Working with Children on the Streets of Brazil

Politics and Practice

Walter de Oliveira

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780789011534
• eBook ISBN: 9781000156683
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Reaffirm your political and spiritual commitment to helping the poor and oppressed!How can teachers and social workers reach the endangered kids who seldom come to school? By going to the streets, where the children live, work, fight, steal, get sick, sell their bodies, and all too often die. Working with Children on the Streets of Brazil is an in-depth study of Brazil's homeless children and the street youthworkers who offer them food, clothing, beds, hope, medical attention, education, and simple respect.The street children of Brazil live in unimaginable poverty and squalor, stealing jewelry or selling their bodies to survive, wandering homeless and untaught, pursued by death squads who clean up the streets by washing them with blood. Yet the street youthworkers interviewed in this moving, powerful book--some inspired by the Catholic Church's Liberation Theology movement, some employed by the government or private agencies--continue their efforts to help and heal these children, often with remarkable success. Their work is widely respected, and their unique viewpoint on serving throwaway children can offer creative solutions for social service workers around the globe.Many of the issues discussed in Working with Children on the Streets of Brazil will be painfully familiar to social service workers everywhere, including:

• the problems of how to identify, classify, and count the children of the streets
• the reasons children leave or lose their homes
• the implications of policy decisions and socioeconomic forces on the children's lives
• the clash between law-and-order advocates and social service professionals
• the negative effects of deinstitutionalization and overcrowded youth homes
• the tragic societal consequences of the widening gap between rich and poor
• the problems of youth crime and violence
• the difficulties in delivering education, health care, and basic services for homeless childrenThis impressive book offers a detailed history of the development of street social education; a study of the aims, methods, and experiences of youthworkers; and solid advice on using the principles and practices of street social education to reach the at-risk youth of any country, including the United States. Working with Children on the Streets of Brazil is both a scholarly work on the phenomenon of homeless children and a rousing call to action that will remind you of the reasons you chose to work in social services.

Chapter 1

The Street Kids Problem

As they say, time don’t pass, we do. But my childhood, I’ve got the impression that time took it away. (Herzer 1982)

When I reached the right corner of the Sé cathedral stairs, a skinny, ragged-clothed black kid ran in front of me. He came from the left, from one of the dark alleys that leads to the other side of the plaza. Behind him, another youth-dressed in a dark police uniform-followed, gun in hand, ordering him to stop. The black kid kept running. For a moment the gun pointed straight at my head. I was paralyzed with fear, knowing that any movement could be fatal. The young police officer screamed, ordering the kid to stop. Soon he caught up and with a precise kick to the kid’s lower back, threw him against the cathedral wall. The boy quietly leaned against the wall, and I watched, motionless.

The young policeman did not look at me but concentrated on keeping the street kid in the range of his pistol; then he did a thorough body search that did not take long, as the kid’s clothes were only some loose shorts and a t-shirt. The police officer was looking for a watch that had been stolen a few minutes before from a man who then arrived at the scene. He was hesitant to identify the kid as the thief. Other kids and a few street educators sat at the top of the majestic cathedral stairs, at the point where one faces the plaza. They kept looking at us, not daring to get close or to say anything. Tension was in the air, but under the circumstances the police officer had no choice but to release the kid.

I slowly caught my breath and, trying not to show that my knees were shaking, started to talk with both the victim and the young police officer. The conversation was friendly, and the officer explained that the kids who steal are not the ones to be blamed. “It is a social problem,” he said, and he explained how abandonment and neglect create “street kids” and the kids’ involvement with drugs and street crime. “After all, if anyone is to blame, it is our corrupt system that makes the children become marginals and forces us to do certain things. If I was in their situation I probably would have to do the same,” he concluded.

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “The Street Kids Problem.” De Oliveira, Walter. Co-published simultaneously in Child & Youth Services (The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 21, No. 1/2, 2000, pp. 3-26; and: Working with Children on the Streets of Brazil: Politics and Practice (Walter de Oliveira) The Haworth Press, Inc., 2000, pp. 3-26. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-342-9678, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: [email protected]].

