Conclusion: The Ephemeral Lives of Street Children

Conclusion The Ephemeral Lives of Street Children In the Introduction, I outlined why this book does not have the restrictive aim of proposing policy recommendations. I argued, among other points, that if one’s goal in writing about street children is to offer ideas on how to eradicate a problem, one can hardly view those people seen to embody the problem as autonomous beings in a social world. Reduced to something to be cured, street children become the objects of a distant debate among adults. This book has aimed to treat street children as socially significant protagonists while also bringing into focus the adult debates in which they are enmeshed. Yet, while I believe it base, even harmful, to reduce street children to a problem, the lives of children growing up in the streets of Recife and other Brazilian cities are fraught with problems. A danger is therefore implicit in refusing to think in terms of change. Feigning the role of the detached observer in the face of an intolerable status quo is to accept tacitly that same status quo or, worse, to hide behind the cynical vogue of treating the brutality of social life as so much text. Vamp, Q5, question 123 Conclusion: The Ephemeral Lives of Street Children The author of a recent book on street adolescents in Hollywood writes that “My fascination with the topic was largely theoretical. Homeless youth pose a challenge to a series of theoretical premises that have become fashionable within critical theory.” (3) Street youths, for this author, seem to obligingly illustrate various academic points, such as the “material power of symbolism” (4) and “new forms of marginality” (5). This final chapter employs the main themes of the ethnography – identity, violence, the relationship of street children to institutions, and the idea of childhood itself – to reassess the problemridden worlds of street children and considers the question of the future, that is, of what may lie ahead for street children. Violent Representations In Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about ChildVictims, Joel Best argues that the success of the missing children’s movement in the United States in the early to mid1980s lay in “the organization and culture of the contemporary social problems marketplace and in the appeal of the crusaders’ message.” The message was appealing because no one was in favor of children going missing; because the wellorganized advocates were riding a tide of activism rooted strongly in the civil rights movement of the 1960s; and because new alternative television news and quasinews programs such as Today, Sixty Minutes, and Donahue – all with time slots to fill and in search of emotionally captivating topics – were conducive to spreading the message of the advocates for missing children. Appropriated into an adultdriven marketplace for social problems, street children have become somewhat like the photographs of missing children whose faces briefly populated milk cartons in the United States, symbols of larger debates. In the case of street children, these debates relate to, among other things, the vulnerabilities of unprotected children and the danger posed by unsupervised children. While advocates for missing children focused attention on cruel, deviant adults who abducted, raped, and killed children, campaigns on behalf of street children have privileged a concern for undeniably vulnerable children over a serious engagement with the oppressive socioeconomic conditions under which both domiciled and homeless Third World children live. The first piece I regrettably wrote on street children is a fine example of how street children have been recruited into an issuehungry adult world. As mentioned in the introduction, I was asked by an NGO to write a booklet about street children as a background document for a meeting of parliamentarians. The conference in fact was about family planning, but the “street children problem” was brought in to widen the appeal of the event. In a planning session it was decided that street children were, literally, “a sexy topic.” The idea was clever, if cynical: whereas family planning is controversial in many countries, street children, on a certain level, are not. No one is in favor of children growing up homeless. What is controversial in Brazil about street children is not only the violence against them, but the crimes they commit. During a visit to the Anibal Bruno men’s prison, I met a smartly dressed man who at first I took to be a lawyer visiting his client. He turned out to be a prisoner sentenced to more than 100 years on several charges of bank robbery. Despite facing what sounded like a dim future, Jefferson wasn’t worried. “Money talks!” (o dinheiro fala mais alto), he would exclaim at regular intervals during our long conversation, explaining with bravado how he had already escaped from jail on two occasions, the last time from a maximum security facility. We began discussing one of the street youths I was visiting, and he let me know how, in an almost fatherly way, he had been trying to convince the boy to give up petty theft. Look, I told him: you have two choices: either get a job, or move on to something more ambitious, like bank robbery. If you go and hold up some poor man in the street who’s wielding a pickax, he’d rather kill you than hand over his month’s salary. But if you go into a bank where the people are dressed in suits, they won’t shoot you. And there’s a lot more money there. Unlike other excerpts of conversations in this book, this particular passage was not taperecorded and is therefore based on my recollection of the exchange. Jefferson had a point. A friend of mine who used to work in a bank reminisced one day about how his colleagues looked forward to holdups because in the confusion that ensued they could always stuff their own pockets with money. Petty crime, on the other hand, renders street children feared and hated and vulnerable to retribution. In Brazil, while condemnation tinged with quiet resignation is expressed in the face of whitecollar crime and corruption, a more violent reaction is often reserved for those who practice smalltime, streetlevel crime. Sometimes mugging several people a day, Recife’s selfdescribed maloqueiros are exceptionally vulnerable. Concerned adults outside Brazil generally focus on the victimhood of children who grow up in the street and attribute the violence against such youths to an alliance of state (police) and business (merchants who lose customers frightened off by the presence of unruly youths). Huggins and de Castro write, “Most commonly, the perpetrators were on and offduty police, lone citizen ‘justice makers’ (justiceiros), deathsquad extermination groups, and private police. . . . Prospective victims get auctioned off to the lowest bidder; some shop owner and commercial associations keep assassination teams on a retainer” (80). Elements of both groups, particularly the police, live up to the accusations against them, but at some point it is also necessary to consider the violence and crime in which street children engage, if for no other reason than because the principal victims are other children. I refer not merely to the violence that street children selfdestructively inflict on one another, but to the small number of street children, sometimes wielding knives, razors, or broken glass, who hold up dozens of people each month. As the bank robber Jefferson suggests, petty thievery renders street children easy targets for adult rage. Highprofile