.[iv] A signifier of this transition was the media’s increased emphasis on safety. Symbols that provoked the sense of unsafety were the staple of this approach. The horrifying image of the delinquent, feral child threatening upright citizens became one of those symbols. The change of lexicon in accordance to the child on the streets becomes especially evident in a parallel reading of articles from the 1970s and 1990s on the same subject. In the examples from the 1970s, the articles about “stray children” were examples of social commentary, and instead of blaming the children, journalists concentrated on analysing the social backdrop of the problem.  It is significant to note that the very same theme was completely reversed in perspective in the two decades that followed, and these children came to be seen as the sole carriers of the blame.

The second observation is articulated by both Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett from quite different perspectives, but both thinkers reach similar conclusions in their interpretation of the issue in terms of redundancy. According to Bauman, capitalist society in its most recent form has created masses that are redundant to the system. He calls these masses “human waste.”[v] In a similar reflection, Richard Sennett observes that the very population Bauman called “human waste,” that is the poor, the unemployed, and other losers of the system, constituted a “spectre of uselessness” that alarmed the rest of the population, who felt in danger of becoming redundant.[vi] Thus, the images of these children served two ends at the same time. First, they became symbols of insecurity, and second, they became alarming spectres of redundancy. These factors influenced their portrayal by the news media, and the apparent disturbance caused by their images was frantically covered with vile and aggressive expressions.

*Excerpt from my unpublished PhD Thesis. Cut the Kids in Half: New Urban Childhoods in Turkey Through the Lens of the Mainstream Media, 1977-1997. Supervisor: Prof. Ayşe Buğra. Istanbul: Bogazici University, 2015.

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[i] Yvonne Jewkes, Construction of Crime News, p.58.

[ii] “Tinerci cinayeti,” (Thinner addict kills) Milliyet, 24 June 1994.

[iii]  Veysi Gezer, “Çocuklarını dilencilere kiralıyorlar” (They are renting their children to beggars) Türkiye, 30 January 1992; Ercan Seki, “Küçük Ceylan işbaşında” (Little Ceylan in action) Türkiye, 11 January 1992; Utku Sağılır “Dilenci annenin dilenci çocuğu” (The beggar son of a beggar mother) Türkiye, 8 January 1992; Selahattin Tercan, “İstanbul’a dilenci akını” Türkiye, 16 January 1997; Sadık Kahraman, “Dilenci operasyonu,” Türkiye, 21 February 1997; Nuri Yılmaz, Dündar Batık,“Dilenci aldatıyor,” Türkiye, 20 November 1997.

[iv] Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor.(Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1999).

[v] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Oxford : Polity, 2004).

[vi] Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2006).

Split Cities, Split Childhoods: Spaces of New Urban Childhood*

*The following article is based on a paper that I presented at the Society for the History of Children and Youth 7th Biennial Conference held in Nottingham in June 2013. What is probably more interesting than the paper itself is the circumstances that it was produced. I started writing it in the winter leading up to the Gezi Park uprising, finished it just at the heat of the moment, and presented it a couple of days after we were cleared off the park by the riot police. So the paper starts as a grim depiction of children in the city, but ends on a positive note. Reading it again after three very turbulent years is a bittersweet experience, so I intentionally left the final paragraph as it is: a reminder that things could have been, and perhaps can still be, very different.

Based on a chapter of my PhD research on inequality and new urban childhood in Turkey, this paper is about how the increasing inequality between children shaped the urban landscape in Turkey, and how it affected the conceptualisation of childhood. In other words, it will discuss how social-spatial and cultural reconstruction of childhood intermingled with socio-economic change. I have limited the time frame to the twenty years between 1977 and 1997, the beginning of the global fiscal crisis, and the peak point when the signs of socio-economic change ceased to be deniable. I will use data derived from a variety of sources including child well-being studies conducted by international organisations, government agencies and NGOs, and articles on children published in the highest circulating mainstream broadsheet newspaper in Turkey.

