Kids Out of Place
Hoffman, Daniel & Scheper-Hughes, Nancy
In Brazil, a poor, ragged kid running along an unpaved road in a favela or playing in a field of sugar cane is just a kid. That same child, transposed to the main streets and plazas of town, is...
...You won't ever turn me in to FEBEM (the misnamed state institution for the well-being of minors), will you, Nancy...
...But stealing, they said, was "um jeito"-a way of getting byan unfortunate means of survival, not something they were proud of...
...The risks and hazards of this inchoate domestic rebel- t children lion are great: illiteracy, toxicity from inhalant drugs such as glue, chronic hunger and under-nutrition, sexual exploitation and AIDS...
...As a guard at the jail in Bom Jesus reflected: "the life of a young marginal here is short...
...boys in a favela of Rio de Janeiro...
...and MNMMR et al, Vidas em Risco: Assassinatos de Crianqas e Adolescentes no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 1991...
...The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (University of California Press, 1992...
...Soil in the ground is clean, a potential garden...
...Not even in maximum security are prisoners treated this way," a prosecutor said, commenting about 100 youths who were kept locked up 24 hours a day in cells without ventilation or bathrooms...
...bordering on the criminal and deviant...
...Their sketches were curious...
...In addition to the thousands of children who fill Brazil's special reform schools, significant numbers of children are illegally detained in prisons alongside adult offenders...
...2. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 469...
...Of course, many street children do, in fact, live through petty crime...
...Of course," the friend replied...
...9 In all, their lives are characterized by a profound sense of insecurity...
...Why do you think that they built the FEBEM school so close to the cemetery of Bom "eet children demonstrate for better health care, voting rights, and at the state legislature in Belem...
...When a younger child was continually pushed away from us at the street shelter in Bom Jesus by older and more "expert" kids who denied that the child had ever really been a street kid, the little one vehemently protested, "Eu pedia, eu pedia...
...The same home conditions that propel their brothers into the Below: Yo street affect them as well, but a favela girl Right: Two must always declare a fixed assignment and a fixed destination in the "street...
...The very notion of a "street child" reflects the preoccupation of one class or segment of society with the "proper place" of another.' The term is a manifestation, albeit a semiconscious one, of a kind of symbolic or psychological apartheid...
...Why, there's no parent with them...
...Scheper-Hughes was made to answer many times over...
...The more she denied that this could be so, the more the children ticked off the names of friends who had been "roughed up" or hurt at one of the reform schools...
...19 Support for death squads, "private justice," lynchings and lethal tactics by the police is related to widespread perceptions that the justice system does not work, and that police are inefficient, corrupt, and frequently themselves involved in crime...
...On October 22, 1992, in the FEBEM facility of Tatuap6 in So Paulo, a 24-hour rebellion resulted in one death, 40 wounded, and over 500 escapes (350 of whom were recaptured...
...Now, five years later, both boys were accused of assault, and Junior, of the rape of another street child...
...3 This minority is, however, very visible, greatly feared, and fuel the stereotype of the "dangerous" and "uncontrollable" menino de rua...
...In spite of the new legislation, the disturbing conditions dramatized in Pixote have not changed...
...63-67...
...To support children's rights is perceived by many in Brazil as "an attack on decent people's rights to walk down the street in safety...
...The very term "street child" has no meaning in the shantytown...
...11 Reform of the FEBEM system-a central demand of child advocates and an implicit provision of the 1990 Child and Adolescent Statute-remains elusive...
...7 Each term denies the validity and personhood of the child or adolescent and transforms him or her into a dangerous and disgusting object, one to be removed or erased with violence and impunity...
...Bolstering and justifying the persecution, indeed the open warfare on street kids in Brazil today are rumors, radio reports and sensationalized news stories about crimes committed by street adolescents...
...1 8 Underlying this sentiment is a perception that street adolescents are dangerous criminals with little chance of reform...
...The tolerance for violence is also a legacy of the dictatorship...