campaigns to protest deathsquad murders of street children in Brazil have undeniably had a few positive effects. They helped create the environment that has allowed the National Movement of Street Children, which has fought on behalf of the rights of all poor children, to become a leading social movement in Brazil; they may have helped move forward efforts to implement the Children and Adolescents Act, for they focused attention on the conditions of young Brazilians; and they put the police under scrutiny. But as argued in Chapter 5, relatively few children living in the street are murdered by death squads today. Attention could usefully be refocused on police torture, ranging from vigorous slaps to the hand to electric shock, from pistol whippings to leaving prisoners hanging upside down, practices that affect poor detainees of all ages, regardless of whether they live in the street or in homes. Although I found that street children in Recife were more likely to die at the hands of their peers than at the hands of the police or death squads, violence carried out by the authorities no doubt encourages the children to act out the violence they themselves experience. In the case of the preso de ordem system, in which prisoners are made to torture other prisoners, the police are clearly setting up their “helping hands” to be murdered. Street children and poor children in general would be aided more if attention were focused not on the rare, tabloidfriendly executions of sleeping children but on the pervasive, everyday abuse on the part of the police and other officials. One of the worst forms of abuse must be that experienced by some young children locked up in the juvenile detention center and molested by their older peers or locked up in the illegal solitary confinement chamber. It used to be the case that some children literally grew up in FEBEM; now, with the Children and Adolescents Act, detentions cannot legally exceed 45 days. As set out in the act, the function of facilities such as CAP (as the old FEBEM in Recife is now called) is that of a sort of triage center where children caught for an infraction or, in some cases, lost or in danger are held temporarily until appearing before a judge. The judge has a variety of options, such as releasing the children to their families, sending them to another institution such as a shelter for street children, or sentencing them (if aged 12 or older) to a secure facility. Yet 45 days for a young child never exposed to an institution like CAP can be devastating, as the testimony of Edson (in Chapter 5) illustrates. Beyond bureaucratic inefficiency or the desire to use CAP as a jail, there is probably no reason to force children to stay more than 24 hours. Although the law on this waiting time is unlikely to be altered, organizations such as the National Movement of Street Children should be supported in their efforts to make the period as brief and humane as possible. This book makes the case that the concern over violence affecting children needs to go beyond the street to take into account the violence children suffer at home. In their homes and neighborhoods, children are exposed to beatings and sexual assault, but above all, they are exposed to the violence of hunger and poverty that renders the street a materially attractive alternative. Focusing exclusively on the crimes committed against a small but highly visible population of street children does little for the vast, hidden population of “home children”; rather it gives the probably misguided impression that there is nothing worse than growing up in the street. Street Children, Childhood, and the Street as a Right for “Home Children” In his history of U.S. children of newly urbanized, workingclass families in the first two decades of the twentieth century, David Nasaw writes that “There was nothing new or extraordinary about asking children to go to work. Only recently has childhood become – almost by definition – an age of irresponsibility.” Viviana Zelizer has argued that by the 1930s changes in the social value of children in the United States had consolidated to the extent that children came to be viewed as economically worthless while emotionally priceless. Today, children in the United States, as in most advanced industrialized countries, are nearly always a financial liability to their families. An article in the magazine Working Mothers cited data from the Department of Agriculture indicating that U.S. families with incomes in excess of $55,000 spend on average $10,510 annually their children from birth to the age of two years. Although children in the First World have come to represent an economic burden for their parents, their noneconomic value has come to be deemed incalculable. Among the poor of Northeast Brazil a contrasting – and once far more widespread – logic prevails: children are valued, in part, according to their success at contributing to the household economy. This is not to suggest that favela parents do not place a high noneconomic value on their children; rather, families whose survival requires continuous resourcefulness expect children to nurture the household, and children take pride in doing so. Successfully helping their families is likely to enhance their status in the household. Thus, discouraging poor urban children in Brazil from working in the street, far from protecting them, will likely weaken their ties to the home. To an extent, urban children can contribute to the household while physically at home, especially by minding younger siblings. But the household’s survival, of course, ultimately depends on the ability of its members to secure from outside money or goods. Poor urban children in Northeast Brazil have an important role in bringing in resources, but their options are limited. Some of the principal means of earning are: hawking items that require little capital, such as popsicles or chewing gum apprenticing with a mechanic, furniture maker, or another workingclass adult working as a guide for visitors (an especially common practice in Olinda) doing odd jobs such as washing store windows or carrying around goods at the market helping their parents in their work begging scavenging for items that can be sold, such as glass bottles, cans, and cardboard petty theft. A cursory look at these options reveals how problematic they are: even the cost of the styrofoam box needed to carry around popsicles is prohibitive for many families and, while the profit margin is small, the competition is great; there is little demand for apprentices; Olinda, the principal tourist destination in Pernambuco, already has more than 100 young guides and on a typical day only a small fraction as many visitors willing to pay for a tour; in many situations, children are not allowed to work alongside their parents (this is often the case, e.g., when the mother is a maid) and do not necessarily augment household income when they do; begging is a competitive arena with a dearth of prospective donors; scavenging for cardboard, bottles, and cans requires capital, in the form of a cart, is competitive, and offers little financial return; petty crime is dangerous for the children and generally shunned by mothers. In short, the informal sector opportunities open to children are competitive, sometimes dangerous, and offer only meager financial rewards. Nonetheless, at different times most poor children in urban Northeast Brazil engage in some of these or similar activities. [PHOTO: A young guide showing a visitor the view from the Alto da Sé