I will observe that rapid but uneven human development has increased inequality among children, thus creating a disparity between their living standards. Furthermore, owing to voluntary and forced demographic flows, by the late 1990s, these distinct groups of children were concentrated in densely populated cities. The same period was also characterised by the disintegration of urban space and the sprawl of culturally and socio-economically homogeneous and segregated neighbourhoods, such as shanty towns and gated communities. I will argue that this split was also translated into the mainstream discourse of the news media. To put it differently, the reorganisation of newspapers and the restructuring of cities followed similar patterns, and spatial, social and mental change entangled within each other.

Many scholars of urban studies who view the city from a Weberian perspective[i] agree that cities act as distributors of income and benefits. They also agree that the changing landscape not only reflects but also reproduces social inequalities by concentrating poverty and wealth in enclosed spaces.[ii] These effects of cities particularly worsened in the last decades as the reorganisation of urban spaces separated distinct and unequal populations. UNDP warns us that since the late 1970s, the distribution of income resulted in increased numbers at opposite sides of the inequality scale.[iii] We also know that people of similar means tend to live in similar houses, in similar areas of the city.[iv] Therefore unequal development, combined with demographic flows from rural areas to cities, and rapid urbanisation amplified the effects of spatial separation and polarisation.[v]

Turkey is a very representative example that displays these observations. Statistical data shows that there has been a dramatic improvement in human development and economic growth in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, since the late 1970s, neither the state’s redistributive welfare policies nor non-governmental efforts compensated for the unevenness of distribution which was displayed by the changing structure of the cities. There were also some factors specific to the country. In the 1980s, the urban population outnumbered the rural population for the first time in the country’s history. Thus, a great proportion of population were concentrated in giant cities which were characterised with uneven distribution of wealth and benefits. The situation was worsened with the changing patterns of migration in the 1990s. Forced and voluntary migration of the Kurdish population from the southeast was unlike any other demographic movement the country experienced in the previous decades, and had even greater polarising effects. The newcomers were unskilled, poor, unemployed, and hopeless. These developments changed the nature of urban poverty in Turkey, [vi] and the stigmatisation of poor neighbourhoods which in previous decades acted like a temporary gateway upwards.[vii] While at the same time, the changing patterns of wealth accumulation favoured the top percentile of the income distribution scale.[viii] Although the extent of spatial segregation was almost impossible to monitor,[ix] new forms urban wealth and poverty found their reflection in newly burgeoning segregated spaces, such as gated communities, squatter settlements.[x]

Children and especially under-fifteen-year-olds were among the most vulnerable. Children’s relative income recorded a decline in the period from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, and distribution varied greatly between children.[xi]  There was little redistribution that made up for low income; as stated by OECD, most state transfers actually tended to go to high income households.[xii] WHO finds that low income limited children’s to health services,[xiii] and UNESCO points out that the differences between schools affected the quality of education, and limited the children’s only escape out of poverty. UNICEF observes that the new migrants were the least likely to reach high quality education.[xiv] According to UNESCO, Kurdish children, and especially the poor Kurdish children are the most disadvantageous group in terms of educational poverty.[xv] In a nutshell, growth without redistribution created distinct groups of children. Thus, the period not only sustained prevailing inequalities between children’s capabilities and life chances, but also created a distinction between different childhoods.
The spaces of childhood were not an exception, the segregation of schools, recreational areas, and houses were all parts of the same process that increased the effects of inequality between children. Children were sent to the outskirts of the cities, some to suburbs, private schools, gated communities, shopping malls and amusement parks; others to squatter settlements, overcrowded state schools, workplaces, and detention centres, or to public parks, if they were lucky to have access to one. The child as the non-adult was exiled from the city centre, and sent to the periphery. Thus, although growing numbers of children were living in more heterogeneous cities, the spaces they inhabited became increasingly homogenous.[xvi] Class and ethnicity separated child populations and destroyed their spaces of contact. And it was precisely because they were separated from one another that they continued to grow ever more distinct from each other.

