Review-Race, Gender, & Punishment

Rene was able to shows us the whole world of street kids, with her research we able to understand that street kids have their own society, their own rules were they feel they are free of the society outside.

Rene Denfeld does a really great job showing us the street life; with James Nelson we are able to experience what the street "family" is. I believe that Denfeld work had a great significant contribution to the field because it gave us an understanding that although at age 16 Nelson was committing murder, he is still like us, a human. David Nelson joins the street life, shortly creating the Thantos Family in response to the need of a family setting. We are able to obtain the meaning of a street family by Rene explaining that although they are small groups they have a "father" and "mother" figure they follow.

There are many reasons why teenagers run away from home, like David explains on page 3, "he watched his parents abuse each other, and, in turn, they abused him. "I live in violence". Coming out of an abusive home to the streets David knows is a "live and let die" game. As the story develops we are able to see how strong the Thantos Family is, they don't look at each other as friends but as brothers and sister, making it harder for them to let each other down. They were all together in the family for a mission that no one seemed to know.

After a decade of following the street kid's culture, Rene is able to show that the majority of these teenagers come from loving middle-class homes and not how the stereotype makes us believe that they have no family and that they have no choice. They have left those homes to form limited communities with cultish hierarchies, codes of behavior, languages, quasireligions, and harsh rules. These children seem desperate to search for a community where they will be accepted, although they might be trap in the fantasy game they play, they feel they are free.

Denfeld suggested that street kids are representative of a society where young adults are encourage to immerse themselves in a fantasy game, many of them not know what they are getting them selves into, but just like the feeling to know they have a "family" to count on unless they break any of the street rules. In the street they find the "family" that accepts them for who they are.

Through the information that Rene is able to present to us we are able to formulate an educated opinion of the younger segment of the homeless community. Although through Rene's perspective we might only get a compassionate or objective perspective that she wants to provide the community, meaning we aren't able to get the full image in a sense that we just know and can learn about the street family through Rene's point of view and research.

One of Rene's failures was that she mentions at the beginning that street families are