HISTORY
Ana Cristina Dubeux Dourado
CONTEMPORARY
Tobias Hecht
HISTORY
In spite of advances in anthropological and ethnographic studies, historians' chances of discovering a range of sources on the history of indigenous children prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil are slim. Information on the treatment of children and adolescents by the Indians generally comes from observations made by people far removed from indigenous culture. For this reason, we begin our account of the history of children in Brazil in the year 1549, when Jesuit priests took on the mission of catechizing indigenous children along various parts of the Brazilian coast. Their broader objective was to bring about a change in customs and beliefs among indigenous societies, opening the path for the teaching of Christian principles through the children.
The first school for indigenous children was opened in Bahia in 1552. A number of studies show that the Indian children in Jesuit schools studied with white orphan children who were brought to Brazil to teach the local children Portuguese and Christian customs. The use of children in the catechism of Indians created a favorable environment for activities typical of the child's universe, such as games, theater, and music. But these schools were also characterized by a rigid sense of discipline, and indigenous children who tried to escape the daily activities suffered corporal punishment, at times being tied for hours to tree trunks or to chains prepared for this purpose.
The Jesuit schools were few and their influence on the indigenous children's education was limited. Contact between whites and Indians was usually the result of not-always-peaceful encounters that, in addition to dramatically reducing the indigenous population through extermination or disease, destroyed many of the original expressions of religiosity and indigenous culture. In spite of the controversies about the size of the indigenous population in the period immediately prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil, conservative estimates suggest that there were at least one million Indians in 1492, and that one hundred and fifty years later, this population had been reduced to around two hundred thousand people. Other studies indicate the existence of over five million Brazilian Indians in 1500, of which 95 percent were decimated by sickness and armed conflicts with the European conquerors.
The few records made by European travelers on the daily lives of children in the villages show the diversity of customs among the various indigenous nations. But they also had customs in common, such as washing and painting newborn children. A practice of the Tupinambas, who inhabited the entire Brazilian coastline, was to wash and paint a newborn child. The boys received a small tomahawk, a bow, and parrot-feather arrows from their father, so they would become great warriors. The girls wove cotton from the age of seven; in addition to weaving they made manioc flour and prepared food. In the passage to adult life, both boys and girls experienced rituals that were aimed at testing their courage. The girls' bodies received cross-shaped cuts, and they were isolated for days following their first periods. The boys also had their bodies cut and their lips pierced, and lay on anthills to build up the courage they would need in intertribal wars. All these practices were common to various indigenous nations living on the Brazilian coastline.
Before the end of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese began to bring slaves on ships from Africa to work in the fields and in other occupations that formed part of the colonization system. The slaves were treated as merchandise and the conditions they lived under were terrible. Men, women, and children were thrown into dark and filthy holds with scarcely any food and water, and many died in the crossing, which could last for months in periods of calm. When they arrived on the continent, the children, often separated from their parents, were taken to slave markets to be sold cheaply, since merchants preferred strong men who could work on the plantations harvesting sugarcane. The high mortality rate for children during the crossing tended to discourage the importation of children directly from AFRICA. Nonetheless, around 4 percent of the slaves who disembarked in Valongo Market in Rio de Janeiro were children, even in the nineteenth century.
When children were born in the slave quarters, they were treated as merchandise from an early age. Their value increased from the age of twelve onward, when they were assumed to have developed the necessary strength for hard labor in the fields. However, younger children also worked at a number of lighter occupations, above all in the domestic sphere on the big sugar plantations. In the country, the smaller children moved easily between the slave quarters (senzala) and their master's mansion, known as the casa grande, and they only began to work with a more defined routine from the age of seven or eight. The girls would sew and some learned lace making as well. They also served as domestic servants for the ladies and looked after young children. The boys worked as pages, looked after the horses, and washed their masters' feet and those of their visitors. They would also serve at the table and help with cleaning.
The unit formed by the sugar mill, the sugarcane fields, the property-owners' residence, and the slave quarters was known as the engenhos (plantation). This productive unit, of such significance for Brazil's colonial history, is perhaps the most expressive example of the confusion between the public and private spheres that characterize the country's social history. Authoritative studies on the history of daily life and thought analyze the various ways in which the social relations generated in the engenhos ended by influencing how politics have functioned in Brazil. In the engenhos the relative intimacy shared by whites and blacks eventually created a hybrid cultural universe, based on the interchange of myths, symbols, art, religious beliefs, and other forms of expression common to both European and African culture. This coexistence between blacks and whites did not occur without conflict. From an early age, the children of the elite saw their fathers reacting violently towards rebellious attitudes from the slaves. Thus, although they could experience moments of equality when fun and games were shared, white children soon learned to discriminate against the slaves, even repeating patterns of violent behavior learned from their parents. And in spite of black children's access to the domestic sphere, their future chances of social mobility were inevitably linked to personal favors that the representatives of the elite might be inclined to offer. In colonial Brazil, education was allotted to very few, and poor children had to work from a tender age.