The one place that these children still cohabited was the news media. This paper will question how the conceptualisation of childhood in mainstream media reflected this persistent inequality in an age of growth. My analysis of child related news published in Hürriyet finds that the broadsheet newspapers were increasingly compartmentalised. In other words, in the last quarter of the 20th Century, several topics related to children were extracted from the headlines and pushed to their reserved margins, and this compartmentalisation was another indicator of children’s disintegration. Throughout the period, the accelerating restructuring of newspapers followed a similar pace to that of urbanisation trends. Several subjects were extracted from the front pages where they were positioned together, and sent to their reserved zones, like the identification of juvenile delinquency with page three, or the news about school and daily life with appropriated attachments. While reports about juvenile delinquency were sent to the periphery of local news, child labour to finance pages, and child poverty to comment sections; pedagogy and children’s culture were offered a safe haven in the outskirts of life and style supplements. Thus, as some pages acted as the shanty towns of the newspaper, the attachments began to look like gated communities, and provided secure grounds for the favoured children of higher social strata.

There were two apparent reasons for compartmentalisation. The first was the changing setup of newspapers. After the paper shortage of the 1970s was sidestepped by importing paper, and the newspapers defended their place in news media against televisions which were increasing by the second, the number of pages per paper steadily increased and triple folded in two decades. Consequently, the simple quintuple organisation of newspapers (national, finance, foreign, sports, and arts, life & style) was replaced with more rigid and clearly defined sections that targeted specific audiences and specialised readerships. This meant that several topics related to children were divided into smaller clusters. Newspapers were not books you read from cover to cover: this clustering dissipated child well being news from their residence under the national headlines, and away from the social agenda.

The second reason was the changing nature of news, and a new found appreciation of newsworthiness. The pressure of new technologies and media made the traditional news media to seek new ways to attract readers. News in general became more sensational, trivial or event oriented. [xvii] In the late 1970s, an article investigating children’s living standards was most likely to be found in the “extra headlines” page, which covered national feature news that did not report immediate developments, but usually published news files on a variety of demographic trends.  These articles were thorough, and they were accompanied by detailed statistical analyses and comments. These kinds of reports required a great deal of time both for the reader and the journalist.  However, the newsmaking trends of the 1980s needed news to be fast, catchy, and most importantly easy to produce and to read. Thus, by the 1990s, most newspaper articles about children were either human interest stories like crime reports, or soft news stories like child rearing advice and trivial articles about child stars. This was a major obstacle that made it hard for ordinary children and their experiences to appear in the newspapers.[xviii]
Consequently, reports about juvenile delinquency were sent to the periphery of local news,[xix] underage prostitution to page three,[xx]child labour to finance pages,[xxi] child poverty to comment sections;[xxii] and housing problems to real estate inserts,[xxiii] pedagogy and children’s culture were offered a safe haven in the outskirts, and pushed to life and style supplements. Furthermore, these articles also differentiated in their styles, lexicons, and even their attitudes towards their subjects. This cognitive reorganisation concealed the socialness of children’s problems, and the widening socio-economic gap between children by categorising their problems. On the one hand, by the late 1990s, disadvantaged children could only appear in newspapers by what they did, and not because they were children, but particularly because they were doing unchildlike things. In these narrative compositions, the actors were the focal point, and the commonalities they shared with other actors were irrelevant. When children became the actors of news stories, the details that make those stories peculiar were selected specifically for narrative purposes, and the child actors were deprived of all characteristics but the distinctive ones that would embellish the story arch. In other words, as children’s actions and their outcomes were personalised, they were reduced to their act, and their subjectivity and agency almost disappeared. On the other hand, advantaged children were hardly ever mentioned for what they did, but they were in newspapers for who they were, for being the children of the perceived readership. The modern conceptualisation of childhood was still intact in child rearing articles. The children were still considered innocent beings that needed to be sheltered and protected. However these articles were published in special sections and aimed smaller audiences. This determined the contents of the texts, obviously an article on anaemia that targeted families did not state the same observations as a general article that would be found on national headlines.
Thus, by the late 1990s, it was possible to find an article which advised mothers to take care of their adolescent children and cautioned them against smothering their kids in one page, and on another page would be another article about adolescents of the same age living on the streets, which, albeit briefly mentioning the hardships these children encountered, argued that street children posed threats to otherwise safe neighbourhoods. As an article pondered about the incredibly cruel lives of middle class children who matured before their time, another that simply informed the reader that there were children working in the worst jobs on the market. To put it differently, there were still certain qualities attributed to “children,” such as their innocence, vulnerability and potential. However, the modern notions of childhood were no longer an umbrella that attempted to cover all children. The dominant discourse used by the press abandoned a standardised and age-based definition of childhood, and employed a conditional definition that normalised the application to different groups of children. 
To conclude, unless these different childhoods are represented alongside each other, unless we see these children in the same frame, we begin to forget that they are all children. Their inequality is reproduced once their difference becomes irrelevant and invisible. This creates a distorted version of the normal: we no longer see these different childhoods as variants of a common experience of “childness”, and we began to internalise their distinction. Furthermore, it is not only the advantaged population that perceives the out-casted children from the lenses of the media: these children themselves are also the audience of that distorted perspective. And this is precisely what multiplies their positional suffering. In “The Space of Points of View,” Bourdieu discusses “how painfully the social world may be experienced by people who, like the bass player in the orchestra, occupy an inferior, obscure position in a prestigious and privileged universe.” He then concludes that “Using material poverty as the sole measure of all suffering keeps us from seeing and understanding a whole side of the suffering characteristic of a social order which, although it has undoubtedly reduced poverty overall (though less than often claimed) has also multiplied the social spaces (specialized fields and subfields) and set up the conditions for an unprecedented development of all kinds of ordinary suffering (La petite misère).”[xxiv]

