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ADOLESCENT TRAJECTORIES
contributions from Psychoanalysis and Sociology
TRAJETÓRIAS ADOLESCENTES:
contribuições da psicanálise e sociologia
ADOLESCENT TRAJECTORIES:
contributions from Psychoanalysis
and Sociology
Editora CRV
Curitiba – Brasil
2020
T768
Bibliografia
ISBN Digital 978-65-5578-273-8
ISBN Físico 978-65-5578-274-5
DOI 10.24824/978655578274.5
1. Psicanálise 2. Adolescentes I. Guerra, Andréa Maris Campos. org. II. Silva, Bráulio
Figueiredo Alves da. org. III. Marinho, Frederico Couto. org. IV. Moreira, Jacqueline de
Oliveira. org. V. Pereira, Marcelo Ricardo. org. VI. Adolescent trajectories: contributions from
Psychoanalysis and Sociology VII. Série.
2020
Foi feito o depósito legal conf. Lei 10.994 de 14/12/2004
Proibida a reprodução parcial ou total desta obra sem autorização da Editora CRV
Todos os direitos desta edição reservados pela: Editora CRV
Tel.: (41) 3039-6418 - E-mail: sac@editoracrv.com.br
Conheça os nossos lançamentos: www.editoracrv.com.br
PRESENTATION�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 13
CAPÍTULO 1
JUVENTUDE E VIOLÊNCIAS NO BRASIL:
breve contextualização������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 15
Frederico Couto Marinho
Bráulio Figueiredo Alves da Silva
Gabriela Gomes Cardoso
Camila Anunciação Matos
CHAPTER 1
YOUTH AND VIOLENCE IN BRAZIL:
a brief contextualization����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 31
Frederico Couto Marinho
Bráulio Figueiredo Alves da Silva
Gabriela Gomes Cardoso
Camila Anunciação Matos
CAPÍTULO 2
SOBRE A METODOLOGIA TRANSDISCIPLINAR EM NARRATIVAS
E TRAJETÓRIAS DE ADOLESCENTES AUTORES
DE ATO INFRACIONAL��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 47
Andrea Máris Campos Guerra
Amanda Lessa Malta
Bianca Ferreira Rocha
Cláudia Serra Wermelinger Silva
CHAPTER 2
ON TRANSDISCIPLINARY METHODOLOGY IN NARRATIVES
AND TRAJECTORIES OF ADOLESCENTS
WHO COMMITTED INFRACTIONS������������������������������������������������������������� 67
Andrea Máris Campos Guerra
Amanda Lessa Malta
Bianca Ferreira Rocha
Cláudia Serra Wermelinger Silva
CHAPTER 3
MAPS, METHODOLOGY AND THE NARRATIVE
AND TRAJECTORY RESEARCH����������������������������������������������������������������111
Lucas Caetano Pereira de Oliveira
Christiane Odete de Matozinho Cardoso
Jacqueline de Oliveira Moreira
Camila Luiza de Sena
CAPÍTULO 4
A ENTRADA NO CRIME NÃO É CASUAL: o delito adolescente��������������� 133
Marcelo Ricardo Pereira
Ramón Eduardo Lara Mogollon
CHAPTER 4
ENTRY INTO CRIME IS NOT CASUAL: teen offense������������������������������� 149
Marcelo Ricardo Pereira
Ramón Eduardo Lara Mogollon
CAPÍTULO 5
A DESISTÊNCIA COMO PROCESSO: contribuições das
narrativas memorialísticas para se pensar o desenlace
de jovens com a criminalidade���������������������������������������������������������������������� 165
Juliana Morganti
Rodrigo Goes e Lima
Ana Luiza Xavier Lelles
Mara Alice Avelar Saraiva Horta
CHAPTER 5
DESISTANCE AS A PROCESS: contributions of the narrative memoirs
to the understanding of desistance from crime by brazilian adolescents������ 179
Juliana Morganti
Rodrigo Goes e Lima
Ana Luiza Xavier Lelles
Mara Alice Avelar Saraiva Horta
CHAPTER 6
“SAY... THIS IS REALLY MY LIFE”: The H. case
and the permanence in criminality����������������������������������������������������������������� 209
Lucas Caetano Pereira de Oliveira
Ana Carolina Dias Silva
Júlia Dainez da Costa
Jacqueline de Oliveira Moreira
CAPÍTULO 7
A POSIÇÃO FEMININA E O SEU (NÃO) ENVOLVIMENTO COM A
CRIMINALIDADE: o caso de Lilith��������������������������������������������������������������� 227
Bianca Ferreira Rodrigues
Maria Luiza Margotti dos Santos
Guilherme Henrique Rodrigues
CHAPTER 7
THE FEMALE POSITION AND THEIR (NON) INVOLVEMENT
WITH CRIME: Lilith’s case��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 243
Bianca Ferreira Rodrigues
Maria Luiza Margotti dos Santos
Guilherme Henrique Rodrigues
CAPÍTULO 8
TRAJETÓRIAS SOCIAIS E IMPLICAÇÕES INCONSCIENTES:
escutando mães de jovens infratores������������������������������������������������������������ 259
Ana Cláudia Castello Branco Rena
Camila Gabriel Meireles Amorim
Fernando Luiz Salgado da Silva
CHAPTER 8
SOCIAL TRAJECTORIES AND UNCONSCIOUS IMPLICATIONS:
listening to mothers of young offenders��������������������������������������������������������� 281
Ana Cláudia Castello Branco Rena
Camila Gabriel Meireles Amorim
Fernando Luiz Salgado da Silva
CONCLUSION��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 315
Andréa Maris Campos Guerra
Braulio Figueiredo Alves da Silva
INDEX����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 331
1 Fonte: Secretarias Estaduais de Segurança Pública e Defesa Social; SINESPJC; FBI; Independent Police
Complaints Commission (IPCC); Police Memorial; Statistiques Canada; Procuradoria Geral da República
do México; Anistia Internacional; Independent Police Investigative Directorate; Cuerpo de Investigaciones
Científicas, Penales y Criminalisticas (CICPC); Banco Mundial; UNODC Crime Statistics; Fórum Brasileiro
de Segurança Pública. http://seer.ufs.br/index.php/tomo/article/view/507/423.
2 Os critérios de dependência usados (prevalência de uso de drogas na vida, no ano e no mês) nas pesquisas
do Centro Brasileiro de Informações sobre Drogas Psicotrópicas (CEBRID) / Secretaria Nacional de Políticas
sobre Drogas (SENAD) são do SAMHSA – Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration,
dos Estados Unidos. Mais informações: http://www.cebrid.epm.br/index.php.
6 Ver conceitos de “onset” e “desistance” como variáveis distintas, com seus próprios determinantes.
Assim, somente esses três atos infracionais são responsáveis por 74,7% das
infrações respondidas por esses jovens naquele momento, sendo que 40% dos
adolescentes já haviam passado anteriormente pelo Sistema de Justiça Juvenil.
Assim, chegamos à uma lista de jovens que tiveram uma ou mais passa-
gens registradas em função do cometimento de ato infracional. Essa lista serviu
de base para a execução da segunda etapa da pesquisa. Passou-se, assim, à
proposta de registro das Narrativas Memorialísticas7 (GUERRA et al., 2017)
dos jovens que compunham o universo da pesquisa documental. Uma vez
que a maioria dos PIAs analisados possuía apenas referências territoriais,
sem apresentar outros contatos, decidiu-se pela busca ativa desses jovens, a
partir dos endereços dispostos nos Planos Individuais de Atendimento, a fim
de alcançarmos nossa população de pesquisa.
Uma equipe de pesquisadores/as do campo da Psicanálise, Sociologia
e da Educação, composta por professores/as e alunos/as da graduação e pós-
-graduação, organizou um plano de trabalho de campo que envolvia desde o
mapeamento oficial das regionais que organizavam os endereços dispostos,
bem como dos equipamentos das políticas públicas de saúde, serviço social
e segurança pública, até agenda de reuniões com tais instituições para pla-
nejamento da aproximação territorial do grupo. A depender da configuração
mapeada em termos de levantamento de ocorrência de conflitos no território,
uma dupla de pesquisadores – eventualmente acompanhada da presença de
um representante de dispositivos da rede de políticas públicas – direciona-
va-se até o endereço que dispunha a partir da análise documental, em busca
do jovem referido por nome próprio e nome da mãe, e não necessariamente
pela passagem no sistema infracional.
Tratou-se de estratégia metodológica imprescindível, tendo em vista que
a proposta das Narrativas Memorialísticas (GUERRA et al., 2017) convida
o sujeito a apresentar sua história de vida de forma a construir sua ficção
subjetiva do ponto de onde os circuitos pulsionais e suas representações o
convocam. A história de vida também revela como o sujeito se relaciona
com o contexto exterior, as crenças e formas de alteridades, uma vez que,
a formação da identidade (ou autoimagem) dos sujeitos e o desempenho de
papéis sociais é um processo relacional entre os indivíduos, os grupos e as
instituições (GOFFMAN, 2007).
Assim, ao referenciar apenas o nome do jovem, entendemos a abertura à
construção de sua apresentação sem necessariamente apreendê-lo em um tecido
discursivo pré-conceituado, relacionado a sua passagem pelo Sistema Socioe-
ducativo. Essa etapa em território também abarcava a aplicação de um survey
7 Trata-se de estratégia de pesquisa psicanalítica de fenômenos sociais, que comporta as ficções, fixações
e fantasias que perpassam os processos inconscientes atravessados por elementos sociopolíticos.
8 Os dados foram levantados com a colaboração direta da 23ª Promotoria de Justiça de Defesa dos Direitos
das Crianças e dos Adolescentes – Área Infracional e do Centro de Apoio Operacional das Promotorias
Criminais, Execução Penal, Tribunal do Júri e Auditoria Militar (CAOCRIM), representados pelos Promoto-
res de Justiça, Dr. Márcio Rogério de Oliveira e Dr. Henrique Nogueira Macedo, respectivamente, a quem
agradecemos pela disponibilidade e parceria.
9 Também aqui agradecemos aos Promotores de Justiça acima mencionados, bem como ao Diretor do Instituto
Médico Legal de Belo Horizonte, Dr. Thales Bittencourt de Barcellos, pela disponibilização dos dados oficiais.
REFERÊNCIAS
BABBIE, E. Métodos de Pesquisas de Survey. Belo Horizonte: Ed.
UFMG, 1999.
CANO, I. The use of lethal force by police in Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro:
ISER, 1997.
HRW. World Report. United States of America, 2009. Disponível em: https://
www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/world_report_download/wr2009_web_1.pdf
1 Source: Brazilian State Secretariats of Public Security and Social Defense (Secretarias Estaduais de Segu-
rança Pública e Defesa Social); SINESPJC; FBI; Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC); Police
Memorial; Statistiques Canada; Attorney General’s Office of the Republic of Mexico; Amnesty International;
Independent Police Investigative Directorate; Scientific, Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y
Criminalisticas (CICPC); World Bank; UNODC Crime Statistics; Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública.
http://seer.ufs.br/index.php/tomo/article/view/507/423.
2 The dependency criteria used (prevalence of drug use in life, year and month) in surveys of the Brazilian
Center for Psychotropic Drug Information (Centro Brasileiro de Informações sobre Drogas Psicotrópicas –
CEBRID) / National Secretariat of Drug Policy (Secretaria Nacional de Políticas sobre Drogas – SENAD)
are from SAMHSA – Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, United States.. More
information: http://www.cebrid.epm.br/index.php.
the lowest (6.9% marijuana, 2.3% cocaine, 0.8% crack). In the survey with
elementary and high school students the use increases (7.6% marijuana, 2.0%
cocaine, 1.2% crack). In the survey with college students the use is even higher
(26.1% marijuana, 7.7% cocaine, 4.9% crack). Finally, among the groups
most vulnerable and exposed to violence (homeless children and adolescents
[40.4% marijuana, 24.5% cocaine, 9.7% crack] and adolescents undergoing
socio-educational measures of interment [89% marijuana, 43% cocaine, 21%
crack]), the use of illegal drugs is very high.
In this scenario, homicides are currently the leading cause of death among
young people in Brazil and especially affect poor and black young men, resi-
dents of the outskirts of metropolitan areas of large urban centers. The Atlas
of Violence (IPEA; FBSP, 2019) highlights the increase in mortality among
blacks in the young Brazilian population, compared to mortality among young
whites, a reality that has persisted over the years. Brazil was ranked third
in the world ranking of child and youth murder, preceded only by Mexico
and El Salvador. “From 1980 to 2014, the homicide rate of the population
aged 0-19 years went from 3.1 per 100 thousand inhabitants to 18.1 – a
jump of 483.9%” (WAISELFISZ, 2017, p. 5-6). However, it is important to
highlight the fact that this rate fluctuates depending on the age of the victim,
revealing a relatively high number of violence in the first year of life (3.7
per 100 thousand), becoming expressive again after they are 12, when there
is marked growth that peaks at 16 and 17 years of age. As the author points
out in the specific report on homicides of children and adolescents in Brazil:
“At the age of 16, in 2014, there were 1,686 adolescent victims: 4.6 per day.
Concurrently, the 17-year-old teenagers added to 2,267 victims: 6.2 per day”
(WAISELFISZ, 2017, p. 7).
Belo Horizonte, capital of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, from which
our analysis departs, had a young population, from 15 to 29 years old, cor-
responding to 26.7% of the population according to data from the 2010 IBGE
(Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) Census. The overall mortal-
ity rate in the municipality in 2017 for 100 thousand inhabitants was 20.6,
with 428 firearm-related deaths in the same year. However, if we consider the
age group mentioned above, from 15 to 29 years old, we find a homicide rate
of 91.1 per 100 thousand inhabitants. It is important to highlight that, when
brazilian pardos (brown-skinned) and blacks are combined, 76% of homicides
are against these groups (BELO HORIZONTE, 2018). We also find that:
Based on the analysis of homicide data from 2011 to 2013, 563 homi-
cides of adolescents and young people aged 12 to 21 were recorded, of
which about 90% were male, 70% were between 18 and 21 years old.
and most of them had records with the Criminal Justice System (BELO
HORIZONTE, 2018, p. 57).
In absolute numbers: in 2005 there were 92,052 blacks in prison and 62,569
whites, that is, considering the portion of the prison population for
which color information was available, 58.4% were black. In 2012 there
were 292,242 black prisoners and 175,536 whites, which means 60.8% of
the prison population was black. Thus, the more the prison population in
the country grows, the more the number of black prisoners grows (BRA-
SIL, 2015, p. 33).
3 In the ranking of over 20 countries in Europe and North America, according to data from the International Center
for Prison Studies (www.prisonstudies.org/info/worldbrief), this number places Brazil in 2nd place in terms of
total population and 8th place in relation to the incarceration rate of adolescents per 100 thousand inhabitants.
4 We can highlight, not exhaustively (but almost), the following studies and research in which social science
interfaces are found with the question of the infringement trajectory: ADORNO, S.; BORDINI, E. Estimativa
da reincidência criminal: variações segundo estratos ocupacionais e categorias criminais. Revista Temas
with criminal behavior and the interactions between them at a specific time
in an individual’s life.
Nevertheless, life course theory does not compare nor ranks specific
factors along the life course6 of individuals as the elements of entry, per-
manence and termination of criminal activity. This paradigm thus proposes
two specific fields of research. First, it is about analyzing the dynamics of
delinquent behavior from childhood to adolescence. Second, it is a matter of
distinguishing the explanatory factors that precede, accompany, or follow
changes in criminal behavior over time, that is, the sequence of biographical,
infractional, and institutional causes and consequences.