Direct welfare provision for needy children used to be provided almost exclusively by the Catholic Church. In the eighteenth century, asylums for foundlings were created to receive the large number of children abandoned in public places or at the gates of the wealthy. Children were abandoned for a variety of reasons: slave mothers left their children in the asylums so that they could live in liberty; needy families sometimes made use of charitable institutions for short periods, collecting their offspring when they could afford to raise them; and there was a high level of ABANDONMENT triggered by the birth of illegitimate children. The lack of adequate hygiene and care for children was denounced by several doctors and jurists in the nineteenth century. These professionals hoped to mold Brazil to the civilized standards imported from modern European nations.
In 1888 and in 1889, Brazil experienced two significant events: the abolition of slavery and the proclamation of the republic. These new times encouraged a discussion of social and welfare policies that could contribute to the organization of the urban centers, which were undergoing rapid population growth. Frightened by the presence of a large number of children roaming the streets, Brazil's governors adopted welfare measures that aimed to offer some form of occupation to children most in need. Even though these initiatives represented a first attempt at creating specific public policies for children in Brazil, their practical application did not always result in real benefits for underprivileged children. While the speeches of those who defended modernization in Brazil exalted the school as the efficient answer to backwardness and ignorance, in practice the Brazilian educational system was based on a discriminatory structure that separated rich from poor. The majority of the schools built in this period offered neither good equipment nor adequate methods to address children's needs. There was a distinct separation between schools catering to the poor that prioritized training for work and the schools for the elite that, in spite of the use of traditional teaching methods, included a greater range of educational opportunities, such as the teaching of music, art, and sports. Many children found on the streets, on the other hand, were taken to shelters and '"corrective" schools, which were organized around a rigid disciplinary system that conceived of education as a training process rather than an opportunity for developing the pupils' cognitive potential.
In the process of constructing the Brazilian nation, many authorities believed that the simple transposition of European ideas and practices would make Brazil an essentially modern country, free of the slave legacy and monarchical past that, in the social imagery of the period, represented backwardness. However, in terms of children's education, the aspirations of a small number of politicians, jurists, and teachers who managed to see beyond their time eventually lost their strength in the face of an economic structure based on the concentration of wealth and social exclusion.
Over the course of the twentieth century, there have been a few attempts at creating good state schools and effective welfare policies to benefit children. However, the results were limited to brief periods or to well-defined geographical areas. Only after the 1990s, with the passage of the Statute on the Child and Adolescent, did Brazil seriously begin the process of building public policies to provide full attention to children. Distinct among the many legal measures and public policies that have been envisioned or implemented throughout Brazil's history, this new legislation makes children and adolescents national priorities, considering them citizens whose rights should be respected. In this new concept of citizenship, society is seen as a participatory element in the struggle for the effective guarantee of human rights. This participation also occurs through the individual actions of each citizen, but chiefly by means of specially designed institutions to act as a bridge between society and the state, in the task of transforming what exists by law into reality.
See also: Latin America.
Goldstein, Donna M. 1998. "Nothing Bad Intended: Child Discipline, Punishment, and Survival in a Shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil." In Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Fishel Sargent. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Hecht, Tobias. 1998. At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hecht, Tobias. 2002. Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Kenny, Mary Lorena. 2002. "Orators and Outcasts, Wanderers and Workers: Street Children in Brazil." In Symbolic Childhood, ed. Daniel T. Cook. New York: Peter Lang.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Daniel Hoffman. 1998. "Brazilian Apartheid: Street Kids and the Struggle for Urban Space." In Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Fishel Sargent. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
ANA CRISTINA DUBEUX DOURADO
With a population of 170 million in a territory larger than western Europe, Brazil is home to some 61 million people under the age of eighteen. Not surprisingly, the lives of Brazilian children are anything but uniform.
