Prevalence,
Abuse & Exploitation of Street Children In the first decade of the 21st Century gvnet.com/streetchildren/Brazil.htm
|
|||||||||||
|
CAUTION: The following links
and accompanying text have been culled from the web to illuminate the
situation in Brazil. Some of these links
may lead to websites that present allegations that are unsubstantiated or
even false. No attempt has been made to validate their authenticity or
to verify their content. HOW TO USE THIS WEBPAGE Students If you are looking for
material to use in a term-paper, you are advised to scan the postings on this
page and others to see which aspect(s) of street life are of particular
interest to you. You might be
interested in exploring how children got there, how they survive, and how
some manage to leave the street.
Perhaps your paper could focus on how some street children abuse the
public and how they are abused by the public … and how they abuse each
other. Would you like to write about
market children? homeless children? Sexual and labor exploitation? begging? violence? addiction? hunger? neglect? etc. There is a lot to the subject of Street
Children. Scan other countries as well
as this one. Draw comparisons between
activity in adjacent countries and/or regions. Meanwhile, check out some of the Term-Paper resources
that are available on-line. Teachers Check out some of
the Resources
for Teachers attached to this website. ***
FEATURED ARTICLE *** Welcome to Brazil,
a Paradise of Impunity for All Kinds of Criminals Augusto Zimmermann,
L.L.B., L.L.M., Ph.D. teaches constitutional law at Murdoch University,
Western Australia. This paper was
presented at the Criminal Law Workshop held by the John Fleming Centre for
Advancement of Legal Research at the Australian National University College
of Law, 7-9 February 2008 www.brazzil.com/info/188-february-2008/10042.html [accessed 21 July
2013] www.profpito.com/WelcometoBrazil.html [accessed 23
November 2016] VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN - "Nowhere does
the gap separating rhetoric and reality emerge more starkly than in the
contrast between the guarantees afforded children by the 1988 Constitution
and the cold-blooded assassination of boys and girls who live on city
streets. If there is anything that most vividly symbolizes the perversity of
the contemporary wave of violence in Brazil, it is the way it has victimized
children." There are now seven
million abandoned children living on the streets of Brazilian cities. Crimes
against these children are characterized by extreme brutality and include
torture and dismemberment. Often their bodies are left out on the streets
"to serve as example for others." Those who manage to
survive another day are left worrying about where their next meal will come
from and finding a safe place to sleep. A social worker has suggested that
these children are subject to a process of "natural selection," in
which only the strong survive to adulthood and the weak die early from
disease and violence. Street children,
utterly deprived of their most basic needs, often become victims of death squads
or other forms of violence born of their precarious situation. Since they
often resort to theft to survive, some people have paid death squads to
"clean up the streets" and get rid of such an
"inconvenience." Unfortunately, many
Brazilians believe that the extra-legal killing of street children is a
legitimate measure to combat criminality and violence, because they feel
revolted with the unrealistic legal "solutions" provided by the
state. T-shirt message
suitable for framing Craig and Marc
Kielburger, Global Voices, The Toronto Star, Dec 21 2006 www.docstoc.com/docs/31290992/T-shirt-message-suitable-for-framing [accessed 8 Aug 2013] After a few minutes
of conversation, he brought me to the bus shelter he and several other street
children called home. They were very anxious that others might discover their
hideout. They said the police might beat them, or worse. At night, they
covered themselves with cardboard and newspapers to stay warm. The children told
me stories of how they had ended up on the streets. Some had been sent away
when their families' food supplies ran out. Others had fled homes where they
were physically or sexually abused. Each one had a unique, heart-wrenching
story. Most of these
children had only a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. They were penniless and
malnourished. All were barefoot. Most didn't even know their own ages, but
several must have been as young as 8. Violence and hunger were an everyday
part of their lives. Candelária massacre Wikipedia, 10 February
2011 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candel%C3%A1ria_massacre [accessed 8 April
2011] THE MASSACRE - According to survivors,