To understand this perspective, two concepts are central: trajectories and
transitions (ELDER, 1985). The concept of trajectory can be described as “a
path or a line of development over a lifetime” (LAUB; SAMPSON, 1993,
p. 8) occurring in a given space and context and marked by transitions that
constitute more or less abrupt state changes. Transitions can either be changed
in the same trajectory or mark the beginning and end of that trajectory, in the
latter case they are called turning points.
In this sense, we start from the concept of trajectory since its use offers
us an opportunity to empirically evaluate the development of individuals
throughout their life course. In methodological terms, the concept of tra-
jectory makes it possible to structure the temporal sequence of events; and
biographical, infractional and institutional transitions and ruptures from the
data in judicial processes. The trail to be mapped in the study of trajectories is
a path that always leads somewhere, and this “place” can be the permanence
or interruption of criminal activity, the continuity or discontinuity of social
integration processes, or the entry and exit of socioeducational institutions.
Events, risk factors, and transitions can be significant in an individual’s
life cycle, such as: family relationship and rupture, peer relationship, dropping
out of school, contact with criminal justice, children, street life trajectory,
and use of licit and illicit drugs. Thus, the infractional trajectory should be
examined in contrast to the background of the biographical and institutional
trajectories. The biggest and most sensitive changes must be analyzed. When
an individual experiences an event, risk factor, or transition, trajectories may
change. Therefore, events, risk factors, and transitions are key elements in an
individual’s life course (e.g. marriage, having children, dropping out of school,
having contact with criminal justice) that can alter social roles, social ties,
attitudes and behaviors. From a criminological point of view, the significance
of these events, risk factors and transitions implies taking them as turning
points that alter long-term patterns.
6 See concepts of “onset” and “desistance” as distinct variables with their own determinants.
7 A strategy of psychoanalytic research of social phenomena, which includes the fictions, fixations and fantasies
that permeate the unconscious processes crossed by socio-political elements.
8 The data was collected with the direct collaboration of the 23ª Promotoria de Justiça de Defesa dos Direitos
das Crianças e dos Adolescentes – Área Infracional e do Centro de Apoio Operacional das Promotorias
Criminais, Execução Penal, Tribunal do Júri e Auditoria Militar (CAOCRIM), represented by the Prosecutors,
Dr. Márcio Rogério de Oliveira and Dr. Henrique Nogueira Macedo, respectively, whom we thank for their
availability and partnership.
9 We also thank the aforementioned Prosecutors, as well as the Director of the Forensic Medical Institute of
Belo Horizonte, Dr. Thales Bittencourt de Barcellos, for making official data available
REFERENCES
BABBIE, E. Métodos de Pesquisas de Survey. Belo Horizonte: Ed.
UFMG, 1999.
CANO, I. The use of lethal force by police in Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro:
ISER, 1997.
HRW. World Report. United States of America, 2009. Available at: https://
www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/world_report_download/wr2009_web_1.pdf
1 PIAS são Planos Individuais de Atendimento, documentos utilizados pelas medidas socioeducativas que têm
objetivo de prever, registrar e gerir as atividades que serão desenvolvidas com os adolescentes durante o
cumprimento da medida, conforme prevê a Lei nº 12.594/12, que institui o Sistema Nacional de Atendimento
Socioeducativo (SINASE) (BRASIL, 2012).
2 A metodologia adotada ao longo da investigação Curso de Vida e Trajetória Delinquencial será melhor
elucidada nas páginas seguintes.
QUADRO DA METODOLOGIA
JOVEM
SOCIOLOGIA PSICANÁLISE
SOCIOEDUCAÇÃO/DIREITO/SAÚ-
DE/EDUCAÇÃO
MAPAS
NARRATIVAS
QUESTIONÁRIOS
MEMORIALÍSTICAS
AUSÊNCIAS
PIAS NARRATIVAS
CASOS
SOCIOLOGIA PSICANÁLISE
CATEGORIAS
MAPAS objeto
objeto construído
objetoreconstruído
construído QUESTIONÁRIOS
DISPOSITIVO ANALÍTICO
TRANSDISCIPLINAR
REFERÊNCIAS
DISCIPLINA CONCEITOS CATEGORIAS
BIBLIOGRÁFICAS
• Curso de vida
• Trajetória
(dimensão e categoria) • Elder
SOCIOLOGIA • Turning Points
• Transições • Sampson e Laub
• Eventos
• Controle social
• Criminalidade
• Sujeito-Outro
• Agressividade e
• Objeto a
Violência • Freud
PSICANÁLISE • Sintoma
• Adolescência • Lacan
• Trauma
• Narrativas
• Repetição
• Corpo-Outro-História
MAPAS
NARRATIVAS
QUESTIONÁRIOS
MEMORIALÍSTICAS
AUSÊNCIA
S
PIAS NARRATIVAS
CASOS
SOCIOLOGIA PSICANÁLISE
CATEGORIAS
MAPAS objeto
objeto construído
objetoreconstruído
construído QUESTIONÁRIOS
DISPOSITIVO ANALÍTICO
TRANSDISCIPLINAR
3 CRAS e CREAS são equipamentos da política de assistência social, de base territorial, que oferecem serviços
socioassistenciais de proteção básica e especializada, respectivamente, para famílias e indivíduos.
enlaces entre os jovens, seus corpos e territórios. Este seria o processo intitulado
como “mapeamento” na figura que inaugura a seção: Fase 2.
O quadro abaixo sintetiza a busca pelos jovens e as situações encontradas
em quatro meses de investigação em campo, esboçando assim as dificuldades
acima citadas, reflexo de uma significativa defasagem entre o número de buscas
e o número de entrevistas e questionários realizados. A defasagem entre o número
de entrevistas e o número de questionários também é expressiva. Tudo isso sem
considerarmos o universo original de 373 adolescentes. A dinâmica de coleta de
dados previa um intervalo entre os tempos de coleta das narrativas e de aplicação
dos questionários, com vistas a não sobrecarregar os jovens participantes. Neste
intervalo, a partir do número de questionários aplicados, nota-se dificuldade de
manter contato com os jovens, seja por dificuldade de localizá-los, uma vez mais,
em seus territórios, ou por questões que envolvem o vínculo transferencial, sobre
o qual é difícil fazer previsões acerca dos possíveis incômodos em jogo, uma vez
que não conseguimos escutar os jovens novamente.
119 134 6 6
4 A esse número acrescentam-se outras 3 narrativas, concebidas por familiares dos jovens que demonstraram
interesse em conversar com nossos pesquisadores.
Infância
Adolescência Jovem - Adulto Adulto Dimensão
(1ª, 2ª, etc)
Quantidade de eventos
Categoria
Trabalho Trabalho
Lazer Lazer
Pares Pares
Igreja
Associações Profissionais
Etc...
Idade
F1
F2
5. Apontamentos finais
REFERÊNCIAS
BENSON, M. Crime and the Life Course: An Introduction. 2nd Edition.
New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.
1 PIAS (Planos Individuais de Atendimento) are Individual Assistance Plans, documents used with socioeduca-
tional measures that aim to predict, record and manage the activities that will be developed with adolescents
during the compliance with the socio-educational measure as provided by Brazilian Law nº 12.594/12, which
establishes the National System of Social and Educational Care (SINASE) (BRASIL, 2012).
2. How does the combination of different events, risk factors, and tra-
jectory transitions occur along the life course of these adolescents
and young people?
3. Can we consider the adolescent moment between childhood and
adulthood as a decisive factor for establishing a link with the crimi-
nogenic object?
4. Does the institutional trajectory incapacitate or empower adoles-
cents and young people involved with theft? To what extent does this
trajectory broaden its biographical trajectory? What is its effect on
interrupting or reinforcing your infractional trajectory?
The research focused on the first three questions and did not engage spe-
cifically on the situation of young people involved solely with theft, but with
those related to any infraction. The notions of trajectory and narrative were
the starting point for the investigation and organization of data collection and
analysis. Three trajectories were prioritized at the beginning of the research
to answer their hypotheses: biographical, infractional and institutional, as
illustrated in the table below. Note that the distinctions between these trajec-
tories are analytical distinctions, that is, in reality and in each adolescent’s
life story, each trajectory is always intertwined by the others. What interests
us is the analysis of reciprocal influences between the different trajectories.
2 The methodology adopted throughout the investigation Course of Life and Delinquency Trajectory will be
better explained in the following pages.
Metodology Framework
Knowledge Field
Young person
Sociology Psychoanalysis
Socioeducation/Law/
Health/Education
continues...
Phase 2 - Fieldwork
Maps
Narrative Memoir
Jacqueline O. Moreira - 22247.indd 70 Questionnaires 04/08/2020 09:00:19
Phase 1 - Conceptual and Methodological Elabora on
Phase 2 - Fieldwork
Maps
Absences
Cases
SOCIOLOGY PSYCHOANALYSIS
Categories
Maps objeto
objetoconstruído
Reconstructed object
construído Questionnaires
Transdiciplinary Analytical
Dispositive
Maps
Absences
may have not been mentioned in the interviews, since these would be free of
guidance, limited only by the narration of the young person.
Then, for about 6 months, we held meetings to elaborate the question-
naire, with 118 questions divided into the following areas of concentration:
the young individual’s profile, questions related to the attribution and origin
of his/her name, surname and nickname, family history, school history, peer
trajectory, work trajectory, community trajectory, infractional trajectory. In
addition to encompassing issues related to self-image (how the person dealt
with their body), to virtuality (their use of social networks), and to the dimen-
sions of affections and behaviors, which sought to circumscribe the conduct
and involvement of young people in certain situations of risk.
The questionnaire was applied as a pilot test in a provisional detention
center for young people undergoing socio-educational measures, Centro Inte-
grado de Atendimento ao Adolescente Autor de Ato Infracional – CIA-BH
(Integrated Center of Assistance for the Infractional Adolescent) and in a state
public school in the city of Belo Horizonte. After this pretest phase, some
changes to the instrument were made until the final field version was completed.
PIAs Narra�ves
Cases
Sociology Psychoanalysis
Categories
Maps objeto
objetoconstruído
Reconstructed object
construído Ques�onnaires
Transdiciplinary Analy�cal
Disposi�ve
After elaborating the instruments, the data collection phase was inau-
gurated based on information obtained from an official documentary source
represented by 373 lawsuits with Vara Infracional da Infância e Juventude
de Minas Gerais (Infrational Court of Childhood and Youth of Minas Gerais),
which were analyzed in a quantitative perspective by the research group
“Life Course and delinquency trajectory” of CRISP – Centro de Estudos de
Criminalidade e Segurança Pública (Center for Studies of Crime and Pub-
lic Security) of the Federal University of Minas Gerais in 2015. Using the
addresses contained in each PIA (Individual Assistance Plan), we actively
searched for the young individuals by heading to the territory where they
supposedly lived.
The field trip, however, presented different and unexpected difficul-
ties. The first of these was the organization of pairs and their distribution
throughout the geographical space in search of adolescent subjects. Having
decided to respect the regions of the city of Belo Horizonte as a geophysi-
cal criterion, it was noted that the addresses sought, most of the time, were
located in places and regions distant from those frequented and inhabited
by the researchers and access via public transportation took long hours and
required successive transfers. It was not possible to access some regions
without long walks, which introduced the young researchers to a new concrete
and symbolic universe, in which otherness manifested its real difference.
However, going to the field also showed us another level of difficulties.
We can list them as: difficulty finding the young people (movement in the ter-
ritory, outdated or missing information from their addresses and references in
public services), adolescents who were dead, imprisoned or living elsewhere,
difficulty in accessing the territory (we used services, commercial areas and
local agents as means of entry), absence of people in homes, conflicting
information from neighbors, suspicion, refusal and unwillingness to respond.
Some chapters of this book are reserved for a more detailed unfolding about
these difficulties, for now, we are only interested in mentioning them so that
our reader can understand what kind of obstacles we had to deal with when
we chose active search as a data collection methodology.
Thus, in order to optimize the field work in face of these difficulties,
partnerships were sought with regional CRAS (Centro de Referência da
Assistência Social – Reference Center of Social Assistance) and CREAS
(Centro de Referência Especializado da Assistência Social – Specialized
Reference Center of Social Assistance)3 in order to seek guidance that would
3 CRAS and CREAS are territorial based social assistance policy organizations that provide social assistance
services of basic and specialized protection, respectively, to families and individuals.
119 134 6 6
Parallel to the continued search for the 373 adolescents and as originally
planned in the project, the data analysis phase began. For this purpose, we
used the original concepts and categories of the project, in order to analyze
the six cases in which the narratives and questionnaires were applied and
allowed us to build the case after being added to the PIA. At this time, new
challenges presented themselves.
While sociology seeks universal and general categories, psychoanalysis
operates with the uniqueness of a single case. Thus, the first really transdisci-
plinary research movement, in which the boundaries of each discipline fell in
face of the imposition of the youth’s knowledge about the relationship with
crime, took place in the attempt to construct the analytical model. The first
movement sought to constitute the trajectories from the three lines of life
courses we had in hand: the course of the judicial process, the registration in
the PIA’s and the subjective script freely collected in the Narrative Memoir
and complemented by the closed questionnaires.
In the construction of the cases, the group of researchers was divided to
analyze the collected material, seeking a singular understanding of each nar-
rative, as well as the possible generalizations based on sociological assump-
tions. At this moment, the impasse was constituted around the difficulty of
what was considered relevant or significant in the narratives, since the notions
of trauma, signifier and floating listener had not been established, in order to
extract the symbolic (written) and traumatic points (unwritten) of the narrated
trajectories. The way in which each trajectory – biographical, institutional and
infractional – was connected was also missing, since the procedural text, the
socio-educational text and the adolescent’s text did not match or find equiva-
lence. We had on the one hand the concrete facts extracted from the official
documents and the subjectively experienced facts told by the young people.
Thus, these did not connect or allow a transdisciplinary approach in that way.
4 There are 3 other narratives added to this number, made by family members of young people who showed
interest in talking with our researchers.
Each case was analyzed using three instruments: the PIA, the question-
naire and the narrative. From this analysis we sought to extract the main turn-
ing points and constraints that had an impact on the youngsters’ infractional
trajectories on their bonds to crime and their outcomes. Our psychoanalytic
reading focused on the narrative, the character of fiction and the fixations they
hold (LACAN, 1972/2003), thus exploring the misconceptions of language,
repetition points and forms of drive satisfaction. Each narrative and the events
experienced by the young individuals were taken as unique and singular, but
without neglecting a close look at what became particular to the group.
The construction of each of the six cases was shared in a meeting with the
research team. In order to consolidate the transdisciplinary work, the discussion
was held taking into consideration the different types of knowledge at stake. In
this dynamic, the knowledge of psychoanalysis and sociology was guided by
the knowledge of the young individuals conferring a transdisciplinary charac-
ter to research, since its conceptual and analytical construction surpassed the
limits of both theories and the informal and popular knowledge of their subject.
Work Work
Leisure Leisure
Peers Peers
Church
Professional Organiza�ons
Etc...
Age
It is always important to trust the work being done and the adolescent
as capable of change and transformation.
Hence, when comparing the theory of the life course, closer to empiri-
cism, with the localization of real events in the individual’s life timeline and
the attempt to establish causality with the psychoanalytic theory of the uncon-
scious, we exposed the Freudian problem of the first topic: reality is inscribed
in the psyche and this happens on an individual level. We could conclude that:
F1
F2
• The path (vector) represents the speech and its diachronic unfolding.
• The central body represents the event, which does not fall within
the field of discourse, but exerts a force on it.
Because they are in different dimensions one can exert influence on the
other. All discursive elements of the narrative can be categorized (Family,
School, Work etc.) and analyzed from their position of proximity, or distance,
with non-discursive events (RODRIGUES, 2019).
