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The article draws from a field survey with children living in the streets and interviews with social workers in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia. After describing the image of “street children” produced by several humanitarian organisations, the article explains the moral dimension underlying the figure of the childvictim of poverty versus the dominant model of child protection established by the International Convention on the rights of the child. To examine whether this category is relevant, it then uses a life course analysis showing that children from broken home do not live permanently in the street but favour different spaces. The last point examines more closely how associating the notions of child and street contributes to assimilating the phenomenon to a social problem.