...Think of Fagin's "boys" from Oliver Twist, especially the Artful Dodger, and you have it...
...There is a natural evolution from begging to stealing as begging becomes both humiliating and more difficult for the older child...
...With the demise of the former police state, the structures that had kept the social classes safely apart and the "hordes" of disenfranchised, hungry and "dangerous" favela-shantytown-children at bay also disintegrated...
...Consequently, young black males in Brazil are increasingly a threatened population...
...In the investigation that followed, a state legislator claimed that the youths were "caged up like animals...
...she has to love me," Chico said, although both Chico and the questioner knew that his mother had tried to give him away several times to distant relatives...
...2 0 Residents of poor neighborhoods are often the strongest supporters of violent, extrajudicial solutions to local crime, a phenomenon that has been, in part, attributed to the lack of security in these communities...
...The specter of violent and sudden death looms alarmingly close for poor adolescents and for street children especially...
...Thus were they rapidly transformed into precocious "little men" incarcerated and held accountable for their chaotic street behavior...
...The National Movement of Street Children (MNMMR), an organization of street educators and children's advocates, is at the forefront of legislative reform and the movement to engage and empower street children in their own environment: in the parks and plazas of the city [see "The National Movement of Street Children," p. 21...
...Unwanted and considered human waste, these ubiquitous tattered, mainly black children and adolescents evoke strong and contradictory emotions of fear, aversion, pity and anger in those who view their neighborhood streets, boulevards and squares as "private places" under siege...
...Homes are overcrowded and mother's "amigo" or current boyfriend may make demands for privacy that preclude older kids sleeping at home...
...We offer them here as a small act of resistance and as a way of honoring their short lives: Pedrinho Zeze Nino Docideiro Rihgue Fro Deda Biopiolho Biu Bebe Taiga Misso Ze Pequeno Pipio Gilvam Regi Geronimo Xunda Beto Boca de Veia Bodinha Joca A few of these adolescents and young men lost their lives in acts of random violence after having fled to Recife, the regional capital...
...She's my mother...
...They kill children there," little Luiz insisted...
...Dimenstein, War on Children, pp...
...Suddenly, street children seemed to be everywhere...
...7. "Menor" literally means "minor" in Portuguese...
...34-45...
...This is revealed in the proliferation of derogatory names for poor street children: pivete (thief), trombadinha (pick pocket), maloqueiro (street delinquent), menor (juvenile delinquent) and marginal (criminal...
...As one observer writes, "people are usually asking the police, whom they fear and accuse of being violent, to be violent 'against the side that deserves it...
...6. The rape of street girls by policemen has been reported by Ana Vasconcelos, founder of the Casa de Passagem, a support and shelter project for street girls in the northeast city of Recife...
...Daniel Hoffman is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley...
...A street child is, like our definition of dirt, soil that is out of place...
...34-35...
...his nine-year-old friend Aldimar corrected him...
...On Friday, July 23, 1993 eight young "street children"-or meninos de rua-were gunned down as they slept near the Candeldria Church in downtown Rio de Janeiro...
...15 Brazilian journalist Gilberto Dimenstein, in his forceful denunciation of violence against children, Brazil: War on Children, emphasized the complicity of off-duty policemen, hired killers, and store owners (lojistas) in the death squads...
...The pattern of violence reflected in the Candeldria killings, though remarkable in its degree, is in no way new...
...4 Domestic work in the context of semi-feudal Northeast Brazil is not infrequently described by favela girls and older women as "slavery," so that a flight to the "streets" and even to "prostitution" can be seen as NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 18REPORT ON CHILDREN acts of self-liberation...
...It is this overall configuration of risks that leads child advocates in Brazil to defend the right of the child to be in the street, while recognizing that a life of the streets can only be self-destructive in the long term...
...Kids Out of Place 1. This and related themes are further elaborated in D. Hoffman, "Street Children and the Geography of Exclusion in Brazil," in Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent, eds., Child Survival, 2nd Edition (Berkeley: University of California, forthcoming...