5. Final notes
We can say that the research went through three moments regarding the
dynamics of knowledge, as shown in the figure below:
PHASE 2 – FIELDWORK
INTERDISCIPLINARY
The different moments that were part of the construction of this research
resulted in the transdisciplinary work of creating its key concepts. Initially
the constructions were based on the multidisciplinarity that occurred in the
discussion and presentation of the concepts. The concepts of the field of
psychoanalysis and sociology were presented and discussed by the team to
give course to the methodology that, aiming at the specificities of each pres-
ent knowledge, focused on working singular aspects and the life course in
the history of each adolescent. The field trip puts our knowledge at stake and
points to the need for interdisciplinary work through the challenges of the
field and the management of data collection instruments. Transdisciplinarity
only happened in data analysis when it was possible, from the knowledge of
young people, to think of concepts that surpassed the boundaries of concep-
tual knowledge and a transdisciplinary analytical method that contemplated
a new subject-object.
The final result, presented in a chapter of this book, was the recomposi-
tion of the analytical framework in relation to the problem-referral binomial,
in three aspects: the early entry into crime, the procedural families (GUERRA
et al., 2019) and their effects on the transmission and institution of affiliation
and finally the territorial migration which produces adoption or disaffiliation
through expulsive elements and/or drivers of belonging.
REFERENCES
BENSON, M. Crime and the Life Course: An Introduction. 2nd Edition.
New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.
1. Introdução
O adolescente conta ainda que outros parentes são envolvidos com o trá-
fico, sendo que traficava para um primo, que atualmente encontra-se preso.
Relata que dois irmãos mais velhos foram mortos pelo tráfico da região. O
primeiro teria sido morto por comparsas e a segunda por delatar um trafi-
cante. [...] José não relata contato com instituições da rede socioassistencial
de sua região, tendo apenas o acompanhamento anterior do LA Barreiro e
do CAPUT. Sobre este último a mãe relata que não gostou do atendimento
recebido na instituição, pois sentiu que o médico estava lhe responsabilizando
pelos comportamentos e uso de drogas de José (José, Regional Barreiro,
Tinha 15 anos na ocasião da elaboração do PIA).
Apesar da riqueza das informações contidas nos PIA’s, eles não nos
ofereciam o olhar do jovem sobre sua história, apenas o olhar do aparato
judiciário, com seus marcadores legais. Nesse sentido, decidimos buscar o
saber do jovem sobre sua própria história, suas trajetórias e sua relação com
a criminalidade e sistema de justiça.
No presente texto, pretendemos reconstruir o processo de criação, em
um ato inventivo, de uma metodologia de acesso aos sujeitos da pesquisa.
Iremos narrar no “a posteriori” nossas movimentações, por vezes livres e
outras planejadas pela comunidades, na busca de escutar a história de alguns
destes jovens.
substrato físico, natural ou artificial, e mais o seu uso, ou, em outras palavras,
a base técnica e mais as práticas sociais, isto é, uma combinação de técnica
e política” (SANTOS, 2002, p. 87).
Douville (2009) nos apresenta um território que extrapola sua significação
geográfica, acrescentado de camadas simbólicas que ancoram esse sujeito na
lógica tanto da cidade, quanto da filiação:
Ela será não apenas disposição geográfica, como também topos onde se
abrigam as memórias dos tempos, das cronologias, das filiações. Tradução
da experiência imediata, orgânica, em narrativas, memórias e passados
reencontrados como moradas, depois, em futuros esperados como oásis
humanos que um dia advirão (DOUVILLE, 2009, p. 332).
A cidade, assim, adquire valor simbólico ao ser sobre ela que se deslinda
a lógica de filiação que engendra o adolescente, bem como os conflitos urbanos
que performatizam o drama do jovem.
O encontro com a política de prevenção nos deu a segurança e o suporte
necessários para que fechássemos uma metodologia de ida a campo:
1 O Programa Fica Vivo! é um programa de prevenção social à criminalidade que possui foco na prevenção
e na redução de homicídios dolosos de adolescentes e jovens, atuando em áreas que registram maior
concentração de homicídios. O programa Fica Vivo! articula dois eixos de atuação: Proteção Social e
Intervenção Estratégica.
Para Sanjek (1990), voltamos do campo com dois tipos de nota: notas
de campo e notas de cabeça. As notas de cabeça são aspectos que trazemos
na memória sobre as experiências que vivemos. No entanto, sabemos que
a medida que o tempo passa nossa percepção pode mudar e vários detalhes
podem ser esquecidos ou sobrepostos. Por outro lado, as notas de campo são
documentos que demonstram de maneira concreta que o exercício de escrita
também é um exercício de observação e reflexividade sobre as situações, os
sujeitos de pesquisa e sobre o próprio papel de pesquisador. O ato de transfor-
mar notas de cabeça em notas de campo é uma forma de preservar uma série
de detalhes capturados pela lente do pesquisador em um dado momento. Uma
vez escritas, essas impressões tornam-se estáticas e podem ser confrontadas
com impressões posteriores e mais distanciadas, fornecendo material para a
construção de uma narrativa de inspiração etnográfica.
Neste tipo de narrativa, o olhar do pesquisador tem fundamental impor-
tância na construção dos resultados da pesquisa. Em primeiro lugar, isso ocorre
por conta da própria biografia do pesquisador (BOURDIEU, 2017), que em
campo é obrigado a “enfrentar seus limites de homem de uma cultura ou de
uma classe, segmento ou grupo social”, de modo que, “sua visão de mundo
estará marcada e de alguma maneira comprometida” (VELHO, 1980, p. 17).
Além disso, deve-se levar em consideração quais são as teorias que nor-
teiam a visão do pesquisador. Isso porque a preparação para uma investigação
empírica envolve uma focalização transformadora sobre aquilo que dirigimos
nosso olhar (CARDOSO, 1998). É nesse sentido que o pesquisador pode
passar a estranhar aspectos corriqueiros e que até então pareciam naturais.
Contudo, é importante ressaltar que a teoria não se compara à prática, uma vez
que as situações encontradas “em campo” nem sempre podem ser antecipadas
ou contornadas somente com base no treinamento do pesquisador. Por mais
que estejamos preparados, o campo pode e irá nos surpreender.
Sendo assim, buscamos percorrer as regiões da cidade de Belo Horizonte
atentos às características dos territórios e às interações sociais estabelecidas
com nossos interlocutores. Abaixo estão ilustradas as observações feitas pelos
pesquisadores de campo, que demonstram a capacidade de perceber e capturar
detalhes e singularidades.
Na reconstrução de uma das pesquisadoras, a região leste da cidade de
Belo Horizonte é uma região que engloba vários bairros tradicionais, sendo
que a grande maioria das residências se encontra em bairros atendidos por
serviços públicos como linhas de ônibus, ruas asfaltadas, iluminação pública,
saneamento básico. Em um dos endereços buscados em um desses bairros
tradicionais, notamos que todas as casas da rua possuíam câmeras de segu-
rança e cerca elétrica. No final de semana em que fomos a campo também
presenciamos nas praças, atividades físicas sendo realizadas ao ar livre em
grupos. Por outro lado, nos bairros mais desfavorecidos dessa regional nota-
mos que os endereços que localizamos são em sua grande maioria situados
em aglomerados e favelas onde as ruas ou becos são estreitos e comportam
A casa ficava para baixo do nível da rua. Havia uma escada de metal que
caia direto no espaço dedicado ao mesmo tempo a sala e a cozinha. A casa
parecia ter mais dois cômodos, sendo um deles o quarto de Eliane, com
uma cama de casal. As paredes da sala, ainda no reboco, estavam repletas
de fotos. Dissemos para Eliane que estávamos procurando seu filho por
conta de uma pesquisa e ela respondeu pesarosamente que ele e o irmão
estavam presos, mas que ela poderia contar sua história. Ela nos contou
que tinha sete irmãos e morou doze anos na rua com sua família, que se
mantinha com reciclagem. Disse que teve muita dificuldade para estudar
porque ajudava sua mãe com o trabalho, mas que apesar de ter vivido na
rua nunca se envolveu com prostituição e nem com tráfico de drogas [...].
Ela está desempregada e não tem condições de visitar periodicamente os
filhos, nem de levar chinelos e outros itens de higiene básicos que não são
fornecidos nas prisões. Para ela, W. está perdendo a melhor parte da vida
de seu filho. “Vale a pena tudo isso, W.?” – perguntava Eliane chorando
(Nota de campo, Pesquisador 1, Regional Oeste).
Ela não nos recepcionou muito bem, mas depois da explicação quanto à
pesquisa e, principalmente, depois da carta convite entregue, houve uma
mudança de postura (quebra-gelo). Retornamos por quatro vezes ao local
e não conseguimos encontrar o jovem para participar da pesquisa (Nota
de campo, Pesquisadora 2, Regional Nordeste).
Jardim Vitória aos 15 anos e de José que mudou-se de bairro aos 8 anos em
função do assassinato do irmão que era envolvido no tráfico.
Pra trazer esses atos infracionais que eu cometi, tudo tem um motivo.
Começou quando eu morava em Nova Cintra, foi 2005, dia 25 de março.
Tudo começou com o falecimento, da morte do meu irmão. Aí eu vim pra
cá, região Vila Formosa que é onde que eu moro, fiquei um pouco afas-
tado. Isso me corroía, machucava muito [...] Morava com a minha mãe,
com minhas irmãs e meu irmão, porque foi falecido lá. Aí nós morava
lá e depois nós foi... nós mudou pra cá, pra já, pra mim não... por causa
deu não envolver lá, né? Querendo ou não eu vi a morte do meu irmão,
querendo ou não abala. Aí você... (José, Regional Barreiro, 20 anos).
Tinha umas biqueira que os policial era muito covarde, né? De madru-
gada quando eles pegavam nós lá, eles regassava nóis sem dó. Um dia
lá, um menino conseguiu correr e eu e mais um não conseguiu não. Foi e
começou a pegar nóis mandou nóis sentar com a mão pra trás de frente
pra parede. Ai foi e começou a dar chutão em nóis [...] Dando soco na
barriga na costela [...] Isso é covardia que ele fez, mas é o trabalho deles
(Charles, Regional Oeste, 18 anos).
Tipo eles me pego, ué. Eles já me conhecia, que eu vendia droga antes,
né? Ai eles me pegou e queria que eu andasse com eles ai. Eu falei que
não ia e nós começou a brigar na mão, ai eu fui preso por desacato [...]
A justiça sempre é maior que todos os favelados. Favelado é foda. Pra
eles todo mundo é bandido, não importa se mudou, se quer mudar. Pra
eles, eles tem que catar e prender, bater. Porque aqui a polícia não tem
regra com ninguém não. Eles chegam, dá tapa na cara, chute. Dá tapa
na cara da mãe dos outros, dá tapa na cara de qualquer um. Eles não
querem saber de nada não. Para eles todo mundo é bandido. Quem não é
bandido, acoita [esconde] bandido. Pra eles é isso ai mesmo (H., Regional
Noroeste, 22 anos).
urbano, que pode ser observado como efeito do fenômeno das migrações entre
esses jovens e suas famílias. Segundo Douville (2002),
4. Consideração final
REFERÊNCIAS
ALMEIDA, B. G. M. A produção do fato da transformação do adolescente:
uma análise dos relatórios utilizados na execução da medida socioeducativa
de internação. Plural Revista de Ciências Sociais, v. 24, n. 1, p. 28-53, 2017.
DAS, V.; POOLE, D. Anthropology in the margins of the State. Santa Fe:
School of American Research Press, 2004.
1. Introduction
The research was made possible to a large extent because the law of the
National System of Socio-Educational Care (SINASE) instituted the obliga-
tion to draw up an Individual Care Plan (PIA) for all adolescents who go
through the Juvenile Justice System. The PIA is elaborated from the technical
assistance usually performed by psychology or social assistance profession-
als in the institutions responsible for the execution of the socio-educational
measures, and its purpose is to guide an interdisciplinary diagnosis, based on
the infractional, family, educational, occupational, communitary and medi-
cal care, serving primarily as a guide for court decisions on termination of
the measure. The information gathered in the PIA includes variables such as
gender, race, age, address, education level, visits to institutions of the social
assistance network, information related to infractional trajectory; as well as
information on family composition. To this information are added reports in
which the technicians of the social educative weave a narrative that describes
the trajectory of the adolescents attended from birth until the moment of their
passage through the Juvenile Justice System. Between November and Decem-
ber 2016, we collected 373 PIAs from the SAMRE (Freedom Restrictive
Measures) Service Sector that operates within the CIA-BH and is responsible
for directing the filing of the processes completed at the Child and Youth
Infrational Court.
The situation in which an adolescent offender encounters a socio-edu-
cational technician for the elaboration of this instrument may be marked by
a series of suspicions on the part of the latter, such as the suspicion that drug
involvement and/or absence of family supervision are possible causes of the
offense for which the young person should be held responsible. This logic of
suspicion may modulate the report made by adolescents and their families.
Thus, it is necessary to consider that, simultaneously with these knowledge-
power relations, strategies of resistance are developed, such as the exchange
of information among adolescents about what needs to be said, the conceal-
ment of behaviors and the manipulation of identity by adolescents and family
members (ALMEIDA, 2017). Aware of this, the coaches seek to confirm the
information by interviewing adolescents and family members separately and
contacting institutions through which the youth may eventually have gone.
Thus, the purpose of the PIA is to produce convincing descriptions of what
happened to justify the actions of the technical team, acting as a kind of insti-
tutional accountability, since they serve as an instrument mobilized by judges
to evaluate and supervise the work performed (ALMEIDA, 2017). Through
this instrument, we realize the mobilization of the administrative network of
the State and more specifically of social assistance, in order to induce a sub-
jective transformation of young people based on the notion of accountability
to prevent recidivism. Thus, an “analytical grid” is used based on a series of
suspicions that allow us to identify the risks and the degree of vulnerability
that these subjects are in to foster the interventions deemed necessary.
The territory and the relationships developed in it can be configured
as a source of risks and influence the commission of an offense or may be
responsible for situations of threat to the lives of young people under socio-
educational intervention. In this sense, the public operator is interested in
investigating the relationship of the youth with the territory in order to verify
the coordinates that can determine the commission of the offense or point out
prevention strategies. This can be seen in the excerpts below:
The adolescent and his family have a good relationship with their neigh-
bors and within the community, not presenting complications related to
social and community relations that the family develops (H., Northwest
Regional, 17 years old at the time of the PIA).
The teenager also says that other relatives are involved in the trafficking,
trafficking to a cousin, who is currently in prison. He reports that two
older brothers were killed by local trafficking. The first was allegedly
killed by his cronies and the second for reporting a trafficker. [...] José
does not report contact with institutions of the social assistance network
of his region, having only the previous monitoring of LA Barreiro and
CAPUT. About the latter, the mother reports that she did not like the
care she received at the institution, because she felt that the doctor was
holding her responsible for José’s behavior and drug use (José, Barreiro
Regional, 15 years old at the time of the elaboration of the PIA).
Despite the wealth of information contained in the PIAS, they did not
offer us the young man’s look at his story, only the look of the judiciary, with
its legal markers. In this sense, we decided to seek young people’s knowledge
about their own story, their trajectories and their relationship with crime and
the justice system.
In the present text, we intend to reconstruct the process of creating,
in an inventive act, a methodology of access to the research subjects. We
will recount in “a posteriori” our movements, sometimes free and some-
times planned by the communities, seeking to hear the story of some of these
young people.