the morning of the day before the massacre, a young group of children threw
stones at police cars. Some of policemen allegedly told them, "don't
worry, we will get you soon!" As children from the Candelária
church were usually given warnings such as these by policemen, the young
perpetrators left without worrying too much about the threat. At midnight, a few
cars came to a halt in front of the Candelária
church. Next, gunfire shots were heard. The children tried to cover up, but
eight of them were shot to death, with several others wounded. One of the
children present that night, Sandro Rosa do Nascimento,
would later commit one of Brazil's most infamous crimes. The international
community severely condemned the attack, and many in Brazil asked for the
prosecution of those who shot the Candelária church
children. ***
ARCHIVES *** A Video Playlist for Brazil www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5867507C9D603AF0 [accessed 8 April 2011] There are an
increasing number of street children videos now available that constitute a
supplementary source of information for researchers, especially for those who
may not have experienced the reality of street children. [Playlist developed by Brian Horne of
almudo.com & streetkidnews.blogsome.com] The Department of Labor’s 2004 Findings on
the Worst Forms of Child Labor U.S. Dept of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs, 2005 www.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/tda2004/brazil.htm [accessed 24 January
2011] INCIDENCE
AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - In urban areas, common activities for children
include shining shoes, street peddling, begging, and working in restaurants, construction,
and transportation. Many children and
adolescents are employed as domestic servants, and others work as trash
pickers, drug traffickers, and prostitutes.
In 2001, 11.9 percent of working children ages 5 to 15 years were not attending school. Human Rights
Reports » 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices U.S. Dept of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and
Labor, March 8, 2006 2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2005/61718.htm [accessed 7 February
2020] ARBITRARY
AND UNLAWFUL DEPRIVATION OF LIFE - Death squads with links to law
enforcement officials carried out many killings, in some cases with police
participation. The National Human Rights Secretary stated that death squads
operated in 15 states. Credible, locally-based human rights groups reported
the existence of organized death squads linked to police forces that targeted
suspected criminals and persons considered "undesirable"--such as street children--in almost all states
and the Federal District. CHILDREN – A July study by
the Institute of Applied Economic Policy (IPEA) reported that more than 100
thousand children and adolescents were living in public shelters. The leading
causes for displaced children were: poverty (24 percent), abandonment (19
percent), domestic violence (12 percent), and drug abuse by parents or
guardians (11 percent). The IPEA report also revealed that in more than half
of the cases, children were living in shelters due to the parent's belief
that the child would receive better care there than at home. In September the
NGO Travessia reported that approximately 350
children lived on Sao Paulo City streets, and an additional three to four
thousand children worked as street vendors. The city of Rio de
Janeiro operated 38 shelters and group homes for street children. The Sao
Paulo City government runs several programs for street children, including a
number of shelters for minors and the Sentinel Program, which identifies
at-risk youth and provides social services, counseling, and shelter. Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2004 UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child, 1 October 2004 www1.umn.edu/humanrts/crc/brazil2004.html [accessed 24 January
2011] [64] The Committee
expresses its grave concern at the significant number of street children and
the vulnerability of these children to extrajudicial killings, various forms
of violence, including torture, sexual abuse and exploitation, and at the
lack of a systematic and comprehensive strategy to address the situation and
protect these children, and the very poor registration of missing children by
the police. Remember the child
victims of sex tourism Sarah de Carvalho et al, Sept. 27,
2010, The Guardian www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/27/remember-child-victims-sex-tourism [accessed 8 April
2011] In Brazil, along
with partner organisations, we are working to
mitigate the effects of this insidious trend; reports state that the country
is overtaking Thailand as the most popular destination for child sex tourism.