...She is currently visiting profes- sor and chair in social anthropology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa...
...Caldeira, City of Walls, p. 179...
...Stealing is the next phase in the life cycle of a street child...
...Death-squad persecution is directed at a specific class and shade of shantytown resident...
...The street-especially the city center-is, after all, the primary site of employment and economic survival...
...Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley...
...1 4 The local human rights organization GAJOP characterizes the routine assassinations of poor adolescents as an unofficial death penalty which is carried out "with chilling cruelty and without any chance of defense whatsoever...
...Today, the police are called upon to enforce, often violently, the apartheid-like codes that seek to keep Friends attend the funeral of two of the approximately 1,000 stree...
...Caldeira, City of Walls, p. 187...
...5. The young woman gave this testimony at a consciousness-raising meeting for young (mostly migrant) sex workers in Sao Paulo organized by a grassroots AIDS awareness group...
...Both street girls and street boys are often used for passive anal intercourse...
...These street children do not so much "run away" or "choose the streets" as they are thrown out of homes where hunger, abuse, poverty and neglect make life under bridges and in bus station restrooms seem more "peaceful" (a term that more than one street child used to describe his life in an abandoned building in Recife) than life at home...
...Most work selling candy or popsicles, guarding cars, carrying groceries and other parcels, or shining shoes...
...razilian street children live in daily fear of the police, state children's asylums, anonymous kidnappers, death squads, and (more fantastically) imagined child-and-organ stealers...
...4. See Gilberto Dimenstein's Meninas da Noite (Sao Paulo: Editora Atica, 1992) concerning prostitution rings and the near-enslavement of adolescent girls in the North of Brazil, and his article in this issue of NACLA Report on the Americas...
...In all, the problem of "street children" is emblematic of a larger dilemma in Brazil: a failed economic development model that has relegated a vast proportion of the population to misery...
...hat is rarely articulated but nonetheless quite clear is that street kids are poor children in the wrong place...
...Outside they were already "marked for extermination" by local hit squads, he said, and they had been rejected by family members as well as feared and hated by the local population for whom their deaths would be counted as a relief...
...See also Gilberto Dimenstein, Brazil: War on Children (London: Latin America Bureau/Monthly Review Press, 1991...
...Urban violence itself may not have actually increased with democratization...
...As long as he or she doesn't get "in trouble" with the law in the process of trying to survive, the child who can successfully negotiate the realm of the street is seen as resourceful and self-reliant...
...Chico Buarque 16REPORT ON CHILDREN Above: Street children in Recife heavily intoxicated from sniffing glue Left: A shoe-shine boy in Rio de Janeiro...
...Both labels justify radical interventions and the forced removal of these public "pests" from the urban landscape...
...See Anthony Swift, Brazil: the Fight for Childhood in the City (Florence: UNICEF International Child Development Center, 1991...
...They suffer, however, increased risks of exposure to HIV infection, pregnancy, and sexual abuse...
...This appears particularly true of smaller municipalities that lack specially designated facilities for minors...
...FiftyFifty," said Giomar proudly with his raspy, boy-man voice...
...Safely confined to the favela, the poor child or adolescent is invisible to the better-off city dwellers, and therefore of little interest or concern...
...The list we gathered from several street children one morning in Bom Jesus in 1992 carried no fewer than 21 names...
...Black and brown (mixed race) bodies outnumbered white bodies 12 to 1, and boys outnumbered girls at a ratio of 7 to 1. In 80% of the cases, the bodies had been damaged or mutilated...
...Indeed, food and affection exchanged for sex is common among Brazilian street kids, the majority of whom are initiated into sex by nine or ten years of age in the big cities...
...By invading the city centers, frequenting the public parks and upper-class beaches of Rio de Janeiro and Recife, and engaging in petty crimes against the middle class, street children defy the segregated order of the modern city...