In the first contact with the field, the teams realized that locating hundreds
of young people scattered in the city, having as their sole reference of loca-
tion the address dated a few years ago, would be a challenge to the research.
While looking for the addresses of these young people, we found in many
cases that there was no consensus between the formal and informal names
of particular addresses. Apart from this problem, we could not find certain
streets, either in physical cartography or through virtual tools. We noticed that
in that region, officially from above, there was no address. This is captured
by the field diary excerpt below:
In the search for the address of J, we came across a work of the city
hall that blocked traffic in some parts of the neighborhood. In addition,
we noted that the numbering of the streets was confusing, with numbers
bouncing enormously between one house and another. In some streets
we observed that some houses had two numbers, one of them flagged as
new or old. This suggests a recent process of postal matching of these
addresses. Also striking was the fact that some streets were given generic
names such as the street where the teenager lived: C Street (Field Note,
Researcher 1, Regional Barreiro).
Even digital maps, however, tend to be more accurate in areas that matter
most to users. Poor communities, such as the Orangi slum in Karachi, Paki-
stan, or the Neza-Chalco-Itza slum in Mexico City, are poorly represented
on maps. For others, with little access, such as North Korea and some war
countries, there is almost no information available (NUWER, 2014. p. 1).
Our strategy of meeting with young people was very similar to the
strategy of actively seeking Social Assistance, even meeting some of the
necessary criteria for this approach, as pointed out in the CRAS Techni-
cal Guidelines (BRASIL, 2009), which states that the active search must be
performed by relocating the reference team to learn about the territory; that
there should be contacts with local social actors (community leaders, neigh-
borhood associations) and information and data from other social assistance
and sectoral services.
The encounter with these regional facilities pointed us to a limited
coverage of the area and a difficulty to support us in this policy at that time
and in that territory, since they also did not have a very clear knowledge of
the territories in which they were inserted, and in some cases they did not
cover these territories to their full extent. However, even though the CRAS
could not help circulation, the service coordinator presented us with a tool
that would be extremely important for the field: GEOSUAS. This is a SUAS
Georeferencing and Geoprocessing System, aimed at both the managers and
workers of the SUAS (Unified Social Assistance System) policies, as well as
the population, through a collection of maps made available on a platform on
the internet. This system was developed in 2015 by the Territorial Studies and
Geoprocessing team of the Information, Monitoring and Evaluation Manage-
ment (GEIMA), of the Assistant Municipal Secretary of Social Assistance
of Belo Horizonte (SMAAS), in order to support decision-making strategies
in the management process of the National Social Assistance Policy. It is
a platform where an interactive and customizable map using Google Maps
identifies the contours of the municipal territory and its administrative divi-
sions, the location of addresses, it gathers information regarding the location
of equipment of the social care network, such as health centers, schools and
Social Welfare Reference Center and also interface policies. This tool, in
addition to enabling access and cross-checking of information throughout
the city, has the ability to build indicators according to the need of the ter-
ritory of operation, and therefore from the outset presented itself as a very
useful tool for our research.
Making use of this tool, through its “Citizen” interface, we launch all
the addresses of the survey youths on this map. Thus, in addition to guiding
information about the territory, we were able to select young people by their
proximity relationship, so that during the field trip, the pairs could make as
many visits as possible. By choosing the addresses to be visited, we located
on the map which nearby public facilities could be used to support further
information about the youth or the territory. We were able to think with more
strategy and organization our presence in the field.
Even with more planning, we realized that many addresses could not even
be launched on the platform, as official addresses did not match the names
of streets and alleys, bumping into the informal city wall again. There was a
cartographic void that even the GEOSUAS tool could not get around. Thus,
we realized that it was essential that they found some equipment of local
and territorial basis capable of translating the territory, filling with a proper
knowledge the cartographic void found in our instruments.
In this sense, we decided to contact the Criminal Prevention Centers
of the Territories visited so that, together with the “Homicide Control Pro-
gram: Fica Vivo”1 we could, in addition to finding the addresses identified
on the map, understand minimally the dynamics of violence in that territory,
in order to ensure the responsible circulation of teams across space. This is
not an exoticization of the field, but a way of anticipating and minimizing
some risk situations, such as the insertion of researchers in territories with
active conflicts.
Before we even went to the field, we had some new data: we knew which
regions had a higher or lower concentration of young people in the survey,
and what public facilities covered the territories in which the youth lived.
We had a sense of the social, political and violence dynamics that cross the
coordinates of those spaces. We had then transposed a logic of understanding
the formally geographical city into a logic of territory, as presented by Milton
Santos (2002) who, using the term “living territory”, revises the traditional
conception of geography. For the author, territory, rather than a mappable
geographical outline, is a living and dynamic organism that reflects and is
reflected by the reality that affects it. The territory “would be formed by the
inseparable set of the physical, natural or artificial substrate, plus its use, or,
in other words, the technical basis and the social practices, that is, a combina-
tion of technique and politics” (SANTOS, 2002, p. 87).
Douville (2009) presents us with a territory that goes beyond its geo-
graphical significance, added by symbolic layers that anchor the subject in
the logic of both the city and its affiliation:
It will be not only geographical layout, but also tops where memories of
the times, chronologies, affiliations are housed. Translation of immediate,
organic experience into narratives, memories, and pasts rediscovered as
housings, then into expected futures as human oases that will one day
come (DOUVILLE, 2009, p. 332).
1 The Program Fica Vivo! is a social crime prevention program that focuses on the prevention and reduction
of intentional homicides of adolescents and young people, working in areas with the highest concentration
of homicides. The program articulates two areas of action: Social Protection and Strategic Intervention.
The city thus acquires symbolic value by being within it that the logic
of affiliation that engenders the adolescent, as well as the urban conflicts that
performatize the drama of the youth.
Meeting the prevention policy gave us the security and support needed
to close a field-based methodology:
We stayed in the field between September 2018 and February 2019 and
visited 109 addresses in the city of Belo Horizonte. One of our greatest dif-
ficulties along this whole path – spatial and temporal – was the location of the
young people: after approximately three years of the elaboration of the PIA,
many moved. In the active search for these subjects, we often did not find
them, either because they had moved, or because at that address there was
no one who knew them, since the neighbors could not tell if the person with
that name resided there, or by mismatch situations between researchers and
young people, since the visits took place on weekdays, during business hours.
After 6 months of work, we closed the field work after conducting only 13
interviews, and of these, only 6 young people answered the questionnaire,
that is, fulfilling both steps of our methodological strategy. In addition to data
collected in the field, we also conducted external surveys done by the research
team, which indicated that of the 373 young people in the initial sample, 16
had been murdered and 69 were trapped in the adult system.
state coordinates over that plane. Health care policies are unaware of health
policies, the limits of coverage differ and do not talk about microregions, so
that the mere physical presence of public facilities in space does not allow an
approximation of the state to the population.
In the next two sections of the text, we will describe our attempt to
capture particular dimensions invisible through the two lenses of the state.
We will present the reading of the researchers about the characteristics of the
territories visited and the situations of interaction with the research subjects
and other interlocutors. Next, we will explore the look and perceptions of our
research subjects about where they live.
For Sanjek (1990), we return from the field with two types of notes: field
notes and head notes. The head notes are aspects we bring to mind about the
experiences we live. However, we know that, as time goes by, our percep-
tion may change and various details may be forgotten or overlapped. On the
other hand, field notes are documents that concretely demonstrate that the
writing exercise is also an observation and a reflexivity exercise about the
situations, the research subjects and about the researcher’s own role. Turning
head notes into field notes is a way of preserving a series of details captured
by the researcher’s lens at any given time. Once written, these impressions
become static and can be confronted with later and more distant impressions,
providing material for the construction of an ethnographic-inspired narrative.
In this type of narrative, the researcher’s view is of fundamental impor-
tance in the construction of research results. Firstly, this is due to the research-
er’s own biography (BOURDIEU, 2017), who, in the field, is obliged to
“face his limits as a man of a culture or of a class, segment or social group”,
so that “his own worldview will be marked and somehow compromised”
(VELHO, 1980 p. 17).
In addition, one must take into consideration the theories that guide
the researcher’s view. This is because preparing for an empirical investiga-
tion involves a transformative focus on what we direct our gaze on (CAR-
DOSO, 1998). It is in this sense that the researcher may start to find strange
aspects that until then seemed natural. However, it is important to emphasize
that the theory does not compare with practice, since the situations found
“in the field” cannot always be anticipated or avoided only based on the
researcher’s training. No matter how prepared we are, the course can and
will surprise us.
The period we were in the field coincided with the realization of a series
of urban interventions, carried out by the city hall in various regions of the
city. In the Northwest region we managed to capture some effects of these
interventions on the daily lives of local communities.
We had difficulty locating the first address because of the confusing num-
bering and urban intervention that was taking place there. We stopped to
ask at a bar and the owner, who has lived in the area for 18 years, informed
us that several residents were evicted and several houses were destroyed
due to the intervention. In the middle of this, was one of the houses we
were looking for. However, according to the owner of the bar, the young
man was in prison and his family had been expelled from the place, even
before the urban intervention. The newly opened street in front of the bar
was now being paved. In another house, we found the grandmother (Gigi)
of a teenager we were looking for. Gigi said the urban intervention had
made drug outlets shrink and police presence on the scene was smaller
and less truculent than at other times. She reported that earlier, when
police conducted operations in the area, young people who were in the
drug dens used to run up the alleys running for refuge in any open door.
In one of these situations, Gigi told us that a police officer even came into
her house and forced in by kicking the door (Field Note, Researcher 1,
Northwest Region).
The intervention of the city hall is to integrate certain territories into the
formal city, providing late access to basic services such as paving roads and
increasing the visibility of these places for state lenses, especially the police.
Regarding the interactions between the researchers and the interlocu-
tors we met in the field, it is important to point out the collaboration of the
residents of the visited territories, since a large part of the young people we
were looking for no longer lived in the addresses we had access to. It is also
interesting to point out that in some situations, even the neighbors could not
tell if anyone with the name we were looking for had resided there. Field
reports provide evidence that residential change for young people and their
families may be related to the dynamics of crime in the territories.
We talked to a neighbor from the front, who told us that A. moved with
her family a little over five (5) months ago, not knowing how to inform
her whereabouts. The neighbor, who asked not to be named, appeared to
be afraid, said the family moved because of the young man V., saying that
in one episode, a friend of V. was killed in his place. He said that on the
day of the event, several hooded bikers arrived at the scene looking for
V., that his friend was scared and ran, the moment when the bikers took
several firearm shots, targeting the boy. Within a few weeks from this situ-
ation, he got up in the morning at his residence and saw a moving truck
parked outside A’s house. Since then, they have completely lost touch.
She further stated that V. is involved in crime (Field Note, Researcher 2,
Northeast Region).
Even with the researchers identified, there were situations in which neigh-
bors were reluctant to give some information about the young person we were
We searched for the address, but the street numbering varied in a schizo-
phrenic way, so we couldn’t find the address we were looking for. We
knocked on a house and were met by a lady who said she knew the
young person’s mother. When we asked about W., the neighbor soon dis-
suaded and said it would be best if we asked Eliane directly (Field Note,
Researcher 1, West Region).
The situations in which we located the family address, but the young
person was in prison, gave us the opportunity to capture some aspects of
intimacy, family dramas, and trajectories of parents or guardians.
The house was below street level. There was a metal staircase that fell
straight into the space dedicated to both the living room and the kitchen.
The house seemed to have two more rooms, one of them being Eliane’s
room, with a double bed. The walls of the room, still in plaster, were full
of photos. We told Eliane that we were looking for her son for a survey
and she said ruefully that he and his brother were under arrest, but that
she could tell her story. She told us that she had seven siblings and lived
on the street for twelve years with her family, sustaining themselves with
recycling. She said that she had a hard time studying because she helped
her mother with her work, but that, despite having lived on the street,
she never became involved in prostitution or drug trafficking [...]. She
is unemployed and unable to visit her children periodically, nor to bring
slippers and other basic hygiene items that are not provided in prisons. For
her, W. is losing the best part of his life. “Is this all worth it, W.? – asked
Eliane, crying (Field Note, Researcher 1, West Region).
If we found the family residence but the young person was working or
was away due to some other reason, we would leave an invitation letter. An
interesting fact of the field was that even leaving the letter of invitation in
many homes, we never had the positive feedback. Meeting the young man
was no guarantee that we would be able to get their cooperation. Narrating
one’s own life is a tricky thing, and it is perfectly understandable for a subject
to deny opening himself to a stranger who knocks on their door. In addition,
some young people may have refused to participate in the survey because
they suspected that researchers were part of the socio-educational system. A
trace of this attitude of suspicion and subsequent refusal was captured in the
following note:
She did not welcome us very well, but after the explanation of the research
and especially after the invitation letter was delivered, there was a change
of posture (icebreaker). We returned four times to the site and could not
find the young person to participate in the survey (Field Note, Resear-
cher 2, Northeast Region).
The researchers’ lens at the field captured the articulation between the
formal and informal city, visualized by urbanistic interventions that coexist
with various illegalities. It was also possible to observe the pulsating life in the
movement of various actors and their agencies within the territory. Finally, it
was possible to realize that young people can instrumentalize the invisibility
marked by the State, as a strategy of protection and resistance within their
own territories, as they escape the focus of policies, public security, or, in this
case, researchers. The richness of this telephoto lens does not yet exhaust the
particularity of the subject’s lens, addressed by the research.
these places in their own life course. Of the 6 young people who participated
in the two moments of the research, 5 were born in the city of Belo Horizonte,
and of these, only two (H. and Francisco) did not move from the territories
where they were born.
The migration dynamics of these young people can be divided into two
categories. First is the migration between neighborhoods of the city, which can
be observed in the case of Charles, who moved from São Gabriel to Jardim
Vitória at the age of 15, and José, who moved from his neighborhood at 8
years old due to the murder of his brother whom was involved in trafficking.
So (pause) my name is Cecilia, I’m 21 years old, I’m from Minas Gerais,
I was born in Itambacuri Minas Gerais which is very close to Teófilo
Otoni, I lived there during my... until I was 11 years old. At the age of 11,
my parents decided to move to Acre, so we left the countryside and went
straight to Acre to the house of an aunt of mine who was having a marriage
problem. Arriving in Acre, my mother did not adapt to the weather because
it is very hot there, so it was (break) 8 months living in Acre. From Acre
we came straight here, to Horto, we live here since 2012, since 2012 we
are here [...]. I was very young and we have never adapted anywhere since
I was little. It was very difficult for me because I never had a childhood
best friend, for example. I don’t know, things that people have... a long
friendship. I was always moving. But after we came to Belo Horizonte
things got a little better, you know? I have friends since I moved here and
so I keep going (Cecilia, East Region, 21 years old).
Cecilia points out very clearly the consequences of her family’s migra-
tions on her opportunities to establish strong and lasting social bonds. It is
possible to conjecture that the beginning of her infractionary trajectory is
related to processes of acceptance in groups, as a substitute for a community
logic. An indication of this statement lies in the fact that in her narrative her
infractional act does not appear.
There is also, in the discourse of young people, an ambivalent relation-
ship regarding belonging to the territory. Some point to a dissatisfaction with
the territory and a lack of community articulation, culminating, in many narra-
tives, in a desire to move out. Responding to the survey, Poet, H and Francisco
expressed a desire to move. Paradoxically, these young people also reported
enjoying the coexistence in their neighborhoods, although they interpret that
the relationships were crossed by envy and interest.
On the other hand, the questionnaire also brings the perception of young
people about the lack of basic services and leisure options. Cecilia, who has
no desire to move from her neighborhood and says she is satisfied with the
location and ease of access to public transportation in her neighborhood, says
she is dissatisfied with leisure options for her daughter.