in Olinda.] As if the difficulties inherent in these working strategies were not enough, children’s strivings to nurture the household are stymied in another way. Their aspirations are in conflict with global moves toward discouraging child labor and with the notion, particularly strong in Brazil, that the street – the principal venue for urban children’s remunerated work – is a contaminating realm, perforce out of bounds to children. For poor families in Northeast Brazil living almost hand to mouth, the economic contribution of young children can literally make the difference between survival and starvation. Children in Northeast Brazil rarely fulfill their dreams of giving their mothers as much as they would like to – many of the children I knew told me their greatest dream was to give their mothers a new house – but most give a lot, especially if their contribution is measured in terms of effort. Poor children speak not only of the obstacles they face in their attempts to nurture the household, but of the consequences of failing to succeed. It is worth revisiting the words of the boy quoted in Chapter 4 who explained his view of the origins of street children. Perhaps because there is so much popcorn being sold in the street, a kid won’t be able to bring money to his mother. So his mother gets worried, frustrated because there’s nothing to eat, and hits the kid. The kid, afraid to go back home without money and get hit, just sleeps in the street. He picks up the vice [pega o vício] of sleeping in the street. He gets hooked [fica viciado], afraid to go home. Then he picks up other vices like sniffing glue, smoking pot, and so on. Street life is an alternative to home life, but it is a violently unappealing one for most children precisely because it is a confirmation of their failure to nurture the household. Street children live within larger political and moral economies that both shape their existence and are shaped in subtle ways by their existence. On a number of occasions I was recruited by mothers in the favelas to photograph their babies. The mothers would always scurry to collect as many artifacts of impersonal capitalism as they could find and place them around their babies – laundry soap in a brightly colored box, a tin of infant formula, a transistor radio, the odd plastic toy. While the urban poor (including street children) of Northeast Brazil pay homage to the trappings of a consumer society from which they are largely excluded, they are also well aware of their position in relation to what we might call a larger political economy. [PHOTO: Baby amid a halo of consumer goods] The political economy, a term I use loosely to denote the macrolevel political and economic systems under which power relations are played out and resources distributed, is a part of the backdrop against which street children assess the benefits of leaving the street and returning to the fold of working, nurturing childhood, and it is the political economy that makes it clear to street children that, materially, home life has little to offer them. Asked to tell me about all the things in her house, a fiveyearold called Negona could only think to mention “mosquitoes” and then, after a moment of reflection, “mud.” Why then do so many children stay at home? Why was the rigorous census of street children sponsored by the city council of Recife (described in Chapter 4) able to identify only 212 children and adolescents sleeping rough, rather than the tens of thousands that the city would have if it conformed to UNICEF’s suggestion that Brazil has at least 7 million street children? This book could surely be criticized for not taking a more explicitly political economy perspective. It is, after all, only the oppressive structural conditions of urban poverty in Brazil that make living in the street a materially rational alternative for some children – an unthinkable choice on those grounds for most children in the First World. But in aiming to place children at the center of this narrative, I have attempted to privilege what I view as their ways of interpreting their predicament. Faced with a political economy that offers them little of a material nature beyond mosquitoes and mud and scant hope for the future, poor children in Northeast Brazil appeal to a moral economy that highlights the importance of their nurturing position within the matrifocal family. The term “moral economy” I borrow, in a reshaped form, from James Scott, who, in turn, borrows the notion from Marxist historians. In his study of agrarian societies in Southeast Asia, Scott argues that “The problem of exploitation and rebellion is. . . not just a problem of calories and income but is a question of peasant conceptions of social justice, of rights and obligations, of reciprocity.” In a similar fashion, if children’s decisions to leave home or stay home hinged merely on where they could find more food or where they could acquire more money, few poor urban children would bother staying in shacks where there is little to do and less to eat. It is the children’s sense of a moral economy that makes them stay at home. Whereas Scott writes about a moral economy that is upset by commercialization in agriculture, by the advent of the bureaucratic state, and by new systems of taxation and tenancy – that is, by outside forces impinging on the subsistence ethic of peasants – I employ the term in a similar but inverted sense, referring to the moral economy of the home that poor children in Northeast Brazil see themselves as responsible for maintaining. The incentives to live at home, work, and stick to what the children call the righteous life (a vida boa) are great, precisely because street life implies a breach of their obligation. Street life undermines the role of children within matrifocality, recasting the nurturing child as social pariah. Beginning with Raymond Smith , matrifocality has been studied from the adult perspective. This book has aimed to turn the tables, delving into the relationship between matrifocality and the child’s sense of self. Whereas Aptekar maintains that in Colombia early independence in the form of living in the street is encouraged by matrifocal families, I argue that children in Northeast Brazil see the situation in diametrically opposed terms. Street life – what the children call essa vida – is a betrayal of their role in the matrifocal household. In the street, the children are physically estranged from their mothers and thus from their guidance and protection (whether real or merely yearned for); and they use resources for themselves, not primarily for the household. Although maloqueiros may speak of bringing home money to their mothers – and indeed many do – most of their resources are kept for themselves and quickly spent in the street. Thus, rather than the child going from the home to the street and back to the home with the purpose of harnessing the incomegenerating possibilities of the street for the nurture of the home, the economic life of street children begins and ends in the street. Rather than bringing home lifesustaining necessities such as food and clothing, maloqueiros spend much of their money on street diversions – drugs, video games, and candy; rather than earning “good money” through work, they earn what they call “bad money” through crime. Efforts at preventing children from working in the street threaten the position of poor urban children within the home. The more difficult it is for children to bring in resources to households that not only desperately need the fruits