Children in Brazil

Death Squads

Street children are forced to fight for their lives, freedom, and future. Brazilians see street children as theats to their belongings and their lives (Dimenstein, 1991). As a result of this image, different citizen groups, drugs gangs, and corrupt police officers have formed death squads to fulfill the goal of eliminating the streets of these threatening youths (Jubilee, 1998). Death squads are notorious for having no mercy for street children and also for seeking out these street children only to torture and murder them. Between 1989 and 1990, 4,611 street children were murdered (Jubilee, 1998; Final, 1994). Death squads are stripping away children's agency by taking away their right of freedom to live. This massive elimination of street children causes these children to become a seperate entity of a society trying to survive.

It is interesting to note that the police are one of the main contributing groups to death squads (Dimenstein, 1991). There are countless reports of the police beating, raping, and torturing street children. The Federal Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry concluded that killings by police officers was the third largest known cause of killing children in Brazil (Jubilee, 1998). The worst of these attacks occurred in July of 1993 when a police formed death squad opened fire on fifty sleeping children. They killed eight and injured many others (Scheper-Hughes, 1997). Between 1993 and 1996, juvenile court data showed over 3,000 brutal deaths of children ages eleven to seventeen in Rio (Jubilee, 1998).

What options do children have when even the police are against them?

References

Dimenstein, G. (1991). Brazilian War on Children, 1991. London: Latin America Bureau.

Human Rights Watch (1994). Final Justice: Police and Death Squads Homicides in Brazil. New York: Human Rights Watch of America.

Jubilee Campaign (1998, October 2). Brazilian Street Children Briefing Paper. http://www.jubileecampaign.demon.co.uk./children/bra9.htm

Scheper-Hughes, N. (1987). Commentary. Human Organization,46 (1) 78-83.

This page was created by Lindsay Bodack, Stephanie Hunter, Tom Kaufman, and Caitlin Kelly as a collaborative project at Tulane University in the Children and Society class taught by Professor April Brayfield. The purpose of this page is to educate the public on the plight of poverty stricken children in Brazil. To view other student web pages please visit the Children Around the World website.

updated December 15, 1999.