The questionnaire shows a certain naturalization of violence, either in
the landscape of the territory or its incidence in the trajectories of these young
people. José, Charles and H stated in the survey that people were selling
drugs and carrying firearms in their territory. The narratives corroborate the
questionnaires as they also portray episodes of instrumentalization and even
trivialization of violence.
There were some drug houses in which the cops were very coward, right?
At dawn when they got us there, they would beat us without pity. One
day there, a boy was able to run and I and one could not. He went and
picked us up and told us to sit with our hands in our backs facing the
wall. Then they went and started kicking us [...] Punching our belly, in
the ribs [...] That’s cowardice what they did, but it’s their job (Charles,
West Regional, 18).
Like, they caught me, right. They already knew me, that I sold drugs before,
right? Then they got me and wanted me to walk with them there. I said I
wouldn’t go and we started fighting hand by hand, then I was arrested for
contempt [...] Justice is always bigger than every favelado. Favelado is
fucked up. For them everyone is a thug, no matter if they changed, if they
want to change. For them, they have to catch and arrest, beat up. Because
here the police don’t have according with no one. They arrive, slap you in
the face, kick. Slap the face of someone else’s mother, slap anybody’s faces.
The meeting of these young people with the lens of the state does not
always proceed within the legality. In these territories, the relations between
the formal, the informal, the legal and the illegal are blurred, so that the
boundaries between the Rule of Law and the State of Exception are in constant
tension (DAS; POOLE, 2004). Young people, as well as public security agents,
are subject to a relational dynamic of specular polarization of identity, but
they share the instrumentalization of extra-legal forms of conflict resolution.
The state’s wide-angle lens, with its generic landscape focus, ends up
reading all residents of certain places as belonging to a specific social type:
essentially criminal subjects, even though most are not involved in criminal
practices. This indistinct treatment of the police with those who inhabit these
territories, fosters disbelief about the legitimacy of state action while strength-
ening and legitimizing local orders of their own.
It’s cool here. It’s big here. It’s just a guy who rules everything here. At
the moment he is in jail, but that doesn’t change anything. Here are the
parts, right? Every... There are many dudes also. A lot of people involved,
there are about 5, 6 drughouses here.
The dudes don’t let it, because they take the residents too much into
account. The locals’ word is what counts. In the other drughouse up there,
[inaudible], you can’t smoke. There you cannot smoke through the whole
street. This whole street until up there you can’t smoke weed. Before you
could, but the locals started complaining that people were smoking on
their doorstep and stuff and the guys forbade it. You can’t smoke weed
there. [...]. It is not worth it for us wanting to discuss with them and want-
ing something from them. They have a lot of voice. There is no point in
wanting to argue with them, we would be left without support. Because
the biggest voice is theirs. Because we argue with them, we get no support
here, right? Because there are times, just like... There are people who are
not working some day in the drughouse, the streets are quiet and they
[the police] arrive knocking. Then the residents also help, because here
nobody treats residents bad and these things. Residents also help, but it’s
not everyone either. There are residents who... But then we don’t even
look at them either. Nobody gets bothered, which is better (H., Regional
Noroeste, 22 anos).
All this complexity presented through the adolescent’s own eye presents
us with a logic of mobility that often occurs in a short circuit, where young
people move from the territory due to economic dynamics or violence and
return to it also within this coordinate. Throughout their reports, what we real-
ize is that these young people glide back and forth through the territories that
do not exert such pregnancy on them. There is a logic of domain, but not of
identity of these young people with the urban space, which can be observed
as an effect of the phenomenon of migration between these young people and
their families. According to Douville (2002),
them, as are the neighborhood and, later, the city (DOUVILLE, 2002). This
intertwining between young people and the polis indicates that the landscape
needs to be interpreted in its relationship with the young, since it is about it
that the subject establishes a relationship with his marks, his sayings, and his
fellow men.
4. Final consideration
REFERENCES
ALMEIDA, B. G. M. A produção do fato da transformação do adolescente:
uma análise dos relatórios utilizados na execução da medida socioeducativa
de internação. Plural Revista de Ciências Sociais, v. 24, n. 1, p. 28-53, 2017.
DAS, V.; POOLE, D. Anthropology in the margins of the State. Santa Fe:
School of American Research Press, 2004.
1 Projeto: Curso de vida e trajetória delinquencial: um estudo exploratório dos eventos e narrativas de jovens
em situação de vulnerabilidade (2017-2019), pesquisa transdisciplinar entre Sociologia, Psicanálise e Edu-
cação, de universidades de MG e RS, parcialmente financiada pelo IEAT-UFMG.
Meu pai, por po po por [ele se atrapalha na fala] pouca coisa antes, quando
a gente era criança, agredia a gente por bobeira. Agredia assim, na forma
dele, era correção. Só que isso em mim gerava um ódio de tal forma, que
pensava que eles vão pagar isso de alguma forma um dia. E aí comecei
a fazer coisas para tentar chamar a atenção deles. Essas coisas no caso
seriam as mais bizarras que eu poderia fazer, que estavam ao meu alcance
fazer, até para eu mesmo não morrer (Aron).
Aron parece envelopar sua história com certa linearidade, como uma
relação causa e efeito, a partir da agressão do pai. Houve uma decisão pelo
crime, mas não diretamente. Foi, antes, para chamar a atenção dos pais, para
os fazerem “pagar”, “ferrar eles”. “Comecei a roubar no supermercado, uma
balinha, um chocolate. [silêncio] Aí, eu lembro que com 8 anos de idade nessa
situação que estava da separação levei um revólver para a escola... Sem porquê,
nem para quê. Comecei demonstrando meus sentimentos nessas ações [...]”,
contra algo que ele parece reconhecer como “me deixaram só”. Seu início
no crime aconteceu aos 8 anos com atos infracionais mais simples, até que,
paulatinamente, foram se tornando mais perigosos. Isso se reflete na própria
trajetória escolar em que aparece, primeiramente, a agressão, o uso de arma,
para depois chegar à degradação do patrimônio e às consequentes mudanças
de instituição. Sua delinquência demonstra estar muito atrelada à instituição
educativa. Quando perguntado sobre o que acha que os professores pensam
dele, responde de maneira aparentemente resignada: “decepção”.
3 Data alterada em razão da ética na pesquisa, para que o sujeito tenha sua identidade preservada.
Não sei, sério mesmo... Não sei o que falar não... [tosse] A vida do crime foi
bobagem à toa, um trem assim, lero-lero, usuário. Por isso, nós entrou foi
no CIA, umas duas, três vezes, eu acho. Uns trens assim lero-lero, 1554...
Tipo isso aí quando era mais novo. Agora já tenho tipo uns 21 anos. Isso
4 Art. 155, Lei nº 2.848, de 7/12/1940, do Código Penal Brasileiro: “Subtrair, para si ou para outrem,
coisa alheia móvel. Furto de coisa comum. Pena: reclusão, de um a quatro anos, e multa”
(detalhado em 7 parágrafos). Disponível em: https://www.jusbrasil.com.br/topicos/10619836/
artigo-155-do-decreto-lei-n-2848-de-07-de-dezembro-de-1940?ref=serp-featured
aí é quando era mais novo, uns 15, 13 anos, gostava de andar de moto
e ver os outros andando. Agora já tá de boas já. Trabalhei já, comprei
minha moto. Agora nem estou mais não, estou de boas. Minha moto está
ali parada ali fora, aquela verde que está ali (Vinícius).
Agora é eu, faço só entrega mesmo de lanche. Ainda não tenho carteira,
não. Tô querendo tirar. Trenzinho à toa, sô Trem de crime é foda, ilusão!
Tinha um amigo. Ele foi lá, tinha uma moto, ele foi lá e perdeu a moto,
ele estava cabritando. Aí, os homens foram lá e levaram a moto dele. Aí,
eu achei que ele ia comprar outra moto. Ele foi lá e caçou roubada. No
primeiro dia morreu. Amigo mesmo. Primo, eu chamo ele de primo. Meu
amigo não, amigo é... É isso. Gosto nem de falar não [fala com nó na
garganta e se cala] (Vinícius).
O que mais me deixou assim, mas traumatizado não, [me deixou] sen-
tido, foi ter crescido sem meu pai. A questão não é ter crescido sem ele.
Foda-se! Mas sendo rejeitado por ele. Minha mãe, ela era muito nova
e teve problemas no relacionamento deles. Aí, isso acabou me afetando.
Ela não olhou mais para meu lado, olhou mais para o lado deles dois.
Aí, isso acabou me afetando um pouco [...] (José).
José parece narrar, de saída, um duplo lugar entre dois que experimenta
em sua biografia: o lugar da adolescência, entre a infância e a adultez, pró-
prio desse momento da vida em nossas sociedade ocidentais, e o lugar que
(não) ocupa entre o pai e a mãe, relativo à ausência do olhar de ambos sobre
si mesmo. Mas é o “não olhar” do pai que o comove de fato, pois o da mãe
parece se dar em consequência do não olhar do pai, de apenas preocupar-se
com o marido. Em outros termos: ambos, mãe e filho, demonstram ser reféns
de um mesmo ponto gravitacional: o pai. Presumimos o quanto deve ser difícil,
e soa até retórico, o momento de José dizer “foda-se!” a esse túnel subjetivo,
buraco mal recoberto pelo não olhar do outro. Constatar tal buraco pode ter
servido como gatilho para a vida infracional do jovem, iniciada com a “direção
perigosa”, mantendo hoje o “consumo de drogas”. Quando perguntado sobre
o principal sentimento que o crime produz em si, a resposta não haveria de ser
outra: “conflito”. O termo parece dar nome à sua trajetória, pois demonstra ser
o que demarca sua relação com o pai e com a delinquência. Notamos que, no
contexto infracional, a polícia o agride, mas é a agressão do pai que o marca:
REFERÊNCIAS
FREUD, S. Fragmento da análise de uma caso de histeria – “Dora”. In:
FREUD, S. Edição Standard Brasileira das Obras Psicológicas Completas
de Sigmund Freud. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1980b. v. 7.
RODRÍGUEZ, C. Aportes para pensar por caso: una cuestión de detalles. In:
FRIGERIO, G.; KORINFELD, D.; RODRÍGUEZ, C. (org.) Trabajar en
instituciones: los oficios del lazo. Buenos Aires: Novoeduc, 2018 (Colección
Ensayos y Experiencias, Tomo 109).
serving them as societal reference which would allow them to situate them-
selves as active partners within their social ties. But what we see are symbolic
requests for death in search of limits as awkward and painful attempts to place
themselves in the world, to ritualize the passage to adulthood, to re-mark the
moment when the act has an advantage over the dimension of meaning. As
Lacadée (2011) claims, these would be “risky conducts”, aimed at ensuring the
value of existence and removing the fear of inconsistency and insignificance.
Rather, they would be attempts to exist rather than to die or to kill.
Violence and delinquency are perfectly normal in those who have not been
symbolically recognized. The only way these people can be recognized is
by the act, since the word or the language refuses to recognize them. [So]
the teenager is exposed to the possibility of delinquency and becoming
violent [...] (MELMAN, 2000, p. 33, our translation).
[...] The perverse is the one who constitutes and practices perversion,
that is, the version of the law by itself or from itself (versionem de per si
or per versionem), refusing the law of the other, transgressing it for their
own enjoyment, as well as for the enjoyment of those who follow him.
The perverse, unlike society in general, is interested in the adolescent,
imaginatively recognizes his sexual drive, and offers real conditions for
his modes of enjoyment to take effect outside the law (PEREIRA, 2019,
p. 43, our translation).
1. Thinking by case
1 Project: Life course and criminal trajectory: an exploratory study of the events and narratives of vulnerable
young people (2017-2019), transdisciplinary research between Sociology, Psychoanalysis and Education,
from universities of Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul, partially funded by IEAT-UFMG.
Assistance System of Belo Horizonte, and are now egresses of such system.
We select here, as a gaze on the theme of this chapter, the trajectory of entry
into crime of 5 of these subjects. We made use of the Individual Assistance
Plans (Planos Individuais de Atendimento – PIA) as a toolbox, which allowed
access to biographical data of the research subjects, including the history of
their infractions; as a questionnaire about the life and criminal trajectory of
each one of them, with more than 70 questions; and as Narrative Memoir,
an undirected interview so that each youngster could freely tell the story of
their own life.
Therefore, based on these tools and with a psychoanalytic reading, we
seek to outline the trajectories of each subject in regard to the entry into crime,
as well as the possible permanence and exit out of crime. For the sake of the
analysis, we have emphasized discursive regularities, which are common
features in such trajectories, allowing us to create broader analytic categories,
while still scandalizing the many discursive singularities that would be the
unique ways in which each one – treated, henceforth, as a “case” – inscribes
its own subjectivity in the concerned infraction. “[...] The subjectivity that
makes the case implies contradictory, or at least disconcerting, association of
principles or data, which are capable of destabilizing the consciousness of a
belief. This singularity breaks the generalization thread to provoke a reflec-
tion” (RODRÍGUEZ, 2018, p. 124, our translation).
In all cases, we seek to follow the Freudian statement concerning his
own clinical research work of archaeological connotation, according to which:
Let us think by case. We will present the first reflection about the initia-
tion in crime of five young people who make up the universe of the research
subjects in reference. The analysis of their trajectories allowed us to highlight
points that are tangential and that also differ in relation to the reasons and the
moment of the criminal origins of each one. We chose the codenames Luís,
Aron, Carlos, Vinicius and José, with processes in the Belo Horizonte Socio-
Educational Service System (Sistema de Atendimento Socioeducativo de Belo
Horizonte), to think on a case by case basis and to make some detail of their
own subjective singularities emerge in order to “[...] reach other intelligibilities
1. Luís – “It was a friends’ thing”: “I got into crime at 14, I started
selling drugs. Then that was it. The first few times it was smooth,
then I started to ride, I passed through the CIA2 and [I was arrested]
the same day. After I left, I returned to the same place to sell drugs.
Over time, I was arrested again”. Luís begins his teenage infrac-
tional trajectory through drug trade and, as he points out, it was
one crime after another. He was constantly caught by the police,
but even so, would still sell drugs again. Faced with the question of
how he went into crime, the answer came clearly: “it was a friends’
thing”. The “boca de fumo” (the spot where the drugs were sold)
known as “Biqueira” was the physical space where crime occurred
and where he met friends. Often it was also the place of advice and
symbolic barriers. Once he fled the restricted freedom institution,
it was his friends from Biqueira who told him to return and comply
with the socio-educational measure, taking him back to the institu-
tion. We note that in Biqueira there is congregation, work, sharing
and significance of life, a kind of place that supersedes societal
ideals. There, the youngster can address an even present other one.
If the school would usually present itself as a privileged space for
such addressing, in the case of Luis, who was not enrolled in any,
he transferred this reference space to Biqueira.
Since he was 13 years old, it was the place where he found friends, a
relationship with trafficking, awareness and also police violence. “I
sold drugs, I got beat by the police, I had to run, there is no peace,
in this world there is not. Then I rode again, I spent 8 months in
restricted freedom, but that was good for me, I’m fine, I’m not a
minor anymore.” His adolescence arises as a psychic short circuit
whose time was adequate to “run”, to be caught by the police and
to have no peace between one crime and another. “I had 11 CIA
records, 5 for trafficking, the last time I rode it was type 7, it was
for stealing a car, I and another one”. His entry into the crime has
elements that stand out, but none of them serves as a compass to
explain by itself the beginning of the infractional trajectory: reloca-
tion, two friends killed with guns and the loss of a family member
2 Integrated Center for Adolescent Care Author of Infrational Act of Belo Horizonte – (Centro Integrado de
Atendimento ao Adolescente Autor de Ato Infracional de Belo Horizonte – CIA-BH).