of child labor but morally expect them, the more vulnerable the child’s status becomes. Where schools occupy at most only four hours a day of a child’s time and home does not offer the physical space for children to play, the street is an invaluable resource. Poor children play mostly in the mud lanes that run near their shacks, but inevitably they also play and work on the city streets. Denying them that possibility, given the dearth of alternatives, is to enforce a social and economic apartheid likely to sink destitute households into even deeper poverty. Thus, any “solution” for the plight of street children must consider first how to make the lives of “home children” more rewarding. Declaring the street out of bounds will only make the home less viable. The Future Observers seem to wonder whether street children inhabit a sort of Rousseauian state of nature and innocence or whether their lives are – as in the Hobbesian embodiment of primitive society – nasty, brutish, and short. On the one hand, Aptekar argued that street children in Cali, quite unlike their image as psychologically battered drug users, were growing up in a generally healthy, adaptive way. While in no way glorifying the conditions of street children in Nepal, PanterBrick, et al. suggest that given the comparatively worse nutritional status of children in rural areas and squatter settlements, “urban homelessness may represent an appropriate response to circumstances of poverty.” On the other hand, Dimenstein described a “war” on children in the streets of Brazil, and the image of street children being hunted down by killers is common in the media. [PHOTO: At home with my dog. Photo by Daniel Aamot] In assessing the conditions of street children, this book treads something of a middle line. By placing street children within the context of what they have left behind – childhood in the favelas – it is possible to see that street life has certain redeeming features. Children may eat better in the street than they would at home. This is not to say that street children do not experience considerable hunger – both their incomes and their resources in kind are secured with great irregularity. But those children adept at stealing have considerable purchasing power compared with the poor in the favelas. Ironically, some of the street children bring in – and quickly spend – a good deal more every month than the street educators who try to help them. In addition, many street children fashion elaborate networks of support from people who give them food, clothing, and other resources. Street children often have ample time on their hands for diversion. In the neighborhood where I lived, the street children could regularly be seen playing checkers, competing at video games, drawing, flying kites, riding on the backs of buses, even paddling rented canoes. They slept when they wanted to, sought food when they were hungry, and there was no one to tell them what to do. Despite their professed adoration of their mothers, their adage “chiefs are for Indians” (quem tem chefe é índio) could probably also describe their feelings about supervision at home. But my research in Recife did not lead me to share the sanguine view of others that street children live amid a supportive network of friends and are likely to simply grow up and become much like other poor adults. Jill Swart writes hopefully of street children, or malunde, in South Africa, Given the opportunity, children are likely to enter stable employment situations. The malunde want to become taxi drivers, photographers, clerks, electricians, builders, doctors, lawyers, bishops, and sign writers. One wants to be a policeman. They plan to be people of worth in the community and to raise children who will not have to live on the streets. (126) Aptekar suggests that living in the street might be “the beginning of a heroic adventure, often in a community of peers and friends – an adventure that has been portrayed in the literature of many cultures as a requisite to finding one’s own identity, which is, after all, the function of adolescence” . Implicit in the statement is the idea that for poor Colombian children, spending some of their early years in the street may merely be a natural part of the life cycle, a characterforming experience that is part of growing up. Also implicit here is the suggestion that adolescence has a broad, crosscultural meaning, a problematic suggestion when considering that Latin Americans often affirm that adolescence (as a social – as opposed to a biological – stage) is a recent import from the United States and Europe that, in any case, has relevance only to the middle and upper classes, not to the bulk of the region’s population. Elsewhere, Aptekar has gone so far as to suggest that stints of living in the street may have a salutary effect on children. For most of the children [in a sample of 56 street kids in Cali], being on the streets was not a permanent lifestyle, nor necessarily a pernicious one. Only a small group of older children were on the streets for long periods of time without getting assistance from some family member or benefactor. If these children were using an excessive amount of drugs, were suffering from additional nutritional problems, or if their general emotional health was deteriorating with time on the streets, then the test results would have shown that these children had more pathology than the younger children. Indeed, according to our results and contrary to expectation, age and time on the streets seemed to mediate their problems. (435) Aptekar explains that this is due in part to the fact that “most of the children were not actively abandoned, but were growing up in an orderly fashion that allowed them to take their place in the existing subculture of urban poverty” (435). The situation of children in Cali and in Recife may not be easily or even usefully comparable because most of the Colombian children, according to Aptekar, were returning home. But I emphasize the argument that living in the street did not hinder the prospects of success for the Colombian children who live in a milieu of urban poverty because I found precisely the opposite to be true in Recife. In an article about children growing up in the street, Judith Ennew recounts a conversation she had with a street child at a conference in Brazil: Some while ago, I shared a cigarette with 13yearold Marcus in Rio. We were both feeling depressed by the nonproductive events of the Second International Meeting of Street Children in Brazil. It was not easy to communicate – he in Portuguese, I in Spanish. But we managed somehow. After a while, I asked him about his family. He had two brothers, he said, but he never saw them. And as for parents? No, they were not a significant part of his life. He had some contact with a state institution. “But really,” he said, “my friends are bringing me up.” (409) Ennew employs the anecdote as a point of departure for reassessing ideas about the peerbased affective relationships of street children. She argues that “such children develop supportive networks, coping strategies and meaningful relationships outside adult supervision and control” (410). She also draws attention to the problem of policies based on the idea that children outside adult control are perforce worse off than those at home and dangerous to themselves and to all those around them. Elsewhere, Ennew makes the point that there are scant data on what happens with street children in the long run. Notwithstanding this important caveat, she