Such is life on the street: Fast-paced and pervaded by tension, suspicion, violence, fear, courage, negotiation, humiliation, and compassion. It is where various socioeconomic classes and professional and ethnic cultures meet, mix, connect, and clash, where emotions, attitudes, passions, ideas, and behaviors are strong and contradictory, and where millions of children grow, learn, live, and work.

Children of the streets suffer. They endure the stresses of everyday life in the street, and in Brazil they are not given fair access to education, health care, and other necessary social services. Most of them do not enjoy the comfort of a warm bed or running water. The presence and supervision of caring and responsible adults are absent from their lives; they are victims of neglect, discrimination, and much violence, including beatings, torture, and even extermination. These youth, mostly the homeless sons and daughters of the poor, are living testimony to society’s failure to distribute wealth fairly, to establish competent social welfare systems, and to assure equal opportunities for all. They constitute a metaphor for the collapse of a society.

Children living in circumstances somewhat similar to those lived by today’s street children have been present in Western societies since the advent of cities. In classical Western literature many youth are described as dwellers in city streets after escaping their homes where they were neglected or exploited.

Robin Hood, Oliver Twist, Sherlock Holmes, and Mark Twain’s stories illustrate rebellious, “deviant” youth who are also characters able to elicit compassion, even when their behavior breaks the law (e.g., Robin Hood). Readers identify with poor, unprotected, exploited, yet often witty, child characters in literature, plays, and films.

As the industrial revolution spawned a technological society and, now, the information era, the “street kids problem” has grown, and street children are omnipresent in most societies. Yet for a long time these youth were virtually invisible to the general public. They have become a cliché: They are invisible precisely because of their omnipresence, an inevitable part of the scenarios of cities, like beggars or birds.

Baizerman (1989) contends that governments and communities have relentlessly tried to deny the existence of street children. Governments are unwilling to deal with the deep structural changes necessary to solve the problems related to poverty and homelessness, and the larger community tends to be apathetic toward social change. This state of denial has played a major role in street children’s virtual invisibility. Nevertheless, psychological and political resistance to acknowledging the phenomenon cannot eliminate the tensions created by the massive presence of street children in the third world.

The most common answers to the street children phenomenon are inaction or, more commonly, symbolic action. The latter refers to action limited to the minimum necessary to “bribe” super-egos and to satisfy bureaucratic demands. One consequence is the general perception of abandoned, needy street children as intrusive and annoying to local businesses and residents and, by extension, to politicians and policy-makers. Thus, massively visible but virtually invisible as individuals, street children and adolescents have come to constitute a challenge to social and community development and to society’s moral and democratic values. For some, it would be better if they did not exist, and therefore their presence is denied. For others, these children just epitomize the fall of a decadent civilization.

At any rate, the number of children living or spending most of their discretionary time “on the street” is increasing. These children have become “intruders” in the community’s everyday life, as their tragic reality has been portrayed over and over in the media and the phenomenon of street children has been linked to a perceived rise in street crime. As the larger community reached a point when it could not ignore the “street kids problem” any more, laws have been enacted and policies have been implemented to protect, educate, counsel, advocate for, and serve street children in various ways and with various degrees of success. A number of social service organizations specifically target street youth, governments have launched extensive programs to deal with homeless children, and a vast amount of academic and professional literature on the subject has been compiled.¹

Street social educators have played a crucial role, and the emergence of street social education has been an essential part of the transition from denial of the phenomenon of street children to the development of specialized services and specific policies for street youth. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the emergence of street social education, which is the object of this book, calls for some initial reflection on the street children phenomenon and why street children have become more socially visible.

Why are Street Kids Receiving so much Attention?

One factor contributing to street children becoming more visible and to society becoming more attentive to their existence has been the steady growth of poverty at a time when it was expected to diminish. Children and adolescents constitute a large percentage of the poor, and street children are the most unprotected subgroup among the poor (UNICEF, 1993), causing indignation among many concerned citizens, social service providers, advocates for the poor, and movements for social change. For these individuals and advocacy groups, such poverty amid abundance is unacceptable.