...21 The poor, it appears, feel every bit as besieged by crime, if not more so, as the rich and middle class do...
...In 1981 Hector Babenco's film Pixote stunned audiences with its brutal portrayal of the institutional and street life of marginalized children in Brazil...
...This is no less true for the children of a relatively small municipality such as Bom Jesus (population 50,000) than for those of major cities...
...Quoted in "Brazil's Police Enforce Popular Punishment: Death," New York Times, November 4, 1992...
...Some were summarily murdered when caught in the act of petty theft, or were the victims of vigilante "street justice...
...Voi XXVII, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1994 17 VOL XXVII, No 6 MAY/JUNE 1994 17REPORT ON CHILDREN For favela girls, the alternation between home and street is more vexed and problematic...
...In the ensuing decade the situation of marginalized children seems, if anything, to have gotten worse...
...Most "street children" are today, as they were in the 1960s, "supernumerary" or "excess" kids, the children of impoverished and often single or abandoned women...
...A band of street children, who had attached themselves to Nancy Scheper-Hughes' household in the 1980s, liked nothing better than to be invited inside to use her flush toilet, to wash with soap and hot water, and, afterwards, to flop on the cool floor and draw with magic-marker pens...
...Gabinete de Assessoria Juridica as Organizag6es Populares/Cen- tro Luiz Freire (GAJOP), Grupos de Exterminio: A Banalizaqo da Vida e da Morte em Pernambuco (Olinda: GAJOP, 1991...
...Thus, each time a troublesome young street child was swept up in a police raid or was physically attacked or "disappeared" in Bom Jesus, people said nothing...
...9. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes, "Theft of Life," Society 27(6), Sept.Oct 1990, pp...
...In one cell of the local jail we found "Caju" and "Junior," 15 and 16-year-olds whom Scheper-Hughes remembered as cute street urchins attached to her household in 1987...
...They tried to make themselves useful in a myriad of ways, some of these NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Por esse pdo pra comer Por esse chdo pra dormir Por me deixar respirar Por me deixar existir Deus lhe pague...
...but I begged, I begged...
...She is the author of Death Without Weeping...
...But unlike other forms of debris, street kids refuse to stay in the dump (the favelas of Brazil...
...It's like this: for a menino de rua to reach 30 years of age, it's a miracle...
...See Ben Penglase, Final Justice: Police and Death Squad Homicides of Adolescents in Brazil (New York: Human Rights Watch/Americas, 1994) for an excellent analysis of extrajudicial violence and murder against poor adolescents, including street children, in Brazil...
...The practice is in flagrant disregard of the new Brazilian Constitution with its bill of rights for the child...
...The Candellria massacre brought renewed attention to the plight of street children, their "elimination" at the hand of death squads, and the wrenching poverty that has come to characterize life for vast numbers of urban residents in Brazil...
...They were commonly referred to with a blend of annoyance and affection as "moleques"-that is, ragamuffins, scamps or rascals...
...Most share a percentage of their earnings with their mothers whom they visit each evening...
...The MNMMR helps street children to form their own organizations, to develop their own leadership, and to articulate their own demands, so that individual acts of survival can be translated into collective acts of political resistance...
...For all its power, however, the Brazilian street children's movement has been unable to strike at the source of the problem...
...5 Because these girls frequently live in brothels, prostitution may remove them somewhat from the dangers of life on the street...
...There are many ways to be a child of the streets...
...But girls who are quick and savvy are often extremely useful to their mothers in dealings with the "somebodies" of the street, including shopkeepers, coffin makers, clinic doctors, patrons, political leaders and clergy...
...The outcome of the struggle for childhood in Brazil will weigh heavily on the success of activists in the MNMMR and other organizations that share its vision of a new society in which all children are valued...
...Until the chaotic economic and social conditions that cause desperately poor parents to "lose" their children to the streets are reversed, childhood for the vast majority in Brazil will continue to signify a period of adversity to be survived and gotten over as quickly as possible, rather than a time of nurturance to be extended and savored...