One aspect of Brazilian social life that makes childhood so diverse is the staggering inequality in the distribution of national wealth. According to the World Bank's 1999/2000 Development Report, the richest 10 percent of the population are responsible for 47 percent of consumption, while the poorest 10 percent account for only 0.8 percent. Children who grow up in tall, guarded apartment buildings and watch MTV, play video games, shop in air-conditioned malls, and vacation at Disney World can gaze out their windows at the shacks where other children suffer from malnutrition. In the poorest areas of Brazil, such as the northeast, even the physical size and appearance of poor children tends to be markedly different from those of their richer peers; children growing up in middle-class condominiums are likely to be considerably taller and heavier than age-mates residing in rural areas or in precarious shacks just down the street. Contemporary researchers are far less likely than previous generations of scholars to accept the notion that Brazil has something like a racial democracy; even the casual observer cannot help but notice the correlation between whiteness and wealth and blackness and poverty. While there are certainly destitute white children in Brazil, the bulk of poor Brazilian youngsters are descendants of African slaves and Amerindians; most rich children are light skinned.
Although the proportion of all Brazilian children attending primary school has risen dramatically in recent years to about 90 percent, poor children cannot attend the better private schools and are more likely to drop out along the way; of the population as a whole, according to the World Bank, only 20 percent of high-school-age children were attending secondary institutions in 1996. Free university education serves mostly those whose families had the means to send them to expensive private schools.
Deemed to be of great sentimental value but something of an economic liability for their families, rich children in Brazil are unlikely to work inside, much less outside, the home. In this sense, their status is similar to that of children in advanced industrial countries. Poor Brazilian children, on the other hand, while usually cherished sentimentally, often contribute to household income, be it in agriculture in the rural areas or through the informal sector in the cities. According to Brazil's official Institute of Geography and Economy, 9 percent of children aged ten to fourteen are "economically active," and of these 32 percent work more than forty hours per week. Such figures say nothing about the prevalence of poor children working in the home, minding younger siblings so that their parents can be employed outside, for instance, or how many children are involved in illegal forms of work, such as the drugs trade. With 44 percent of Brazil's population living on 2 dollars or less per day (as indicated in World Bank figures from 1990), the survival of millions of households almost certainly depends on child labor in one form or another. Unfortunately, careful studies of this phenomenon in Brazil are remarkable for their absence.
Rates of INFANT MORTALITY have fallen dramatically, from 70 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 34 in 1997. Still, the prevalence of infant death among the poorest populations in Brazil remains high and is largely attributable to malnutrition in combination with easily treatable childhood diseases. In a controversial 1992 ethnography of infant death in a Brazilian shantytown, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes argued that mothers living in conditions of extreme poverty and chronic hunger exhibited a sort of indifference to the deaths of their offspring, not unlike that reported by some historians studying preindustrial societies; this indifference, she contended, was both a reasonable coping strategy given the reality of pervasive child death and a contributing factor to it. Other scholars have refuted the contention about maternal detachment, yet the debate has drawn needed attention to the social consequences of malnutrition and infant mortality.
Brazil has one of the highest rates of violent death of any country not at war, with children figuring prominently as both victims and perpetrators. According to a study by Tom Gibb, 4,000 children and adolescents under the age of eighteen were killed by firearms in a single and by no means anomalous Brazilian city, Rio de Janeiro, between 1987 and 2001–eight times the number of all Palestinian children killed in the conflict with ISRAEL during the same period. The massacre of a group of children sleeping in the street in Rio de Janeiro in 1993 led to international protest (in 1996 a member of the military police was convicted for his participation in the crime). Still, the preponderance of violent crimes carried out by young people and the ineptitude and corruption of the Brazilian police and judiciary have been accompanied by considerable tolerance of vigilante justice.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brazilian street children became the focus of media attention the world over. For a time, international advocacy institutions were estimating the presence of some 7 million children living in the street. These claims–wildly exaggerated, as carefully gathered census data later demonstrated–were also partially responsible for the emergence of a vibrant social movement on behalf of children. With intensive lobbying by the National Movement of Street Children and other organizations, Brazil adopted in 1990 the Children and Adolescents Act, an ambitious piece of legislation guaranteeing children the right to attend school, access to leisure activities, special treatment at the hands of the police and judiciary, and many other entitlements and protections. Few would contend that the implementation of this law has been successful, however.
Whereas most research on contemporary Brazilian children has focused on a small minority living in extraordinary circumstances–for instance in the street or working as prostitutes–scant attention has been paid to rural children or to the conditions of the vast majority of urban children who live and stay at home.
Hecht, Tobias. 1998. At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sheriff, Robin E. 2001. Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Gibb, Tom. 2002. "Rio 'Worse than a War Zone.'" Available from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2247608.stm.
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Economia. Available from www.ibge.gov.br/.
World Bank. 2003. "1999/2000 Development Report." Available from www.worldbank.org/wdr/2000/.
TOBIAS HECHT