Another factor contributing to street children’s high visibility was the denunciation by human rights advocates of a widespread wave of violence against these youth. In Brazil and other third-world countries, violence against street youth has taken the form of “genocide” perpetrated by “death squads,” often by the police themselves. Reports of street children being imprisoned and tortured in correctional facilities are not uncommon as well.

Even under less extreme circumstances, street children are usually denied opportunities for social advancement and are frequently discriminated against by social service agencies, the media, and the general public. Journalistic, academic, and professional reports from social service agencies have examined and documented these phenomena (e.g., Davis, McCaul and Edward, 1991; Sherman, 1992; Thompson, 1991).

In recent years, street crime and the lack of public safety in the community have been given much importance in political agendas all over the world, bringing street youth to the forefront. The presence of youth in the streets has come to be seen by many as potentially dangerous. As a consequence, children “hanging out” on the streets are often perceived as connected to gang activity or even as a “dramatization of evil” by the larger community.

Street children’s higher visibility has also been facilitated by the institutionalization of social services committed to serving and protecting the poor. Such systems have existed since the 18th century in Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon America, while in most of the third world, welfare systems were not developed until the 20th century. However, in both the developed and developing world, it was not until the second half of the 20th century that many child welfare systems were able to play an important role in social development (Fundação João Pinheiro, 1987; Trattner, 1989). Today, social welfare systems not only try to help the poor through direct services but also seek to raise public awareness about poverty and social justice issues, including the “street kids problem.”

A few other factors have contributed to the increasing number of street children, and thereby to their higher visibility, including the following:

1. The development of a street subculture (de Oliveira, 1989). Peer recruitment is continuously carried out by those who are already on the streets; thus the street subculture helps to keep a flow of children and youth entering street life. In this way, children are “pulled” in addition to being “pushed” toward the streets by other circumstances (e.g., the need to contribute to the family income).
2. Demographic changes such as the inversion of the ratio of rural to urban populations. Massive migration from rural to urban areas has proved to be an important factor in expanding urban poverty, facilitating homelessness, and leading children to the streets (UNICEF, 1993).
3. Various economic, cultural, political, and social changes have affected the distribution of wealth, family structures, values, and belief systems. These include economic recessions in some parts of the world with high rates of unemployment, political instability (leading to discontinuity in social programs), as well as generational conflicts, which often have caused more children and youth to run away from home during the second half of the 20th century than at any other time in history (Sutherland, 1976).
4. A growing societal acceptance of children leaving their families and living by themselves.
5. The development of mass communications has increased awareness of the phenomenon of street children. The media have played an important role in denouncing the children’s overwhelming presence on the street and have helped to create a perception of crime epidemics perpetuated by these youth. All of these factors have helped to make street children the focus of much more national and international attention.

The gradual conversion of street children into a highly visible population was also caused by the problems created by their presence in public places. Middle-class values demand a repertoire of shared attitudes and behaviors to which street children do not conform. One consequence is that street children are perceived as an aesthetically offensive population and their behavior is considered to be aggressive.

Thus street children are seen as a category, a group that shares some characteristics, including being undesirable and unfit for the majority’s universe. Therefore it can be said that while they are highly visible, the children are still invisible as individuals; what is seen instead is “a problem” in a world that has not been organized and prepared to accept society’s neglected offspring.

The Universe of Street Children

The Street as a Social Environment

The streets are the main social space for street youth. In the streets they make friends, learn trades, incorporate values, and solidify belief systems. All of these activities take place within the context of more or less close relationships with an immediate environment consisting of homele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Indexing
• About the author
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Street Kids Problem
• Chapter 2. The Need for Intervention: Street Social Education as a Response of the Community to the Phenomenon of Street Children
• Chapter 3. The Emergence of Street Social Education in Brazil
• Chapter 4. Understanding Street Social Education
• Chapter 5. The Story from the Inside
• Chapter 6. Doing, Being, and Becoming: The Craft of Street Social Education
• Chapter 7. Street Social Education and the Enduring Questions of Society
• References
• Index