My father, for fo fo for [he stutters in his speech] small things, before,
when we were children, used to beat us for small things. I mean the beat-
ing, in his way, was a correction. But it generated such hatred in me that
I thought they would pay for it somehow some day. And then I started
doing things to try to get their attention. These things in this case would
be the most bizarre I could do, that were at my reach, because I didn’t
want to die (Aron).
Aron seems to wrap his story with some linearity, as a cause and effect
relationship, from the point of his father’s aggression. There was a decision
for crime, but not directly. It was rather to get the attention of parents, to make
them “pay”, to “screw them”. “I started stealing the supermarket, a candy,
a chocolate. [silence] Then, I remember that when I was 8 years old, in that
situation of separation, I took a gun to school...No reason, no purpose. I
started showing my feelings in these actions [...]”, against something that he
seems to recognize as “they left me alone”. His onset of crime came at age
eight with simpler infractions until they gradually became more dangerous.
This is reflected in the very school trajectory in which aggression appears first,
then the use of a gun, and then property damage and the consequent changes
in institution. His delinquency appears to be closely tied to the educational
institution. When asked what he thinks teachers think about himself, he then
responds in a seemingly resigned way: “disappointment”.
[...] but in the life trajectory it is totally different, an ordinary person likes
to play, likes to tease, that’s not only that which many think that a young
person who commits infractional acts, which only commits crime. He also
jokes, makes fun, what he does there doesn’t reach the people around him.
Likewise, each has their own story, to begin with. What was the mark in
childhood, or something that happened [...]. Because whether we want it
or not, we are all ordinary young people among society (Carlos).
3 Date changed due to research ethics, so that the subject has their identity preserved.
I don’t know, really... I don’t know what to say... [cough] The life in crime
was a silly thing, stuff like that, foolishness, drug user. Because of that,
we went into the CIA a couple of times, three times, I think. Some stuff
like that, foolishness, 1554... Stuff like this when I was younger. Now I’m
about 21 years old. That’s when I was younger, about 15, 13 years old,
I used to like riding a motorcycle and watching other people ride. Now
it’s all good. I’ve already worked, bought my bike. Now I’m not in that
anymore, I’m good. My motorcycle is standing there, that green one that
is there (Vinícius).
The crime in Vinícius’s life is deeply linked to the motorcycle. The one
he wishes for and for which his cousin died. This death will act as a trigger
for his entry into crime.
It’s me now, I only deliver meals. I don’t have a license yet. I want to get
it. Pointless stuff, man. This crime stuff is a fucking illusion! There was a
friend. He went there, he used to have a motorbike, he went there and lost
the bike, he was doing a wheelie. Then the police went there and took his
bike. Then I thought he was going to buy another bike. He went there and
4 Art. 155, Law nº 2.848, of nº 12.7.1940, of the Brazilian Penal Code: “Subtrair, para si ou para
outrem, coisa alheia móvel. Furto de coisa comum. Pena: reclusão, de um a quatro anos, e
multa” (detailed in 7 paragraphs). Available at: https://www.jusbrasil.com.br/topicos/10619836/
artigo-155-do-decreto-lei-n-2848-de-07-de-dezembro-de-1940?ref=serp-featured
looked for trouble. On the first day, he died. A real friend. Cousin, I call
him cousin. My friend no, a friend is... That’s it. I don’t even like to talk
about it [he speaks emotionally and goes silent] (Vinícius).
What left me like this – but not traumatized, [it made me] sad, was mostly
growing up without my father. The point is not to have grown up without
him. Fuck it! But being rejected by him. My mother, she was very young
and had problems in their relationship. Then it ended up affecting me.
She was no longer looking to my side, but to those two. Then it ended up
affecting me a little [...] (José).
José seems to narrate, from the outset, a double place between two that
he experiences in his biography: the place of adolescence between childhood
and adulthood, proper to this moment of life in our western societies; and the
place that he occupies (not) between the father and the mother, relative to the
absence of their look towards himself. But it is the “not looking” of the father
which really moves him, since that his mother’s seems to be a consequence
of his father’s, as if she just worried about her husband. In other words, both
mother and child indicate they are hostages of the same gravitational point:
the father. We assume how difficult it must be, and it even sounds rhetorical,
when José says, “Fuck it!” to this subjective tunnel, a hole barely covered
by the not looking of the other. Finding such a hole may have served as a
trigger for the infractional life of the young man, initiated with “dangerous
driving”, and maintaining it today with “drug use”. When asked about the
main sentiment that crime produces in him, the answer could be no other:
“conflict”. The term seems to give his trajectory its name, as it proves to be
what demarcates his relationship with his father and delinquency. We note
that in the infractional context, the police assaults him, but it is his father’s
aggression that marks him: “There was a problem at school, the girl I was
dating passed by my father’s house and said a lot of things there...I actually
had a gun, but she exaggerated... My father not knowing anything about the
things she had exaggerated about, then, my father came, not knowing any-
thing, trying to beat me, to beat my mother, then there was police... lately it’s
like this, he is there and I am here, we don’t even talk anymore”. Due to the
“dangerous driving” by which he was caught, he complied with the Socio-
Educational Measure of Assisted Freedom and Community Service at age 16
as an isolated infraction in his life history. Today he reveals that he uses drugs.
I’ve been to the place that you said because of the motorcycle, that stuff.
Since I was a kid, I always liked motorcycles, adrenaline... Then, when I
was 16 years old, I had a record at the CIA because of dangerous driving,
I paid with community service here at the Health Center. But after that I
had no more problems with the justice (José).
This schism is only there representing the deepest schism, situated between
what the subject refers to in the machinery of the dream, the image of the
child approaching with a gaze full of reproach and, on the other hand,
what causes it and what it fails at, invocation, child’s voice, solicitation
of the gaze – Father, can’t you see... [I’m burning] (LACAN, 1964/1988,
p. 72, our translation).
and José, each in their own way, communicate to us common and non-casual
signifiers about their lives and initiation experiences that can best guide our
actions, interventions and perhaps our policies for youth.
The first regularity to highlight in the narrative of these young people is
the early experience of a loved one’s death in troubled circumstances or the
experience of aggression by someone close to them, from whom one would
not ideally expect. Without having sufficient symbolic resources to cover or
explain such events, traumatic experience demonstrates that it fixes these
subjects to the deadly designs of the death drive, without being able to create
meaningful substitution, societal ideals, or a quilting point to the destructive
impulse that permeates their lives. Still, young people seem to accept the death
of the other or the aggression by a family member, for example, by trying to
interpret them with the signifiers that are precariously at hand, among them
that of crime, as confirmation of the drive design, and of the socio-educational
measure itself, as an attempt to cover or repair such design.
Another regularity that can be inferred, and which is intrinsically linked
to the early experience of death and aggression, concerns the experience of
abandonment. Everyone, in a way or another, seems to have been left to their
own devices early on. The place between two to which they were relegated
as teenagers proves to be exponentially potentiated by their sense of social
abandonment. This can invariably contribute to the fact that their subjective
“tunnels”, excavated from both sides – as Freud (1905/1980a) elucidates – are
very poorly covered and equally unsuccessful in terms of moving from side
to side: from a childhood often abandoned to an almost always rejected adult-
hood. A kind of aimlessness seems to come as a result of this, leading them as
a rule to the experience of excess, transgression, and confrontation with society.
We also emphasize how much the experience of entry into crime can
influence peers, whether they are colleagues, friends, gangs, brothers, cousins
etc. Our small sample does not allow us to take such inference as regularity,
since only Luís was explicit about it. But we notice that most of them report
some form of influence from their neighbors, sometimes more subtly, some-
times more visibly. The fact is that the infractional act emerges as a common
passage and experience related to the circumstances of these young people
from the peripheral neighborhoods, with early and destructive experiences,
and coming together in pairs to perhaps support them more mild. In the places
where they live, crime makes up their daily lives and none of them refers, at
first, to their act of delinquency as a crime. They begin with less expressive
acts and gradually become hooked into the world of misdemeanor. At times,
it took an unexpected event for them to become aware of themselves and
where they were in, such as someone’s death, for example, generating some
reflection on their permanence (or not) in this world.
Finally, the most substantial discursive regularity, when considering
psychoanalytic orientation as a way of reading the cases under consideration,
was the presence or absence of the other and the very experience of other-
ness these young people go through. Most of them knew, not by chance, the
excesses of this other in very diverse records: abuse, aggression, death, aban-
donment. Relational, affective, sexual, and adaptive problems become, in fact,
problems of symbolic or societal regulation that, as such, do not seem to rely
on an other as a reference to guide it. The absence of this regulation (and of
the other which sustains it) does not create in the life of these young effective
societal barriers against the drive short circuit and the libidinal aimlessness
to which they are subjected.
In Deprivation and Delinquency, Winnicott (1984/2002) will say that
there is an inherent relationship between the antisocial tendency and the
youngster’s own deprivation. It is as if he recognizes that the other owes them
something, that the environment in which this other is, deprived themselves
of something very fundamental for them to constitute themselves as a subject.
And what deprivation do you say? In our terms: of an unnamed desire of this
other towards the youngster. Once deprived of this, an archaic aggressiveness
would derive, which, if not externalized, could destroy the youngster himself
and his social ties. However, precisely by directing it out of the Self in the
form of crime, the act of the perpetrator can “act” on him, even penalizing
him, apparently without causing discomfort in virtue of this.
To put it another way: either externalized or internalized, crime does not
fail to sanction a disastrous fate to the youngster.
The reason for such a sanction may lie, among other reasons, in the need
for that same youngster to signify the lack of the other – usually a referent
adult who is deprived of their desire. Therefore, we suspect that for some
young people, the infraction may mean a way for them to present themselves
to one another, convened as such to take sides in the state legal apparatus. The
socio-educational institution itself can serve as a vehicle for such a presenta-
tion, so that they put themselves on the scene and resignify the lack of the
other. But we know that our legal, police, welfare and even socio-educational
institutions – precarious and politically disinvested as they are – are hardly
able to meet this demand to be offered as genuine otherness carrying both
symbolic barriers and the desire implied by these young people.
Thus, it is well understood why they are hypothetically very vulnerable
to the capture of the social perverse, as we initially discussed, even though
our small sample of 5 young people did not confirm such a hypothesis. They
do not indicate having been caught, but we know how the perverse are always
on the prowl!
Exposure to crime, the possibility of injury or death, of hurting or exter-
minating the other, of taking for themselves something that belongs to an
other, of compromising one’s personal future or of endangering themselves,
all of these substantially alter the probabilities of social ties of these young
people. Using the infractional act as a symptom, precisely in defense of being
part of the bond with the other, the outcome results in the opposite of what
was aimed at: social detachment. Each young person under this circumstance
is stigmatized and segregated precisely by trying to integrate, by trying to
belong and to make the two holes in their tunnel meet. But no. Segregation
generates more segregation. And, as we have already had the opportunity
to reflect (PEREIRA, 2019), many do not hesitate to adopt delinquency as
a symptomatic way that testifies to their lack of being, their suffering, their
derision, their inner need to confront the world for – who knows, perhaps –
sedating the anguish of living and the symbolic emptiness of their existence.
Now, like every symptom, we would once again have a request for help to
be heard by us.
We know that we, the social operators, cannot help teenagers very much
in this journey, except by surviving unscathed, without changing ourselves,
without abandoning any principle that implies our desire and our own policy.
Therefore, we think it is essential to keep the responsibility of accompanying
them, never letting them drift or abdicating them, so that they can civilize the
death impulse of each one a little in the difficult conquest of their social place.
REFERENCES
FREUD, S. Fragmento da análise de uma caso de histeria – “Dora”. In:
FREUD, S. Edição Standard Brasileira das Obras Psicológicas Completas
de Sigmund Freud. Vol. 7. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1980b.
RODRÍGUEZ, C. Aportes para pensar por caso: una cuestión de detalles. In:
FRIGERIO, G; KORINFELD, D.; RODRÍGUEZ, C (Orgs.). Trabajar en
instituciones: los oficios del lazo. Buenos Aires: Novoeduc, 2018 (Colección
Ensayos y Experiencias, Tomo 109).
1. Introdução
1. Maturação e envelhecimento;
2. Desenvolvimentista;
3. Curso de vida;
4. Escolha racional; e
5. Aprendizagem social (LAUB; SAMPSON, 2001)8, parece-nos ser
interessante abordar a questão da desistência a partir do que nos
permite o método das narrativas memorialísticas. Nosso intuito,
portanto, é buscar entender como o método narrativo nos concede
acesso à construção de um processo singular de desistência por
parte de um jovem. Como, diante do arcabouço teórico que temos
sobre desistência, podemos voltar nosso olhar para a narrativa de
um jovem às voltas com o envolvimento com o crime?
8 (1) maturation and aging accounts of desistance; (2) developmental accounts of desistance; (3) a life-cou-
rse account of desistance; (4) rational choice accounts of desistance; and (5) social learning accounts of
desistance.
A última vez que rodei, rodei 157, fui rouba o carro, eu e mais um, aí foi
o cara levou nóis de carro, aí na hora que ele levou nóis, aí nóis pediu
pra ele esperar nóis lá na Praça C, foi e não esperou, não. Na hora que
nóis foi rouba o carro, a muié saiu acelerando o carro rapidão, aí foi, a
bolsa dela foi caiu no chão que tava encostada na perna dela e na porta,
na hora eu abri a porta a bolsa caiu no chão, aí foi ela saiu acelerando o
carro em cima do passeio, aí foi nós saiu correndo, eu fui pegar a bolsa
e nóis saiu correndo, eu e ele até lá no cara que levou nóis (Charles).10
9 Definição proposta de forma coletiva no âmbito das reuniões da pesquisa “Curso de vida e trajetória delinquen-
cial: um estudo exploratório dos eventos e narrativas de jovens em situação de vulnerabilidade”, realizadas
entre 2017 e 2019.
10 Pesquisa de campo realizada em Belo Horizonte, em 25 set. 2018.
Na hora que eu olhei pra trás a polícia já estava vindo, aí só abaixei atrás
do carro, dispensei tudo... mas mesmo assim eles veio e pegou nóis. Já
passou de mim, já foi até ele, já pegou ele primeiro, eu já ia dar meia volta
pra correr, aí já falou “volta, volta, deita, senão vou te matar você”. Ia
dá um tiro na minha cabeça, aí eu já deitei, já foi e começou a espancar
nóis, bater em nóis, chutar minha cara, algemou nóis pra trás, de barriga
pra cima, mão pra trás, dando tapa na nossa cara, perguntando quem
que enquadrou o carro, aí não era eu e ele também falava que não era
ele, aí o policial falava “então, foi eu então, né”. Falava “não senhor,
não”. E ele só batendo ni nóis, aí foi ro... aí foi nóis foi preso (Charles).11
É que eu vou começar a trabalhar, né. O meu tio vai... meu tio já me pôs
pra trabalhar, meu tio é policial... militar, aí foi e... foi e matou um cara aí,
aí acho que ele tá de li... tá afastado, tá sem represália. Aí foi pôs eu pra...,
pôs meus tio pra trabalhar, os irmão dele, aí foi tava implorando pra ele
me pô também, né. Porque antes eu não conversava com ele, não, porque
eu tava no crime e ele era policial [...] aí hoje, eu tive essa oportunidade
com ele não, aí hoje eu tô tendo a segunda chance com ele (Charles).12
4. Considerações finais
REFERÊNCIAS
ARISTÓTELES. Arte retórica e arte poética. São Paulo: Difusão Euro-
péia, 2000.
