Social Factors Leading to Street Children Abscondment from Rehabilitation Centres in Iringa Municipality, Tanzania

This study examined social factors leading to street children's abscondment from rehabilitation centres in Iringa Municipality. Specifically, the study investigated the children’s peer pressure, social culture and children’s autonomy factors contributing to children's abscondment from the rehabilitation centres. A snowball chain was used to obtain 10 street children who absconded from the centres and Purposive sampling key informants. Interviews and documentary reviews were used for data collection. Thematic analysis technique (TAT) was used to analyze data. The results showed that social factors significantly influenced children's decisions to abscond from rehabilitation centres. The study found social factors that drive children’s decisions were peer pressure, social culture practised at rehabilitation centres and the desire for children’s freedom or autonomy played a significant role towards children's decisions to abscond from rehabilitation centres. These factors are rooted in their social experiences, relationships, and perceptions of the environment that they lived in before joining rehabilitation centres. To end the study, it concludes that children's abscondment from the rehabilitation centres was a result of a combination of social factors ranging from the influence of peer pressure, street children's autonomy and desire to regain self-independence as well as the social culture practised at the rehabilitation centres. The study recommends: (i) To rehabilitation centre, addressing social factors effectively requires rehabilitation programs to incorporate comprehensive vocational training, financial education, and sustainable livelihood options that cater to the unique needs and aspirations of street children (ii) The government must develop a coordinated multi-agency strategy to identify and share information about concerns for a children person’s safety when absconding from centres. (iii) Recommendations to scholars, the study recommends examining political ecology factors contributing to children's abscondment from rehabilitation centres to cover large areas to enable generalization.