writes, What [information we do have] hints. . . that they do not remain on the street. They taste its freedom as children – when they are able to make a living there. But once they become youth it is not possible to beg, they need more money than can be gained in casual street trades, they settle for mainstream society, albeit in casual work and poverty. They marry or cohabit, have children, find a dwelling of some sort. (9) Street children in Recife spoke to me about friendship in varied ways. Many said that they had no friends at all. “We don’t have friends, just colegas [peers]” was how Margarete described it. Some children said there was no difference between friends (amigos) and colegas while others made a distinction. While I initially had translated the word colega as “chum,” I chose “peer” instead, to emphasize that the association was based more on a shared condition than the result of purposeful selection. Others spoke warmly of their relationships, explaining that, notwithstanding the strife, “We’re all friends.” But none suggested anything approaching the idea that their mothers (“parents” are hardly a packageable concept for Brazil’s urban poor) were “not a significant” part of their lives or that their friends were “bringing me up.” On the contrary, their anxieties about the future were resolved only through wishful thinking about a reapproximation to their mothers and to homelife. As Ennew herself has lamented, street children have been studied mostly through “anecdote or statistics collected . . . without comparison with control groups.” I believe it important to add that they have been studied anachronically. Research on street children has been mostly like a snapshot, a portrait at a particular moment in time with no effort to discover what happens over the long run. I do not pretend to redress the lack of longitudinal data here, but the devastation of human life I saw in following street children closely over a mere three years and then through the occasional news that reached me over an additional two years has led me to draw conclusions very different from those of Swart, Aptekar, and Ennew. Here is what has happened to some of the street children discussed in this book. Margarete, of Chapter 1, was expelled from the shelter where I first interviewed her because she hit another girl over the head with a brick. After a short stay with an aunt, she returned to the street. She gave birth to a baby girl in a public hospital, then returned briefly to her aunt’s house. A job was found for her in a municipal crèche. Later, she was committed to a mental hospital and her infant daughter was placed in a state institution. Margarete was then released – to the street – where she soon became pregnant once more. Shortly after her second child was taken from her she was said to have suffered a mental breakdown and then disappeared from the streets. When I returned in 1995, no one had heard from her in months. Most assumed she was dead. There was no trace even of her babies, for when I tried to track them down at the Casa de Carolina, I was told they had been given up for adoption. In 1997, to everyone’s surprise, Margarete resurfaced, in the mental hospital. Carlos, interviewed in my first radio workshop (Introduction), was in the men’s prison, Anibal Bruno, the last time I saw him. He and three companions had been accused in mid1993 of using a brick to smash the skull of a schoolboy who refused to surrender his watch. Alejado, whose mother speaks of her attempts to coax him off the street (Chapter 2), was accused in the same case as was Manoel, the youth who threatened to smash a large rock over the head of Marcela (Introduction). In mid1995, all three were still in prison. In 1997, I learned that Carlos and Alejado had been murdered. Beto, who interviewed Carlos, remained in the street. An NGO tried to help him set up a market stall so that he could work his way out of the street. They built a stall for him, reserved a place in a neighborhood market and gave him enough money to make his first purchase of produce. He took the money and ran. He subsequently threatened a street educator with a gun and was thereafter refused any help from the group. His brother Zezinho (Chapter 3) was murdered by someone he was attempting to mug. Zé Luis, accused of murdering Cristiano (Chapter 5) remained in jail, last I heard. Mônica, the girl in Chapter 4 who said she would be a maloca [sic] all her life, was pregnant for the third time, the last I knew. Her first baby died, the second was taken to the Casa de Carolina. I do not know what has become of the third, but am reluctant to inquire. In 1997, I learned that Mônica had taken a job as a street vendor. Bia (Chapters 2 and 5) participated actively for about a year in an educational program for street children. Then she suddenly abandoned the school. When I saw her in 1995, she was nearly always very high. Her body was more scarred than ever and she had few teeth left. She lived with her newborn in an abandoned, roofless house. A street educator friend wrote to me in 1996 to say that she found the baby with cigarette burns across her body. She wrote, “I became extremely anguished. My first impulse was to take her to my house, but I know that is not the best solution. Every day they [the street kids at the abandoned house] have a more depressing quality about them and less hope of improving their lives.” Sócrates, the boy who describes his beating by the police in Chapter 5 (“if a person gets kicked a lot in the belly he might what? Die! Yeah, he might die”), was arrested, accused of stealing a wallet. He spent nearly two years in Anibal Bruno, the men’s prison. Upon his release, he returned to the street. João Defunto, discussed further on in the conclusion, was released from prison, to the street. In 1997 I learned he had been murdered. Cheira, of chapter 5 and 7 (“one day I hope to quit this life and work, have a kid, a wife, live in a quiet house, walk in front of the police without anyone thinking I’m a thief”), was also murdered. I heard about Marconi, the youth who insisted I record his testimony of how the police had murdered his best friend Luquinha (Chapter 5), from the mother of my godson. In a letter she dictated for me in 1994, she recounted how Marconi was “found dead on the Olinda beach with three bullets in his head.” A 15yearold whose words do not appear in this book stabbed to death his inseparable chum Maguinho (Chapter 5). That was 1993. By the time I returned in 1995, he was said to have committed two more murders. One young boy who participated in a radio workshop at the Law Faculty (Chapter 2) fell off the back of a bus and was killed instantly when run over by another bus. Adriano (Chapter 7), the boy who raided refrigerators whenever he got the chance, was murdered and no one was saying by whom. Walter, spoken of as something of a bully by his chum Eufrásio (Chapter 2), went into hiding after committing a murder. Eufrásio, the last time I saw him, was leading much the same existence, adept as always at breaking into houses during the night. He had scarcely grown. Iracy, who helped me with some of the interviews, wrote me a desperate letter in 1994, at that time aged about 17, to say that she was pregnant and jobless. When I returned to Brazil in 1995, having been away for two years, I found many of the surviving children on the same corners where I had left them. Only the situation always seemed worse. Eliane (Chapter 2), the 15yearold who looked no more than 12 in 1993 and who hoped to fill her