“Insistence is our effort, desistance is the prize. One gets the prize
when she has experienced the power of building and, in spite
of the taste of power, prefers desistance. Desistance has to be a
choice. To desist is a life’s most sacred choice. To desist is the true
human moment. And it alone is the glory proper to my condition.
Desistance is a revelation” (LISPECTOR, 1964/(1988), p. 170).
1. Introduction
argues that there are basically two paths that one can take when breaking
up with a trajectory in crime. The first one consists of an “abrupt break-up,
which is rare, and is in general caused by the irruption of a happening that,
by causing either disruption or stabilization, becomes a turning point, and
that only a posteriori can be interpreted by the person as something new”
(GUERRA, in press, freely translated). The second way, as opposed to the
first one, is a lot more frequent, according to the author, and consists of a
gradual and processual desistance, with comings and goings, and is char-
acterized by attachments and detachments in relation to crime. When this
movement occurs gradually, it reorients the subject’s symbolic coordinates,
in a subjective process of working-through. From the point of repetition to
which the subject returns, he may reach a new perspective, reorder his signi-
fier elements (GUERRA, in press).
This approach acknowledges the fluid and intermittent relations of con-
tinuity and discontinuity that characterize the involvement of young people
in crime in Brazil, giving special emphasis to the subjective and unconscious
elements that may lead to an adherence to crime, while also highlighting
aspects related to trauma, to repetition, and to possibilities of subjective
working-through that are present in the history of an adolescent. Although
this perspective comes from a different theoretical foundation, it seems to
corroborate the notion of desistance as a process, as found in the sociological
literature (LAUB; SAMPSON, 2001). Besides, it also contributes with a clini-
cal, subjective and political perspective to the understanding of desistance,
which allows for a more individual interpretation of an adolescent’s subjective
responses, which is characteristic to the psychoanalytic field.
Thus, Laub and Sampson (2001) present us with a categorization of the
different “frameworks for understanding the desistance process” (LAUB;
SAMPSON, 2001, p. 38) organized in five categories, namely:
remembrance, in which he may slide “through the word, writing his own his-
tory, in a dimension that comprises the other, his fictions, and his fixations”
(GUERRA et al., 2017, p. 1250). Guerra et al. (2017) also claim that the use
of this strategy to approach the life history of subjects allows for the analysis
of the narrative fiction through the apprehension of the drive-related nodal
elements that bind the subject and his body to his own history.
posteriori (nachtäglich), and may constitute meanings around which the sub-
ject constantly recurs to in order to justify his actions, exerting a gravitational
force that modulates his narrative1. These are the events that provide a mate-
riality to Charles’ narrative composition. The adolescent, in given moments,
presents himself as an offender, narrating happenings that highlight the facts
behind his doings, making use of a descriptive, witty and dynamic language,
like flashes of a sketch that is orally performed, as we may notice in the fol-
lowing excerpt from his narrative:
The last time I got caught, 1572, I was going to rob a car, me and another
guy. The guy took us by car, and we had asked him to wait for us at Square
C., but he did not wait for us. When we were robbing her, the woman
started to accelerate the car very fast, so her purse fell in between her leg
and the car’s door. When I opened the door, the purse fell on the ground
and she accelerated, driving on the sidewalk. Then we ran away, I went
to get the purse, and then ran, he and I, towards the guy who took us
there (Charles)3.
In other moments, with the same level of details, and making use of
similar language resources, Charles paints himself as a victim, in an almost
cathartic effort of working-through:
When I looked behind me, the police were coming, so I ducked behind
the car, and threw it all away... But even then, they came and got us. The
officer went by me, caught him first, and when I was going to turn around
and run, he said: “come back, come back and lie down, or else I will kill
you”. He was going to shoot me in the head, so I got down and they started
to beat us up, to kick my face. He handcuffed me behind my back, lying
on my back, and he kept slapping my face, asking who had robbed the
car, so then I told him it wasn’t us, and he would say: “oh, I did it then,
right?”. I would say: “no sir, you didn’t”, and he kept hitting us. So then
we got arrested (Charles)4.
1 This definition was developed collectively during the meetings that happened over the course of the research
“Life-course and criminal trajectory: an exploratory study of narratives and events of young people in situations
of vulnerability”, which took place between 2017 and 2019.
2 “157” is a reference to the article in the Brazilian penal code concerning armed robbery.
3 Field research conducted in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil, in Sept. 25th, 2018
4 Field research conducted in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil, in Sept. 25th, 2018
in the narrative act, giving the story its uniqueness as a message. We have
access to experiences arranged and decomposed in chronological and sub-
jective times, according to the premise that the narrative time is permeated
by a poetic, as Bakhtin (2000) points out. It is the Russian philosopher who
draws our attention to the fact that the meanings mark the poetic time by
non-watertight images, words and symbols, and that memory, as a temporal
instance, approaches a poetic composition, precisely because disentangles
itself from chronological ties in order to privilege the subjective time and the
images to which the subject clings to say about himself (BAKHTIN, 2000).
The poetry of Charles’s narrative, thus, calls for a reflective listening
posture that brings us back to Aristotle, for whom history refers to facts that
have already happened, while narrative and poetry refer to what might hap-
pen (ARISTOTLE, 2000). In this sense, the detailed description of scenes
in which the young man stars in offenses and episodes of violence, not only
gives prominence to events that make up Charles’s history, but goes beyond,
pointing, in his narrative uniqueness, to “becomings” and possibilities.
We believe that by narrating himself as a character in scenes that show
his connection with crime, Charles puts his actions into perspective, revisits
memories and feelings about situations of violence and infringement and cre-
ates conditions for sending himself a message of intent regarding the desistance.
Although we cannot accurately affirm his status as a crime desistant, Charles’s
narrative points to the prospect of changing the subjective position in relation
to crime. By describing his offenses in a favourable listening space, not only to
the remembering and repetition, but also to elaboration, the narrator-character
recovers his past and points to possibilities (employment, law enforcement).
It’s just that, I’ll start work, right. My uncle is going... my uncle has already
put me to work, my uncle is a police officer... a military one, so he... he
killed a guy, so I think he is... he on leave, away without reprisal. So, he
put me to..., put my uncles to work, his brothers, then I was begging him
to put me too, right. Because before I didn’t talk to him, because I was in
crime and he was a police officer [...] then today, I had this opportunity
with him, today I’m having the second chance with him (Charles).5
5 Field research conducted in Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil, in Sept. 25th, 2018.
4. Final considerations
Finally, it is worth gathering some key points from the exercise of taking
Charles’s case as a basis for understanding how the resource of the narrative
memoir method helps us in the interpretation of a possible process of crime
desistance of a young person.
First, even being aware of the transitory and unstable nature of the adoles-
cent passage, as well as the methodological difficulty of speaking of a process
of desistance at this stage of life, we could note the privilege of the narrative
method in allowing the emergence of distinctive elements of the uniqueness
of the case as a research material. In the specific case of Charles, the narrative
reconstruction seems to constitute itself as an important symbolic resource
for sustaining a trajectory that points to new paths, including the possibility
of desistance from crime. This statement is anchored in the observation of
how the young man’s insistence on reproducing crime scenes in a detailed
and spectacular way points to a point of repetition to which the young man
always returns in his speech. By reconstituting his story always from the
scene of a narrative of a spectacle that intends to privilege the descriptive
and almost theatrical aspects of each event in crime, the young man allows
to debug, from his statement, something of the truth of his subjective position
from, even though it is not all said.
It is precisely the discursive performance in the narrative making that
enunciates a certain position in the face of crime, and points out, in this case,
how the desistance as a process materializes itself in the language, in the
ordering of the chosen facts, and finds some symbolic support in the act of
narrating. Charles seems to demonstrate us, thus, how in the re-union with
his own life story from the composition of a fiction of his personal history,
in a work of memory, organization, selection of events, choice of discursive
mode etc., he faces desistance as a possibility. It is in the reconstitution and
in the narrative repetition of the events of crime that the young man seems to
anchor, symbolically, the foundation of the process of desistance announced
by him. If, as we saw above with Aristotle (2000), history deals with the facts
that have already happened, while narrative and poetry point to what might
happen, we have in Charles’s narrative the linguistic support as the wake of a
process of subjective re-situation, relative to the position towards the crime,
which can lead to desistance. We believe that, by allowing such a symbolic
support to the account of a life story, the narrative serves as an important
instrument for analysing the particular constitution of involvement (or not)
with the criminogenic object.
REFERENCES
ARISTÓTELES. Arte retórica e arte poética. São Paulo: Difusão Euro-
péia, 2000.
1. Introdução
Este texto apresenta uma discussão que faz parte dos resultados parciais
do grupo de pesquisas do Instituto de Estudos Avançados Transdisciplinares
da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (IEAT/UFMG), intitulado: “Curso
de vida e trajetória delinquencial: um estudo exploratório dos eventos e nar-
rativas de jovens em situação de vulnerabilidade”.
Neste trabalho, que tem como objetivo uma articulação transdiscipli-
nar entre os campos da Sociologia, da Psicanálise e da Educação, no que se
refere aos estudos que articulam as temáticas da criminalidade e juventude,
entendemos que, “fundando-se no paradoxo da condição humana, o conflito
entre determinações estruturais e autonomia subjetiva não pode encontrar
uma saída fácil, situada em uma das extremidades, fazendo-se necessário
sustentar a condição de oscilação e conflito permanente entre os dois pólos”
(MOREIRA; GUERRA; COSTA, 2012, p. 400-401).
É neste contexto que iniciamos a discussão a respeito do caso de um
jovem que participou do escopo desta pesquisa, cujo envolvimento com a
criminalidade no período da adolescência persistiu até a entrada na vida
adulta, configurando uma forma de permanência da conduta infracional na
cena urbana do tráfico de drogas. Nesse contexto, tematizamos a questão
da permanência na criminalidade em relação à juventude. Sabemos que os
1 Para uma revisão mais ampla conferir em Neiva (2015) e Rolim (2018).
2 As referências apontadas nesta citação são: BAUMAN, Z. O mal-estar da pós-modernidade. Rio de Janeiro:
Zahar, 1998; HARVEY, D. Condição pós-moderna: Uma pesquisa sobre as origens da mudança cultural.
São Paulo: Loyola, 1992.
3.1 Família
Tem meu tio ali em cima. Meu tio é igual um pai. Ele é tipo um pai pra
mim. Era marido da minha tia. Lá é o lote, né? Com a família inteira, as
irmãs da minha mãe tudo. Acho que é quatro irmãs. Antes era cinco. Eu
tenho uma tia que faleceu.
H: Nós morava lá, minha mãe num deixava passar nem daqui. Pra rua.
Mas, a gente aprontava do mesmo jeito. Com a escola, aprontava mais
ainda. Apanhava quase todo dia (riso).
[...]
Pesquisadora: Sua mãe era brava?
H: Nossa senhora, bota brava nisso!
Pesquisadora: É mesmo? E aí como é que foi depois que cê entrou
mesmo... como é que ela ficou?
H: Bão... no começo ela ficou triste, né? Falava de o que acontecesse ela
num ia deserdar, num ia ir atrás... essas coisa, se eu fosse preso, ela num
tava nem aí. No começo foi assim. Num queria dinheiro de nada disso.
Pessoa trabalhadora assim, num gosta muito dessas coisas errada, não.
A mãe da gente também num criou a gente pra ver a gente nisso não, né?
Ali no lote, a maioria dos meus primos também, todo mundo igual eu. A
mesma história. Entrou no crime também, todo mundo... Só um que não.
E tem um novo, que agora também tá fumando maconha. Não adianta
dar conselho. A gente está errado e ainda tenta falar pra não entrar no
errado. Quer entrar do mesmo jeito. Acha que é bom, mas... é bom na
parte do dinheiro, mas nem tanto.
A maioria da minha vida foi isso, moça. Não tenho muita coisa pra falar
não. A maioria da vida de todo mundo aí é isso. Igual eu falei com vocês
que eu comecei com quinze anos, quatorze, eu acho. Nem lembro muito.
Tem gente que começou até mais novo. Com dez, doze. Antes os caras não
admitiam não, mas depois eles viu que não tinha jeito. Eles mandavam nós
embora da boca, direto. Nós, mais novo também fazia corre pra eles de
rango e essas coisas. Eles davam nós dinheiro. Ai você vai vendo aquele
bolo de dinheiro, você quer ter também. Não quer trabalhar pra ganhar
pouco. Mas é melhor trabalhar do que isso... mas infelizmente, todo mundo
quer isso. É fácil, que num dia você ganha mil. Trabalhando é um mês, o
dia todo. Dependendo você nem ganha mil trabalhando num mês.
H: Não, não tem não. Tem mais umas tretinha com os caras que foi embora
aqui da favela. Fez umas coisas erradas que os caras não aceitou. Pegou
e foi embora. Mas ninguém passa aqui dando tiro, não. Aqui é tranquilo,
graças a Deus.
Pesquisadora: Circular, você não circula muito, fica mais aqui mesmo?
H: Não. Quase ninguém circula muito não, porque tem os caras que
saíram daqui, né? Que já é um problema pra gente. A qualquer momento
pode acontecer o inesperado com a gente. A polícia pode pegar e pedir
arma, pedir esses trem. Porque a polícia pega a gente sem nada e quer
arma, quer droga, quer tudo e infelizmente tem que pagar. Ou você paga
ou você vai preso. Eles mesmos tem a droga deles pra te levar preso.
Você paga ou você vai preso. Mas é bom que os caras aqui é tranquilo,
se não tiver o dinheiro para pagar eles pagam pra gente. Mas também
não é muito valorizando a gente não. É mais valorizando a favela deles,
pra polícia não vir aqui caçar a gente. Ficar devendo a polícia e eles
não virem caçar a gente. Aí os caras pagam e depois a gente paga eles.
H: Tem muito problemas que acontecem com a gente aqui. Muito desa-
certo que acontecem, dívidas. Muita coisa. Mas aqui é bom de morar.
Aqui é gostoso de morar. Todo mundo respeita trabalhador, todo mundo
pode ir, entrar, sair. Mesmo que tenha a barreira aqui, todo mundo pode...
isso ai é só para a polícia não entrar mesmo.
H: É! Só para a polícia não entrar. Mas todo mundo que quiser entrar
é só arredar... com tranquilidade. Aqui é bom de morar. Todo mundo
respeita todo mundo. Sabe seu lugar.
[...]
A palavra dos moradores é que vale. Lá na outra boca lá de cima, [inau-
dível], não pode fumar não. Lá não pode fumar na rua inteira. Essa rua
inteira lá pra cima não pode fumar maconha. Antes podia, mas os mora-
dores começaram a reclamar que tava fumando na porta da casa deles
e essas coisas e os caras proibiram. Não pode fumar maconha lá não.
Eles que chegou em mim querendo que eu andasse com eles dentro da
favela. Chegou me enforcando. Eu não vou abaixar pra ninguém não. Ai
aconteceu esse caso. A justiça sempre é maior que todo favelado. Fave-
lado é foda. Pra eles todo mundo é bandido, não importa se mudou, se
quer mudar. Pra eles, eles tem que catar e prender, bater. Porque aqui a
polícia não tem regra com ninguém não. Eles chegam, dá tapa na cara,
chute. Dá tapa na cara da mãe dos outros, dá tapa na cara de qualquer
um. Eles não querem saber de nada não. Para eles todo mundo é bandido.
Quem não é bandido, acoita [esconde] bandido. Pra eles é isso aí mesmo.