...The first time I sold my body was the first time I felt that it belonged to me," said one young "runaway" from the rural Northeast who chose "the streets" of Sdo Paulo and prostitution over domestic servitude in Pernambuco...
...Instead, they often stake out the most public and most elegant spaces of the city to live, to love, and to work, thus betraying the illusion of Brazilian "modernity...
...the poor and the black-young as well as old-"in their proper place...
...Pushing further: "Is any kid on the street without an adult a street kid...
...Likewise, a poor, ragged kid running along an unpaved road in afavela or playing in a field of sugar( cane is just a kid...
...While most street kids return home at night to sleep, some alternate nights of sleeping outdoors with sleeping at home...
...A very small number of children actually live full-time in the streets, rarely if ever going home to visit...
...Since when did you ever give your mother more than a third...
...Street kids of Bom Jesus had no difficulty identifying the names of murdered friends and companions...
...The Federal Police reported that close to 5,000 children were murdered in Brazil between 1988 and 1990.12 Few of these deaths were considered worthy of investigation, which is hardly surprising given that police officers are themselves perpetrators of many of these crimes...
...Many moleques survived by "adopting" an affluent or middle-class household for whom they did odd jobs in exchange for the right to sleep in a courtyard or patio...
...Indeed, it is almost never used as a term of reference or identification, although favela mothers will sometimes lament having permanently "lost" one or more boys "to the streets...
...Street children are, in a sense, poor kids in revolt, violating social space, disrespecting property, publicly intoxicating themselves, and otherwise refusing to conform or to disappear...
...Indeed, the contemporary plight and the problem of thousands of loose and "dangerous" street children has become the center of attention both within and beyond Brazil...
...That same child, transposed to the main streets and plazas of town, is a threat, a potentially dangerous "street kid...
...What has changed significantly is both the official discourse and the popular representations of marginalized children in Brazil over the past three decades...
...2 Here, the term "lost" and "street" are used to describe a poor child's declaration of independence from his home and his parents...
...8. Maria Simas Filho, Eliane Azevedo and Lula Costa Pinto, "lnfdncia de raiva, dor de sangue," Veja, May 29, 1991, pp...
...The daily Folha de Sdo Paulo reported that those adolescents returned to the 1,200-inmate facility were beaten severely by state functionaries...
...Although the process of democratization has been fairly rapid since 1982, it has yet to check the extraordinary power of the civil and military police over the poorer populations...
...That's why they're street kids...
...Throughout Brazilian military rule N(C2LA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 22REPORT ON CHILDREN (1964-1985), the civil and military police were heavily implicated in the disappearances, tortures and deaths of suspected "subversives...
...A director of FEBEM confirmed that the adoNACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20REPORT ON CHILDREN lescents were being kept naked in the buildings "for reasons of security...
...But, despite all, their self-portraits were often surprisingly smiling and upbeat...
...Oh, chd...
...ung street vendors sell trinkets and food in Cruzeiro do Sul in Acre...
...Dimenstein, Brazil: War on Children...
...Penglase's Final Justice describes the many obstacles to achieving convictions in death-squad killings, particularly when cases involve the military police and the military justice system...
...The vehicle of their "escape" is generally prostitution...
...1 3 Most of the victims are adolescent males, like Caju and Junior, between the ages of 15 and 19, a particularly "dangerous" time, especially for the children of blackfavela dwellers...
...Street girls in Recife are frequently raped by men, including policemen, and younger street boys as well as street girls are vulnerable to rape by older street boys...
...Street kids in Bom Jesus da Mata-most of them boys-tended to be sentimental on the topic of mothers, their own in particular...
...These homeless children also favored religious themes-the crucifixion in particular-colored in with lots of bright red wounds...
...The Below: Str popular news weekly Veja reported that in education, the central plaza of Sdo Paulo, the Praca da Right: A b S6, street children commit over 32,000 thefts and robberies a year, each child allegedly committing three thefts a day...