mother’s refrigerator with yogurt before she died, was pregnant for the third time. Camilla, the pregnant 17yearold mentioned in the Introduction and elsewhere (e.g., chapters 5 and 7), was raising her baby, in the street. The gaunt toddler, aged two, when I met her in 1995 was suffering from a chronic respiratory disease. She was so malnourished her hair had not grown in fully and she had never slept in a bed. Camilla, who once shunned drugs, had become a habitual user of glue and a variety of pills and, though still under the grip of her abusive boyfriend Tadeu (Chapter 2), she exchanged sex for money and drugs with a much older man. Although she was not using contraception, she desperately wanted not to have another pregnancy. In 1997 Tadeu was murdered. Marcela (Chapter 2), the transvestite, seemed to be giving up any hope of ever realizing her dream of being a designer or opening a beauty salon and she seemed to be losing her looks, of which she had been so proud. Germano (Chapter 2) graduated from stealing bicycles to stealing cars and from statutory adolescence to adulthood, which landed him in jail. Somehow he was released, and he returned to the street. Upon my return to Brazil, I heard no reports of children “returning home” and no reports of street children finding jobs and leaving the street except to live (for a time?) in a shelter. Latinamerica Press reported on a photojournalist who in 1990 took a picture of 17 young people, from the ages of 8 to 21, living in the streets of São Paulo. Almost six years later, the daily Folha de São Paulo looked for the children. They found that “Of the 17, eight are in prison, two are in FEBEM. . . four still live in the street, and two are dead. Only one, now 18, has changed her lifestyle and works as a domestic earning US$80 a month.” The street children in Recife fare similarly, though I have never heard of any becoming domestic workers and the mortality rate is surely higher. Agencies working with street children discuss engaging their charges in a “process,” but the objective of this process is nearly always loosely defined in terms of a variety of unlikely transformations. But three institutions with very distinct approaches have had success in keeping some children (doubtless a minority of those in their care) off the street for long periods of time. These are the Comunidade dos Pequenos Profetas, where Demétriu maintains a farm with a “family” atmosphere; CAMM, where street children live without fulltime adult supervision and with remarkable autonomy; and Desafio Jovem, the rigid, Pentecostal farm for drug addicts and street children. All of these institutions are dependent on the whims of foreign donors and local government agencies, and it is uncertain what will happen with these children in the long term. Demétriu plans to have them stay “forever.” The directors at CAMM say they hope to reintegrate the children into their original homes (normally they only accept children with some family links). When I returned in 1995, some of the same kids were at the CAMM farm while others had simply left and returned to the street. It is uncertain what happens at Desafio Jovem, but many of the children were taken in at a very young age, some as little as eight or nine, and are simply growing up in this Pentecostal community. Others stay for a time, and then run away. But to my surprise, some youths who had been in an out of many institutions decided to stay at Desafio Jovem. As one “recovered” lay worker at Desafio Jovem explained to me, “We substitute one drug for another, God for the street.” Nowhere is the attempted transformation of street children more radical than at Desafio Jovem, where street life is equated with sin. But since street children are accustomed to speaking of street life as a vice, this philosophy seems to click with some of them. Those who aim to turn maloqueiros into working children and future working adults or who wish to engage street children in political activism have remarkably few success stories. Around 1992 and 1993, NGOs in Recife seemed to point to the same two children when citing such cases. One became a militant with the National Movement of Street Children. But his return home, to a crowded hovel in a favela, did not solve all his problems. He remained illiterate, unemployed, even hungry, and reaching adulthood jeopardized his role in the movement. The other, David, of Chapter 4, found a steady job as a silkscreener. As the main breadwinner of the household and the only member with formal employment, he doubtless saved some of his youngest siblings from starvation . But when I visited, the family of 11 and counting lived in a tworoom shack without running water. Some street children, as discussed in Chapter 7, are offered opportunities, such as to live with middleclass families, or a relatively well paying job, but desist. Whereas Aptekar argued that the worst enemy of street children was their increasing age, I think the maloqueiros of Recife would say their worst enemy is what they describe as the addictive power of street life itself. Support for institutions working to remove street children from the street must start with painful recognition that many street children, when presented with seemingly attractive alternatives, still opt to live in the street. Likewise, despite largescale efforts to effect street education in Recife, that is to teach children in the street, I never encountered a child who had learned to read or write in the street. But I also take something of a middle ground when it comes to discussing the importance of organizations that work with street children. Although it would be easy to cynically disregard as ineffectual much of the work being done, the value of this activism cannot be quantified simplistically in terms of how many street children have been “saved.” Despite all of the frustrations that agencies in Recife have experienced in trying to awaken in street children a yearning for a new life and a new society, their persistence is not gratuitous for it forms part of a struggle for life and human dignity. Activist and serviceproviding organizations are gripped by the certainty that if they give up on the maloqueiros, they are handing them over to be killed by the police, by thugs, or by other angry children. Indeed, when observing maloqueiros in Recife, one has the distinct sense that childhood in the street is a fleeting condition, not because it inevitably leads to adulthood, but because it leads to early death or something equally intolerable. Efforts to change this reality cannot be dismissed. In speaking of their own futures, I found street children walked a tightrope between two extremes. Often, they spoke of an almost formulaic dream. Vamp [male, aged about 16]: [I’d like to] get a job, a woman, get married, have my children and leave street life [essa vida]. Whoever lives that life has nothing to lose. It’s just be killed or die. Renata [female, aged 15]: What I want is to have a house to live in, to not need anything from my mother, for me to have enough to give to her. Patrício [male, aged about 17]: [What I want is] to work, have my child, my house, my wife. They speak, on the one hand, of what I earlier referred to as a bourgeois dream (a spouse, a house, an “honest” job, and a couple of kids). On the other hand, Vamp hints at a different future he and so many other street children envisage, namely premature death – which turned out to be only too true in his case. When asked what happiness meant for them, the children’s answers