Not-Quite-Friendship: exploring social relations between child domestic workers and the children of employing families

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.