A very interesting finding of my research is that the transformation of news media preceded urban transformation: spatial segregation followed this pattern nearly a decade later. To put it differently, the discoursive compartmentalisation of children was a self fulfilling prophecy that predated its translation to the city landscape as urban transformation. The construction of the vulnerable child and a world full of danger predated the gated communities; the actual deprivation of the squatter settlements in fact reflected the stigma and degradation of the urban outcasts. First the children in the newspapers were separated and segregated in different pages, then followed the polarisation of the children in the city. The transformation of urban landscape and the reconstruction of symbolic geography were inextricably intertwined. Today, new and advanced forms of urban transformation, such as the displacement of marginalised groups and gentrification still continues in Turkey. Sociologists fear that it will only get worse unless the tide turns. However, there’s no place for desperation in social sciences. We know that there are different forms of marginal settlements: banlieues, ghettos, slums, and shanty towns. And there are different forms of advantaged habitations: suburbs, residences, gentrified areas. Although architecturally speaking their function is the same, according to Wacquant, albeit appearing similar, these spaces have different dynamics. He argues that efficient state policies can still be a part of this equilibrium and turn the tide around.[xxv]

When I started working on this paper, I planned to conclude my presentation with this remark. I would state that there may be a way out of this, but I was not hopeful. The recent events in Turkey might change that. For the first time, a movement that originated from a protest against urban transformation fuelled something very interesting: people are now claiming their rights over the city. The demonstrations, as you might know, started off as a protest against the demolition of a public park, situated in the most important central square in Istanbul. It was, in a sense, a display of citizens’ demands to take back the centre of the city. To this day, we don’t know where these events will lead us. Yet, it is extremely exciting to see that the children I just told you about became the backbone of this civilian resistance.

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[i] Mike Savage, Alan Warde and Kevin Ward. Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 (1993).

[ii] Some examples include David Harvey, Blair Badcock, and others.

[iii] UNDP, Human Development Report, 1990.