varied. But there were also commonalties: houses, mothers, families, school, and work figured prominently in their answers, the same elements they spoke of when thinking hopefully of the future. In the questionnaire, I asked each respondent whether she or he would like to have children. A typical answer went as follows: Jacilene [aged 15]: Yes, yes, I’d like to have just two, a casal (a girl and a boy). In fact, of the 35 children who said how many children they wanted to have, only 5 (14%) gave an answer other than one or two. Whenever optimistic talk about the future arose, the children almost universally expressed the desire to have either one child or a casal. Nothing troubled me more than seeing infants in the street, and with a certain righteous determination I initially argued at length with children about the dangers of early pregnancy and encouraged them to use contraception. Speaking with boys about using condoms proved fruitless, and the closest I ever came to introducing any of the girls to the world of contraception was convincing an already pregnant Camilla to attend a sex education session at a family planning clinic, a requirement for the prenatal exam for which she never showed up. Although no girls told me they wanted to be pregnant immediately, parenthood was consistently part of what I believe is a way street children – both male and female – have of imagining their way out of the street. Thus while street children hardly cling to a belief in salvation from outside, they seem to treat their own reproduction as a type of salvation they themselves can effect. For girls, the thought of having children may be a painful resignation to the realities of an inevitable adulthood, but it is also part of an imagined way of creating the opposite of street life, of producing the most essential component of home life – the emotional link between mothers and children. In a region where children almost universally say the person they love most is their mother, it is no surprise that motherhood and the concomitant possibility of being adored constitute a powerfully attractive hope for girls. Street children have an ambivalent attitude toward adulthood. Being an adult means being treated as one before the law – that is, being sent to adult prisons rather than to juvenile detention centers from which escaping is easy. Living in the street, they also prefer to think of themselves as children, for being a street adult is a painful confirmation that their dreams of leaving “that life” have not been realized. For adolescent boys, parenthood, preferably with multiple women, is a means of confirming an important facet of their ideal of manhood. Riding the bus to the Anibal Bruno jail to visit João Defunto, a maloqueiro who had recently turned 18, I met his girlfriend, Luanda, then pregnant by him. After being refused entry to the jail because she lacked identification, she gave me a package to deliver to her boyfriend. Upon my telling João Defunto about the package, he asked if it was “From Katia?” Katia, as I later learned, was also pregnant by him at the time. “No” I said, a bit confused, “it’s from Luanda.” His mother, who was visiting at the time, giggled with evident pride and explained, “He’s got women coming out of the woodwork” (ele tá cheio de mulheres). For young people, male and female, who literally possess nothing but their bodies, reproduction endows them with the possibility of creation. But their dreams of family life in the comfort of a home, they mostly realize, are unlikely to be realized. As I left Brazil in 1995, Camilla asked me when I would be back. When I told her it would probably be a couple of years before I returned, she said she would be dead by that time. I protested weakly, but she insisted, “Street children only have three futures: prison, insanity, or death.” Street Children, Reproduction, and Apartheid Childhood has emerged as a specialized domain: pediatrics, compulsory schooling, child psychology, and Disneyland, to name just a few now takenforgranted institutions, are all recent inventions. In the United States, new parents are greeted with a barrage of mailorder catalogs peddling every imaginable accoutrement for child care – each product, from breast pumps to diaper disposal machines, billed as indispensable. As Ellen Seiter describes it, “The message is no less than this: mothering is the most satisfying and fulfilling experience life has to offer – so long as one has the right equipment.” Another type of equipment, that used for children’s play, is at present contributing significantly to the U.S. trade deficit with China, because China is the leading manufacturer of toys for American children. Legislators in the First World debate the minutiae that color the character of childhood: school prayer, viewer ratings on movies and video games, regulations for child car seats. But what is beyond contention is that, as the habitat of humankind is inexorably transformed from rural to urban and economies from subsistencebased to marketdriven, the practice of raising children has become pivotal in debates on where nations and the community of nations are headed. Sharon Stephens has drawn attention to the relationship between constructions of childhood and constructions of the nation: “It is precisely because childhood so often still tends to be seen as natural and innocent, ahistorical and apolitical, that it is eminently fitted for use within nationalist visions and projects, with a wide range of consequences for the lives of actual children.” At the same time that children are the subject of nationalist rhetoric everywhere from Singapore to Croatia , Indonesia to Britain , they are also appropriated as symbolic representatives of an emerging global community based in no small way around the consumption preferences and popular culture of children and youths. Chris Jenks has observed that the child has become “an index of a civilization – witness the outrage and general disapproval at the revelations concerning Romanian orphanages, an obvious signifier of the corruption of Communist structures!” Images of childhood are vital to everyday Brazilian conceptions about the United States, and the reverse is also true. For so many Brazilians who know only a few things about the United States, one of those things is almost invariably “Disney,” that is, Orlando’s amusement park world of eternally happy childhood. For an excellent examination of Disneyland in relation to global notions of Childhood, see Hunt and Frankenburg 1990. In contrast, Americans familiar with just a few things about Brazil tend to know that death squads kill homeless children there. If the state of childhood is to any degree “an index of civilization,” as Jenks suggests, the lore of popular culture places street children and Disneyland as markers at opposing ends of the spectrum. First World claims to a privileged state of civilization are buttressed through condemnation of the plight of the Third World’s street children. Street children, who undeniably suffer, are for the First World the obverse of its own still diverse notions of childhood, fomenting through their shock value a consensual position on the vital elements of childhood. In their negation of what is familiar and dear in childhood, street children reassure a world still ill at ease with its own patterns of reproduction, of bringing children into adulthood. While it is problematic to essentialize the paradigm of the “world’s children,” I do believe there are a few essential elements in the emerging global