...When nine-year-old "Chico" was asked if his mother loved him, he looked back incredulously...
...When asked why they beg or steal, or why they live in the streets, poor children often replied that they were doing it to help their mother...
...Caju" was elected to represent the street children of Bom Jesus at the first national convention of street children held in Brasilia in 1986, when street children from all over Brazil converged on the capital to voice their grievances and demand their human rights...
...In 1991 Veja reported that the public morgue in Recife received approximately 15 bodies of dead children and adolescents a month...
...For this good bread to eat For this hard ground on which to sleep For letting me breathe For letting me exist God reward you...
...Indeed "race" and race hatred have emerged today as popular discourses that justify violent and illegal police actions in shantytown communities...
...During a brief season of field research two years ago in Recife, the capital city of Pernambuco, and in Bom Jesus da Mata, a small market town in the interior of the same state, we made a point of asking ordinary townspeople the naive question: "What is a menino de rua (street kid...
...While driving with a friend down a wide avenue in Recife, one of us, spying some scruffy boys walking in the grass along the road, asked: "Are those street kids...
...58-63...
...Filmed during the final years of a waning military dictatorship, Pixote focused on the generation forgotten by the Brazilian "economic miracle" of the 1970s...
...Still others died at the hands of death squads, their murders unresolved and little investigated...
...In exasperation, the friend replied, "Look, they steal and sniff glue...
...The seemingly far-fetched rumors of street kids kidnapped for overseas adoption or mutilated for their organs co-exist with an active round-up of street urchins, thousands of whom "disappear" each year into state-run reform facilities that are viewed with suspicion and horror by shantytown residents...
...Agencia Ecum~nica de Noticias (AGEN), through the computer network Peacenet, November 19, 1992...
...oy locked up in FEBEM, the state-run reform school system...
...In the context of his own environment, the street child is nothing more than a "kid...
...Jesus...
...Discourses regarding human rights, including rights for children, easily come into conflict with popular concerns for public safety, leading some to claim that human rights are the "privileges of bandits...
...The first denotes pity for the child (and blame for the neglectful mother), while the second denotes fear...
...A similar conclusion was reached in a report by the Sgo Paulo chapter of the Brazilian Bar Association, which indicated that "the military police and death squads paid by shantytown shopkeepers killed most of the nearly 1,000 street children slain here in 1990...
...The children were incarcerated, the judge explained, for their own safety...
...The primary function of these "correctional" institutes continues to be the removal of unwanted children from the public sphere...
...Until the enactment of the new Child and Adolescent Statute (1990) which recognized the legal rights of minors incarcerated without due process, almost 700,000 Brazilian children and adolescents were locked up in FEBEM or related reform schools.10 The film Pixote recreated the life of children in a FEBEM facility, portraying conditions of everyday violence and vulnerability where criminalization, rather than reform or education, were the only possible outcomes...
...Surveillance of the immediate whereabouts of daughters is a perennial preoccupation of favela women who themselves must often be out working in the street for long periods of the day...
...3. For a useful discussion of street children and family life, see Childhood and Urban Poverty in Brazil: Street and Working Children and Their Families, Innocenti Occasional Papers, The Urban Child Series, UNICEF, 1992...
...From the age of seven or eight, favela girls are assigned child-tending and other domestic tasks that keep them close to home...
...Home" for many male favela kids is not so much a place to eat and sleep as an emotional space-the place where one comes from and where one returns, periodically...
...The newly appointed Children's Judge of Bom Jesus allowed us to visit a few dozen minors being held without bail in the local prison...
...Journal de Comercio, June 19,1991...
...In the context of family-driven Brazil, the street child is barely a "person," and is vulnerable to the worst forms of exploitation, abuse and manipulation...
...Almost all of the street children we interviewed in 1992 at a shelter in Bom Jesus volunteered that they stole things, or that they "used to" before they mended their ways...