[iv] Michael Young and Peter Willmott, The Symmetrical Family. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1975.           

[v] Therborn observes that urbanisation doubled globally between 1950 and 2010. Göran Therborn, The World: A Beginner’s Guide. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

[vi] Ayşe Buğra and Çağlar Keyder, “New Poverty and Changing Welfare Regime of Turkey,” Ankara: UNDP, 2003.

[vii] Deniz Yonucu, “A Story of a Squatter Neighborhood: From the Place of the ‘Dangerous Classes’ to the ‘Place of Danger,’” The Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. VII (2008). Oğuz Işık and M. Melih Pınarcıoğlu, Nöbetleşe Yoksulluk: Sultanbeyli Örneği.(Poverty in Turns: The Sultanbeyli Case)  İstanbul: İletişim 2001 Necmi Erdoğan, ed. Yoksulluk Halleri: Türkiye’de Kent Yoksulluğunun Toplumsal Görünümleri. (Faces of Poverty: Social Displays of Urban Poverty in Turkey) İstanbul: Demokrasi Kitaplığı, 2002.

[viii] Income Distrubiton, Consumption and Poverty Database, Turkish Statistical Institute.

[ix] As Tanış and Pérouse observe, it is almost impossible to gather exact numbers about the size of urban transformation. Yet all studies agree that these trends are very obvious. See Aslı Didem Tanış and Jean-François Pérouse, “Zenginliğin Mekanda Yeni Yansımaları: İstanbul’da Güvenlikli Siteler,” (The Reflections of Wealth on the Landscape: Gated Communities in İstanbul) Toplum ve Bilim, no.104 (2005).

[x] Ayfer Bartu Candan and Biray Kolluoğlu, “Emerging Spaces of Neoliberalism: A Gated Town and a Public Housing Project in İstanbul” in New Perspectives on Turkey, no.39 (2008): 5-46.

[xi] OECD, Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries, 2008.

[xii] World Bank, Turkey: Economic Reforms, Living Standards and Social Welfare Study, 2000.

[xiii] World Health Report, WHO, 1996-2013.

[xiv] UNICEF, Child Poverty in Turkey, 2006.

[xv] UNESCO, Education for All, 2002-2010.

[xvi] Ayşe Öncü, “The Myth of the ‘Ideal Home’ Travels Across Cultural Borders to Istanbul” inAyşe Öncü and Petra Wyland: Space, Culture and Power: New Identities in Globalizing Cities. London, New Jersey: Zed Books, 1997. (pp.56-72)

[xvii] In 1997, half of all news articles about children were human interest stories, the ratio was one third in 1977.

[xviii] Champagne states that “Even if the close observation of everyday life in these suburbs, with its ordinary problems, is more enlightening, the majority of journalists tend to focus on the most spectacular and therefore exceptional violence. The media thus produce for the general public, which is not directly concerned, a presentation of problems that emphasize the extraordinary.” Patrick Champagne, “The View from the Media” in Pierre Bourdieu et al., Trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010 (1999).

[xix] “En küçüğü kan kırmızı” (The smallest of all is blood red), 1 March 1997.

[xx]  Ali Aksoyer, “Dikiş kursu aşk yuvası çıktı” (Turns out the needlecraft course was a love nest) 9 March 1997.

[xxi] Ayşe Özek Karasu, “Peki çocuklar ne olacak?” (How about the children, then?), 2 March 1997.

[xxii] Zeynep Atikkan “Çocuklarına bakamayan toplum” (The society that cannot take care of its children) Hürriyet, 19 January 1997.  Enis Berberoğlu, “İstanbul’un yuttuğu çocuklar ve diğerleri” (The children swallowed by İstanbul and others), 16 October 1997

[xxiii] “İstanbul gecekondu cenneti” (İstanbul is a paradise for squatter houses), 19 September 1997.

[xxiv] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Space of Points of View” in Pierre Bourdieu et al., Trans. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010 (1999).

[xxv] Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2008.