paradigm of childhood. An increasingly urban, marketbased world coupled with state-regulated education as the principal means of preparing the work force and international pressure to reduce or eliminate child labor have meant that the appropriate, “natural” – not to mention only feasible – habitats for children are school, home, and commercially ambitious play places, from amusement parks to shopping malls. Whereas in certain contexts it was thought of as natural for children to play and work in the street, for instance in New York City at the beginning of this century , today’s street children find themselves in a prohibited realm. And it is easier and cheaper for a world troubled with its own patterns of reproduction to focus on the plight of children in a highly anomalous situation (preferably in a distant country) than to rethink the turbulent process of child rearing at home. Brazil’s street children challenge the hierarchical worlds of home and school and threaten the commercialized “public” space such as stores and shopping centers. They subvert their country’s unmentioned but very real social apartheid that keeps the poor cooped up and out of view in the favelas. The final stages of writing this book were undertaken in Cape Town. As the twoyear old ANC government in South Africa was struggling to contend with the havoc wrecked by apartheid, I could not help but think that Brazil is moving in the other direction. Brazil may not have a Group Areas Act but in some places one would hardly know it. São Paulo now has vast neighborhoods known as condomínios fechados, gated communities where no one can enter without a pass and where only wealthy people can afford to live. The larger communities have their own schools, stores, and movie theaters, and some children scarcely leave these modernday bantustans of the frightened elites. In Recife, some neighborhood streets have been blocked off by residents and declared private. And everywhere, the rich build evertaller apartment towers fortified by high walls and armed guards, hoping to live just a little further above and more protected from the world of the street. At a global level, inequality is enforced through separation and control of movement. South Africa’s apartheid was merely an explicit, some would say generic version of this phenomenon , but the pattern is reproduced on many scales in many contexts, perhaps most strikingly in efforts to hermetically seal the borders of wealthy countries, as if the global movements of labor were divorced from global movements of goods, services, and capital. The intersection of violence and children strikes emotional chords. But the chords are heterogeneous. In an examination of public debate in the wake of two gruesome cases of murder – one in the United Kingdom, the other in Norway – in which children were both the perpetrators and the victims, Stewart Asquith points out that whereas the British widely called for more severe punishment of children, the Norwegians moved to ban the Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles from television: “What this surely illustrates is the way in which social, cultural and even historical differences in the explanations of childhood behaviour have to be taken into consideration.” Asquith argues further that what the cases “alert us to is the malleability of childhood as a social construct, both from a historical and comparative cultural perspective, in which theories of childhood, the process of socialization and the relationship between the generations cannot be divorced from the structural makeup of society in general” (103). A similar point can be made about violence and Brazilian street children. Part of the reason that the murders of children in Brazil’s streets are widely perceived as more shocking than, say, severe malnutrition in the Brazilian favelas relates to the poignancy with which notions of children and adults as, respectively, in need of protection and responsible for protecting are subverted through these two tragedies. It is easier to ignore the children who, together with adults but in the privacy of their own homes, are victims of macrostructural social and economic systems than it is lone children in the public arena. Within Brazil, the murders of street children are seen as shocking and worthy of profound condemnation, but there is also a simultaneous and opposing tendency to focus on the role of children in perpetrating violence. When children and adults are seen more as beings on a continuum than opposing elements of a dyad, it follows that children must be held responsible for their action. Street children are not only held responsible, they are held up almost as the public face of violence and urban disorder, as the undoing of the nation. The existence of impoverished, unsupervised, enraged children in the commercial centers and middleclass neighborhoods of Brazilian cities is a threat to the geographical segregation of rich and poor; and the violence in which the children sometimes engage is a threat to hierarchical class relations and to the division of power between adults and children. Violence at once endows street children with power and renders them vulnerable to retribution. Efforts to transform street children – either by turning them into working children, “restoring” to them a lost childhood, or saving them from the terrestrial hell of street life – can be seen as attempts to redress the threatening divergence of street children from familiar notions of childhood, to return them from street to home, from the libertine world of essa vida to the watchful eye of motherdom. Janice Perlman was correct in arguing that at the center of the debate over marginality in Brazil is the issue of control. Whereas most of the favelas she studied were located near middleclass sections of the city, the government wanted to raze those favelas and relocate residents to remote workingclass neighborhoods: “It is easier to exert police control over a distant ghetto, and easier to treat the needs of the poor in a perfunctory manner when they are no longer a visible part of the urban scene” (249–250). The problem with street children is precisely that they are so visible and yet so difficult to control. It may be easy for the elite to ignore hungry children tucked away in the favelas, but they cannot do this with the children who might hold them up at gunpoint as they ferry their own progeny to private schools. And the street children know this only too well. As a young adolescent explained to me with a certain tone of pleasure, “We ask people for money and they say ‘I don’t have anything.’ You point a thirtyeight at them and then you see how fast they come up with some.” The perception of street children as a threat is rooted in the contradiction between the desire to keep children socially marginal, docile, and out of view, and the existence – precisely at the center of urban social life – of street children who often exercise violence, something normally deemed the province of adults. Street children are a reminder, literally on the doorsteps of rich Brazilians and just outside the five-star hotels where the development consultants stay, of the contradictions of contemporary social life: the opulence of the few amid the poverty of the majority, the plethora of resources amid the squandering of opportunities. They embody the failure of an unacknowledged social apartheid to keep the poor out of view. At home in the street, they are painful reminders of the dangerous and endangered world in which we live.