Despite Brazil's growing economy, street
children in cities like Recife, in the north-east of the country, are
turning to prostitution simply to afford a plate of food. Life on the street
for these children is grim and often punctuated by violence, drug addiction
and sexual abuse. Many girls fall pregnant by the age of 12. The statistics
are heart-wrenching – UNICEF estimates that there are as many as 250,000
child prostitutes in Brazil. Brazilian Street
Kid Publishes Inspirational Book with Help from American Professional Athlete
PRWEB, Sept. 26,
2010 www.prweb.com/releases/damon-j-smith-motivation/rescued-to-tell/prweb4502244.htm [accessed 8 April
2011] Life on the streets
of Brazil's third largest city is far from easy. Approximately 5 million
people inhabit Belo Horizonte, and the impoverished masses dwell in slums
that line the city's mountainside circumference. These shanty communities are
called "favelas" in Portuguese. Many favela children wind up
working the streets to bring home money to feed their families, and often to
support their parents' addictions. Most of the children who work in the
streets one day choose not to return home at all. By the time Sidney was
11 years old, he had been in and out of juvenile institutions. He was a drug
addict, thief and gang member. He had escaped gang warfare, corrupt police
and murderous vigilante squads. He had learned every survival tactic the
streets had to offer -- survival tactics that were slowly killing him. Street Children Human Rights Watch At one time this
article had been archived and may possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 21
September 2011] While street children receive national and international public attention, that attention has been focused largely on the social, economic and health problems of the children -- poverty, lack of education, AIDS, prostitution, and substance abuse. With the exception of the massive killings of street children in Brazil and Colombia, often by police, which Human Rights Watch reported in 1994, very little attention has been paid to the constant police violence and abuse from which many children suffer. This often neglected side of street children's lives has been a focus of Human Rights Watch's research and action In several countries where we have worked, notably Brazil, Bulgaria, and Sudan, the racial, ethnic, or religious identification of street children plays a significant role in their treatment. The disturbing notion of "social-cleansing" is applied to street children even when they are not distinguished as members of a particular racial, ethnic, or religious group. Branded as "anti-social," or demonstrating "anti-social behavior," street children are viewed with suspicion and fear by many who would simply like to see street children disappear. Brutal end for
woman who devoted life to helping children from Rio's violent slums Tom Phillips in Rio
de Janeiro, The Guardian, 1 March 2007 www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/01/brazil.international [accessed 8 April
2011] Appalled by reports
of death squads exterminating street children in the beachside city, she set
her sights on the favelas of Rio. Yet this week, after nearly a decade
dedicated to the children of South America, she met the most ghoulish end
imaginable - hacked to death with kitchen knives at her Copacabana home
alongside her husband and another colleague, apparently by one of the street
children she had tried to save. Global peace a
growing priority among diverse Christian groups Hannah Elliott,
Associated Baptist Press ABP, Dallas, January 23, 2007 www.abpnews.com/archives/item/1749-global-peace-a-growing-priority-among-diverse-christian-groups#.UgPjfayS_Bw [accessed 8 Aug 2013] According to Bostian, U.S. director of Hope Unlimited, only 18 percent
of Brazil's street children are biological orphans. The vast majority are
children who have run away from home to escape violent or neglectful
parents. Once the runaways hit the
streets, however, they find that option isn't much safer -- in fact, for many
it is brutal and deadly. The average lifespan for a Brazilian street child is
less than four years, with most meeting a violent end. In 2006, the United
Nations reported that 16 children are reported murdered every day in Brazil.