...While they may be quite economically independent, street kids remain deeply emotionally dependent and attached to the idea of "family...
...While most of those who actually live in the street are boys, young girls may also enter the anonymous space of the street, often escaping exploitative work as junior domestic servants or abusive homes...
...asked Jos6 Roberto, age 12, with a quiver of fear in his voice...
...Underlying the current formulation of the street children's crisis is a deep preoccupation with the future of Brazil, and with the increase in public violence that seems to have accompanied the economic crisis and transition to democracy...
...soil under the fingernails is filth...
...The Street Children's Movement activists recognize the anger and indignation of street adolescents as appropriate to their marginalized and precarious existence...
...When street children begin to show signs of physical maturity, they are chased away from public spaces and rarely evoke compassion or a handout from people on the street...
...Most drew self-portraits or conventional intact nuclear family scenes even when there was no "papa" living in the house or when the child himself had long since "left home" for the streets...
...Only when thinner, the child steps outside of his or her area is that child perceived as a problem about which "something must be done...
...In the 1960s in the Northeast of Brazil, street urchins were a fairly familiar feature of urban life...
...They are now referred to either as "abandoned" children or, alternatively, as "marginals...
...How can you tell...
...Out of this configuration arises the specter of the homeless and abandoned street child, perceived by the more affluent classes as a blemish on the urban landscape and a reminder that all is not well in the country...
...6 Street children-typically barefoot, shirtless and seemingly untied to a home or a family-are separated from all the statuses and roles that confer propriety, rights and citizenship...
...From the point of view of the favela, however, there is nothing inherently problematic about a child, especially a male child, flowing over into the main streets of the town...
...1 6 Typically, it is store owners who pay to have "undesirable" adolescents and children eliminated...
...Such children "of the street" are predictably more associated with theft, gangs and drugs, and are the most common target of adult exploitation, violence and death squads...
...Some residents were even sympathetic to these violent attacks on other people's "bad" children," and would occasionally murmur under their breath, "Good job, nice work...
...That same child, transposed to the main streets and plazas of town, is a threat, a potentially dangerous "street kid...
...This is crucial to understanding their acceptance of extreme forms of private justice, even when they are most likely to become the targets of its abuses...
...In the context of Brazil, it is stigmatizing, and specifically applied to poor adolescents who are assumed to be criminally inclined...
...Cemeteries and violent death were also a frequent theme...
...Maria Simas Filho, Eliane Azevedo, and Lula Costa Pinto, "lnfincia de raiva, dor de sangue," Veja, May 29, 1991, pp...
...Teresa Caldeira describes these transformations in public life in contemporary Sao Paulo in her dissertation City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in 5So Paulo (University of California at Berkeley, 1992...
...Moleques were "street-wise" kids, who were cute and cunning, sometimes sexually precocious, and invariably economically enterprising...
...Today, despite new and in many respects model legislation asserting the rights of children, street children in Brazil are viewed as a public scandal and a nuisance...
...7 Dimenstein writes that support of human rights for children in Brazil is confined to a relatively small minority, and that to make a case for the rights of children is perceived by many as "an attack on decent people's rights to walk down the street in safety...
...Available from Human Rights Watch, 485 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 100176104...
...killed in Brazil each year...
...8 Further fueling the panic among middleand upper-class populations were news reports of the arrastdo-or sweep-in which large roving gangs of poor adolescents allegedly streamed across the elite southern beaches of Rio de Janeiro robbing anyone within reach...
...But under ordinary conditions, to be a favela boy is to spend the better part of the day-and often enough the night as well-"na rua," in the street...
...The new Brazilian Constitution and the subsequent Child and Adolescent Statute recognize the rights of children and the obligation of the state, civil society and parents to protect these rights and to provide for the needs of children as individuals in a special condition of dependency, and physical and social development [see "The Struggle for Citizenship and Human Rights," p. 19...
Vol. 27 • May 1994 • No. 6