Many more murders go unreported. NBC Nightly News to
feature American Baptist ministry Hannah Elliott,
Associated Baptist Press ABP, Valley Forge Pennsylvania, December 21, 2006 www.abpnews.com/archives/item/1697-nbc-nightly-news-to-feature-american-baptist-ministry#.UgPkDayS_Bw [accessed 8 Aug 2013] “The situation with
street kids in Brazil has not gotten a lot of attention,” Bostian
said. “Only 18 percent of these kids are biological orphans. The rest are
social orphans. They think they would be better off on their own away from
their home. Most die from violence in the streets.” Many of the
children suffer from poor health and malnutrition. Because of rape and forced
child prostitution, they are often exposed to HIV/AIDS. According to the
Brazilian Center for Children and Adolescents, Brazil has more than 800,000
child prostitutes. Drugs also run rampant among the children, who sniff glue
to escape reality. The problem with
street children became so bad in the late 1980s that Brazil had “large-scale,
deliberate, systematic killing of street children by death squads who enjoyed
a high degree of impunity for their actions,” according to the Hope Unlimited
website. “Street execution" was once listed by Amnesty International as
the third leading cause of death for Brazilian children. Brazilian activist
says more money needed to help street children November 29, 2006 [accessed 16 January
2017] Yvonne Bezerra de Mello was changed by witnessing the police
massacre of eight street children in 1993. That’s when she started alternative
schools to help educate children who have been traumatized by life under
control of drug lords that rule Rio. 'Zero Tolerance'
comes to Brazil Suzy Khimm, Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor, Rio
De Janeiro, May 4, 2006 www.csmonitor.com/2006/0504/p04s01-woam.html [accessed 8 April
2011] His stepmother beat
him, so Aluizio Pereira fled for the streets. Three years later, the scrawny 13-year-old
still sleeps on the sidewalk along Ipanema Beach, begging for handouts in the
shadows of the luxury hotels that dominate the upscale neighborhood. But to some, Aluizio is more than just a reminder of a grim social
reality. In this divided city, he represents a threat to public security and
- thanks to former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani - the police are working
to clear him, and others like him, off the streets. "Street
Children" In Brazil T.H.O.M.A.S. (Those on
the Margins of a Society), EDGES Magazine Issue 27, November 2001 www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~edges/online/issue27/p20.htm [accessed 8 April
2011] [page 189] The largest category consists of children living in absolute poverty. These children grow up in an extremely underprivileged social environment. They lack the most elemental means to meet basic needs and usually receive hardly any or no parental care, because their mothers (who are often the only parent) are forced to seek some means of subsistence. In the absence of day-care facilities, the children, even toddlers, are left on their own. This exposes them to a high risk of starting an early “career” on the street. Brazil: Tragedy Of
Street Children Timothy
Bancroft-Hinchey, Pravda.RU Lisbon, 25.04.2001 english.pravda.ru/news/russia/25-04-2001/40995-0/ [accessed 8 April
2011] Abused, confused, lonely
and abandoned, children take to the streets to find a safe refuge from abuse
by parents or stepparents. In a life without hope from the moment they are
born, they soon find that they have nowhere to go, no one to turn to and no
life to live. Not for Kids Chuck Pfister, Cover Story, September 1995 [accessed 8 April
2011] An estimated 8-10
million children make their living on the streets in Brazil, primarily
because of extreme poverty. The degree
of vigilante violence against these children is extreme, and the behavior of
their vigilante murderers became a solidifying issue and a public relations
cornerstone in the children's movement. Real Dungeons Human Rights Watch,
December 6, 2004 www.hrw.org/en/node/11883/section/4 [accessed 8 April
2011] BEATINGS BY GUARDS - We heard reports
of physical abuse by guards in all detention centers we visited. “The guards
are very violent,” said a volunteer with a nongovernmental organization that
works with detained youths. The accounts of
youths themselves were not the only indication we had of abuse. In some
cases, the youths we interviewed showed us cuts and bruises that were consistent
with their descriptions of beatings. And when Human Rights Watch talked to a
group of parents of detained children, they described seeing visible signs of
abuse while visiting their children. For example, one parent spoke of a visit
to Santo Expedito in May 2003: … The guards had gone in and hit everybody,
beat them up. The boys were bruised, with broken arms, broken legs, covered
with blood. I saw this. Fifteen boys called me over to look inside and see
how they were. I saw them inside a bathroom. They lifted their shirts to show
me the injuries. Street Children in
Brazil The United Methodist
Church UMC gbgm-umc.org/missionstudies/globalhealth-yth/streetchildren.htm [accessed 8 Aug 2013] FACTS ABOUT POVERTY - Sáo Paulo has more people than New York City. There are 17 million kids, ages 10-14. Children decide to live on the street,
because home life is not good, they need to find other ways to get food, or
they are orphans. Before living in the streets, they existed in favellas, the most impoverished of slums, dug in garbage
dumps for food, and encountered family violence because of the stress of
poverty. Working With The
Street Children Of Brazil Liz Searle, studentBMJ 2001;09:305-356 September ISSN 0966-6494 student.bmj.com/student/view-article.html?id=sbmj0109349 [accessed 19
September 2011] Offering an
alternative social network and activities for children to replace their existing
lives on the street or their dependence on drugs or both, while dealing with
any underlying emotional issues, and providing some hope of a brighter
future. Brazil's Street
Children United Nations
Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland At one time this
article had been archived and may possibly still be accessible [here] [accessed 21
September 2011] Grupa Ruas e Praças (GRP) is a civil
society organisation founded in the 1987 by a group
of street educators. The organisation now has a
team of 12, including psychologists, art educators, social workers, and
people who have lived on the streets themselves. GRP staff visit each site where
children are regularly found on at least a weekly basis. Once they have
gained the confidence of the children, they invite them to visit a safe farm
owned by GRP where the children can benefit from comfort, peace and regular
meals. If the visit goes well, the children are invited to spend longer at
the farm and become part of a more structured programme
before moving on to the next stage. At Home in the
Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil Tobias Hecht,
Cambridge University Press, May 13, 1998 books.google.com/books/about/At_Home_in_the_Street.html?id=RJNYZI405aIC [accessed 10 October
2012] Through innovative
fieldwork and ethnographic writing, Hecht lays bare the received truths about
the lives of Brazilian street children. This book changes the terms of the
debate, asking not why there are so many homeless children in Brazil but why
- given the oppressive alternative of home life in the shantytowns - there
are in fact so few. Speaking in recorded sessions that participants called
"radio workshops," street children asked one another questions that
even the most experienced researchers would be unlikely to pose. At the
center of this study are children who play, steal, sleep, dance, and die in
the streets of a Brazilian city. But all around them figure activists,
politicians, researchers, "home" children, and a global crisis of
childhood Brazil: An
Endangered Generation Marlinelza B De Oliveira,
Women's Feature Service, Rio de Janeiro www.wfsnews.org/citylife/inside5.html [accessed 8 April
2011] “The so-called
street boy is an island surrounded by omissions on every side. All the basic
public policies have already failed to help him," says Antônio Carlos Gomes da Costa in his book 'Brazil Urgent
Child'. This book was published over a
decade ago but not much has changed since then. Street Children and
Circulation: A Case Study in São Paulo, Brazil Maria Filomena Gregori, 29 November 2001 www.clas.berkeley.edu/Events/fall2001/11-29-01-gregori/index.html [accessed 8 April
2011] clasarchive.berkeley.edu/Events/fall2001/11-29-01-gregori/index.html [accessed 23
November 2016] These families
continually break up and regroup in order to meet minimum, short-term needs,
sending a child to live with a relative or neighbor, or seeking work wherever
possible. Gregori terms this constant movement
"circulation," and says that the one constant in these children’s
lives is instability. Street children in
Brazil Spiros Tzelepis of Greece interviewing Yara
Dulce Bandeira de Ataide,
author of "Decifra-me ou
Devoro-Te", an oral history of life of street
children in Salvador users.otenet.gr/~tzelepisk/yc/streetchild.htm [accessed 8 April
2011] [Question] Which
are the causes for this phenomenon? What happens with the families of
these children? [Answer] There are multiple causes for this phenomenon.
The severe level of unemployment, the neo-liberal government policies, the
domestic violence, the high levels of illiteracy of population, poverty are
among them. These families generally are misadjusted, with social and
psychiatric problems, such as alcoholism, violence and other mental
disturbances. The
Killings Escalate In Brazil - Street Children: More and More Killed Everyday Caius Brandao, International Child Resource Institute ICRI
Brazil Project Coordinator, 24 April 1995 pangaea.org/street_children/latin/brazil.htm [accessed 24 August
2011] Clearly, there is a
perceived benefit to killing destitute children, not only to those who
directly profit from it, i.e., the hit-men. When street children die it also
'benefit' the people who paid the professional killers to clean up the
streets in the first place. In 1994, 1221
minors were killed in the State of Rio de Janeiro, an average of more then three kids everyday; 570
died from gunshot wounds, and a total of 344 were under the age of 11. All
material used herein reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107
for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use. PLEASE RESPECT COPYRIGHTS OF COMPONENT
ARTICLES. Cite this webpage as: Patt,
Prof. Martin, "Street Children - Brazil",
http://gvnet.com/streetchildren/Brazil.htm, [accessed <date>] |