[Os moradores] Têm bastante voz. Não adianta nós aqui querer discutir
com eles e querer nada com eles não. Porque a voz maior é a deles. Porque
também nós discutir com eles, nós fica sem apoio aqui, né? Porque tem
vez, igual assim... Tem gente que não está trabalhando no dia na boca,
tá tranquilo na rua e chega [a polícia] batendo. Aí os moradores também
ajudam, porque aqui ninguém trata mal morador e essas coisas. Morador
também ajuda, mas não é todos também não. Tem morador que... Mas aí
nós nem olha pra eles também não. Não incomoda ninguém, que é melhor.
5. Ofertas precarizadas
H: Planos é mudar de vida, né? Sair daqui, pra outro lugar, viver tran-
quilo. Que essa vida que a gente vive num é tranquila, não. A gente mesmo
nem sai da favela não. Fica só aqui. Todo dia, o dia inteiro. Sai, sai de
noite, vai em boate gastar mais dinheiro, uma ilusão danada.
[...]
REFERÊNCIAS
BEATO, C.; ZILLI, L. F. A estruturação de atividades criminosas: um estudo
de caso. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, v. 27, n. 80, p. 71-88, 2012.
MERTON, R. K. Social Theory and Social Structure. Nova York: The Free
Press, 1968.
“Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains,
disappointments and impossible tasks” (FREUD, 1930/1962, p. 22).
1. Introduction
This paper presents a discussion that is part of the partial results of the
research group of the Institute of Transdisciplinary Advanced Studies of the
Federal University of Minas Gerais (IEAT/UFMG), entitled: “Life course
and delinquency trajectory: an exploratory study of events and narratives of
young people in situation of vulnerability”.
In this paper, which aims at a transdisciplinary articulation between the
fields of Sociology, Psychoanalysis and Education in what refers to the studies
that articulate the themes of crime and youth, we understand that “based on
the paradox of the human condition, the conflict between structural determi-
nations and subjective autonomy cannot find an easy way out, situated at one
extreme, making it necessary to sustain the condition of permanent oscillation
and conflict between the two poles” (MOREIRA; GUERRA; COSTA, 2012,
p. 400-401).
It is in this context that we begin the discussion regarding the case of a
young man who participated in the scope of this research, whose involvement
with criminality in adolescence persisted until adulthood, configuring a form
of permanence of offensive conduct in the urban scene of drug trafficking.
In this context, we address the issue of permanence in crime in relation to
youth. We know that studies concerning desistance are well developed in the
field of criminology (SAMPSON; LAUB, 1993, 2005)1, and make progress
2 The references pointed above are: BAUMAN, Z. O mal-estar da pós-modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar,
1998; HARVEY, D. Condição pós-moderna: Uma pesquisa sobre as origens da mudança cultural. São Paulo:
Loyola, 1992.
H. then consents to participate in the research and proposes that the nar-
rative be recorded in the center of the territory, in plain sight. Two researchers
sit on the sidewalk with the young man and ask him to tell his life story. H.
begins by stating that he had no story to tell, and shortly after points out his
detachment from school and entrance into crime at around 14/15 years old,
stating that “crime needs no school”. He also indicates that his approach and
involvement with crime was driven by the relationship of cousins with whom
he lived and the necessity to have money and material goods. He presents
an episode of departing from crime when he was 18 years old, after entering
the formal labor market, having returned to the context of crime shortly after
being discharged from the service of a bricklayer’s help, a hodman.
H. discusses the difficulty of childhood, for his mother “not being able
to,” the abandonment of his father when he learned of his partner’s pregnancy
at 19 years of age, and the constant contact with the criminality within the
territory. The critical reflection concerning the territory and the dynamics that
underlie the configuration of trafficking are striking features in the discourse
of this young man, both from the point of view of the relations of tension with
the police and the spatial circumscription mainly arising from them, and from
the point of view of internal relations in trafficking, such as the paradigmatic
change in the precocity of involvement in the generations after their own and
the significant participation of residents in decisions related to the movement,
due to the protection they provide to the young people involved.
His perception of the socio-educational system in the narrative is unshak-
able, without hesitation: “Too much talking in people’s heads. Telling us to
abandon these things... Don’t need this... We were born seeing this here, see!
Born into it”. Rooting in crime precedes it and leaves it almost with a dead
end. On the other hand, a striking feature of the PIA’s technical report is its
emphasis on the direction of movements for institutional school entanglement
and entrance into the labor market, as well as a statement on the withdrawal
of involvement with crime due to a close friend’s death episode. According to
the document, as we have seen, there were only records of socio-educational
warning measures and services of provision to the community. This fact draws
attention if we think about how the narrative and the questionnaire present
an extensive and well-marked offense trajectory. What the cunning of such a
shrewd subject – who knows how to move around in the field of crime and
present such a realistic narrative – point us in what refer to the dynamics that
would escape the rational field? In terms of psychoanalysis, what concerns
this crossed subject regarding the affect/drive field that reveals ambivalences?
Let’s look at what we can find in the non-narrable of H.
3.1 Family
The first of these breaks occurs in the family field. As we mentioned, H’s
father abandoned his mother when she was still pregnant. H. reports that in the
past his father frequented the community, but they had never had any relation-
ship. In the absence of a father figure, an uncle, the ex-husband of his bio-
logical maternal aunt, took this place. H. tells the story of a broad family and
procedural ties, i.e. continuous and discontinuous, with non-blood relatives.
There’s my uncle up there. My uncle is just like a father. He’s like a father
to me. He was my aunt’s husband. There is the house, right? With the
whole family, my mother’s sisters and all. I think it’s four sisters. Before
it was five. I have an aunt who passed away.
We also find, in the area of ruptures within this history, the attempt of
some possible transmission from his mother, which despite appearing in an
incisive manner, does not have a decisive force in the history of involvement
with crime:
Researcher: Really? So how did it go after you entered... how was she?
H: Well... at first she was sad, right? I was talking about what happened,
she was going to disinherit, she wasn’t going to come after me... these
things, if I got arrested, she couldn’t care less. In the beginning it was
like this. She didn’t want money from any of that. Working person like
that, doesn’t like these wrong things, no. Our mother also didn’t raise us
to see us in this, right?
H.’s statement about his mother’s initial sadness may lead us to think that
in a second moment she does not oppose the young man’s activity with crime.
This could be linked to the fact that the mother has a precarious job. Accord-
ing to the PIA, H’s mother worked as a general service assistant and received
a salary of 788 reais – corresponding to a minimum wage in 2014 – plus a
benefit of 190 reais. Under these conditions of financial pressure, H tells us:
We suffered, because we start becoming teenagers and want to buy our own
stuff. You want to have branded sneakers, branded clothes. Our family has
no conditions. Just, like, my mother had me, my sister, had to buy school
supplies. And there’s this... our father abandoned us when my mother got
pregnant. And it’s just my mother. There’s all of this.
Added to this is the researchers’ casual encounter with H.’s mother, who
was disorganized, with disregard for personal care, in a confused and apathetic
state. This encounter leads us to hypothesize a dimension of contradiction in
H.’s life, inasmuch as this mother whom the researchers met – a disaggre-
gated figure – does not coincide with that in the young man’s narrative – the
strict mother.
Exploring the narrative constructions of young H in relation to his mother,
we highlight a possible contradiction between the development of an offending
trajectory and a supposed vigilance. On the other hand, the possible influence
on the young man of the involvement of other family members in drug traf-
ficking, an illegal activity that, like any other, depends on a learning process.
During this process, the definitions favorable to the committing of crimes,
as well as the techniques and methods of action are apprehended from social
interactions. For Sutherland (1940), the greater the participation in deviant
groups, the greater the incentive to develop a deviant trajectory. In this regard,
it is noteworthy in H.’s narrative the involvement of most of his cousins in
criminality and his lack of legitimacy to advise his cousin who had begun
using marijuana.
There in the house, most of my cousins too, everyone just like me. The
same story. Entered in crime too, everyone... Just one didn’t. And there’s
a new one, who’s smoking marijuana now too. No use giving advice. We
are wrong and still try to tell them not to go wrong. They want to go in
just the same. You think it’s good, but... it’s good on the money part, but
not so much.
Most of my life was that, miss. I don’t have much to say. Most of everyone’s
life here is this way. Just like I told you, I started at fifteen, fourteen, I think.
I don’t even remember much. There are people who started even younger.
At ten, twelve. Before, the guys would not admit, but then they saw that
there was no way. They sent us out of the drug house, straight. We, the
younger ones also ran for them for food and stuff. They gave us money.
Then you see that money cake, you want to have it too. You don’t want to
work to earn little. But it’s better to work than that... but unfortunately,
everyone wants it. It’s easy, in one day you earn a thousand. Working is a
month, all day long. Depending, you don’t even earn a thousand working
in a month.
In the field of crime, his speech is structured around a realistic and coher-
ent position: “It’s good on the money side, but not so good, no. It’s a lot of
problems that happens to us here. The mistakes that happen, debts... A lot”.
But it is noteworthy that the consequences of criminal activity lead to an
episode of apprehension by the adult criminal system. We observe that, from
the researcher’s inquiry about such an experience, there appears a discomfort
that translates into a break or avoidance revealed in the following excerpt:
“(sigh) Ah... over there is not advisable for anyone, no, right? [...] And it’s
not a joke”.
Lacan (1950/1998), when discussing the relations and, fundamentally,
the divergences between the contribution of psychoanalysis to criminology
and the debate conducted by penalogy, indicates that crime brings with itself
the possibility of reaching a structural configuration of the act in relation to
unconscious fantasies, understanding that the truth of the alienation of the
criminal’s reality is different from the justification of the social context. Thus,
there is no absolute crime, such an experience being irreducibly subjective.
However, Lacan (1950/1998) warns us that “neither the crime nor the crimi-
nal are objects that can be conceived outside their sociological reference”
(LACAN, 1950/1998, p. 128). Thus it is essential to locate in the discourses
that cross the subject and which are produced by him – in a dialectical move-
ment – the elements related to unconscious fantasies eminently crossed by
social, political, economic and cultural issues.
From this context of ruptures, we will work in the next sections how
some elements are articulated in relation to the “favelado” – in Brazil, a young
black urban periphery resident – in what refer to what H. presents us about
the subjective-political crossings of his existence, from two central points of
his narrative, namely: police and community; precarious offers.
to the community there was a refrigerator that closed traffic. At the end of this
same street, workers at the service of the city, worked to open a roundabout
in the middle of the houses, some recently demolished by the construction
works. This was part of the City Participatory Budget program, which during
the research period carried out interventions in various communities in the
municipality. “They say they’re going to make a roundabout there. You go up
there and down here. They say it will be bad for us, but it will not, because
it will be closed the same way. It will continue the same thing. It will be bad
for themselves”.
In H’s speech, he expresses himself as a collective subject represented
by the use of the pronoun “us”. This “us” refers to the community-based drug
trafficking venture that moves a large volume of drugs and money. In the
young man’s speech, we can see that there is a structure of local illegalities,
since the drug houses belong to the same individual and that even in their
absence the business continues to operate without many mishaps (BEATO;
ZILLI, 2012).
It’s cool here. It’s big here. It’s just a guy who rules everything here. At
the moment he is in jail, but that doesn’t change nothing. Here are the
parts, right? Every... There are many dudes also. A lot of people involved,
there are about 5, 6 drughouses here. Then each one has their day. Each
has their day of staying here. You can’t come another day. You can’t do
that, otherwise it causes a fight, it’s a problem. Then it will bring trouble
to the guy.
Beato and Zilli (2012) argue that this structuring is the result of a process
that would happen following a three-act script. In the first act we have the
disorganized crime and the conflict between local groups. This is characterized
by a low complexity of illicit activities, poor articulation between offenders
and criminal groups, and the first germs of police violence and corruption
schemes. In this context, the groups develop their activities in small fractions
of the clusters, operating in a more societal than economic logic and without
necessarily having systematic articulation with groups from other communi-
ties. In the absence of public means of conflict resolution, violence in these
contexts is often for banal causes and may result in endless sequences of con-
frontation and revenge (ROCHA, 2015). In this act, the drug trade occupies
an intermediate place between the cause and the means of maintaining these
disruptive cycles of violence.
The second act would be that of competition and attempt to monopolize
the market, in which some groups may try to impose themselves by force on
others, establishing cycles of confrontation marked by rationally operated
H: No, there is not. There are some problems with the guys that left the
favela. They did some wrong things that the guys didn’t accept. They went
and left. But no one comes here shooting, no. It’s cool here, thank God.
Researcher: Walk around, you don’t walk around much, you stay
here mostly?
H: No. Almost no one goes around a lot, because there are the guys who
left here, right? Which is already a problem for us. At any moment the
unexpected can happen to us. Police come up and order a gun, order these
things. Because the police catch us with nothing and want a gun, want a
drug, want everything and unfortunately you have to pay. Either you pay
or you go to jail. They themselves have the drugs to get you arrested. You
pay or you go to jail. But it’s good that the guys here are cool, if you don’t
have the money to pay they pay for us. But it is not much appreciating us
either. It’s more valuing their slum, so the police don’t come here to hunt
us. Owing the police and not coming to hunt us. Then the guys pay and
then we pay them.
We can see from H’s speech the third act of organization, in which lend-
ings represent an economic management of potential problems, perpetuating
a system of debt.
Accompanying Das and Pole (2004), we can say that much more than
imposed, order is something produced by the constant bargaining between
agents within concrete and specific situations. Under these conditions, the
powers of sovereignty multiply and agents use legal and illegal ways to nego-
tiate rules, limits, protocols, so that the state’s own margins are constantly
delineated (DAS; POLE, 2004). H’s speech reveals that local trafficking has
some sovereign power, which is expressed by the determination of a clear
boundary of the limits of its territory and the normative force that prohibits
certain types of conduct in certain places in the community and prohibits the
sale of drugs like crack and inhalants.
H: Yeah! Just for the police not to enter. But everyone who wants to get in
is push it aside... easily. It’s good to live here. Everyone respects everyone.
They know they place [...]. The locals word is what counts. In the other
drughouse up there, [inaudible], you can’t smoke. There you cannot smoke
through the whole street. This whole street until up there you can’t smoke
weed. Before you could, but the locals started complaining that people
were smoking on their doorstep and stuff and the guys forbade it. You
can’t smoke weed there.
They came at me wanting me to walk with them inside the slum. They
came choking me. I won’t back down to no one. Then this thing happened.
Justice is always bigger than every favelado. Favelado is fucked up. For
them everyone is a thug, no matter if they changed, if they want to change.
For them, they have to catch and arrest, beat up. Because here the police
doesn’t have according with no one. They arrive, slap you in the face, kick.
Slap the face of someone else’s mother, slap anybody’s faces. They don’t
care about anything. To them everyone is a thug. Whoever is not a thug,
shelter [hide] a thug. For them that’s how it is.
is a domain of degraded identity (“thug” label) over all the other social roles
of the individual, leaving little or no space left to negotiate it.
The social and spatial concentration of police violence can undermine the
legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System and other state agencies, since the
widespread use of this experience in certain places can foster the emergence
of solidarity between victims, and a system of norms, values, and attitudes
diverging from state normativity (WILDEMAN, 2014). This is true in H’s
narrative, as trafficking and residents maintain deference and even complicity
relations amongst themselves.
[The residents] They have a lot of voice. It’s no use for us here wanting
to argue with them and wanting nothing to do with them. Because the
biggest voice is theirs. Because we argue with them, we get no support
here, right? Because there are times, just like... There are people who are
not working some day in the drughouse, the streets are quiet and they
[the police] arrive knocking. Then the residents also help, because here
nobody treats residents bad and these things. Residents also help, but it’s
not everyone either. There are residents who... But then we don’t even look
at them either. Nobody gets bothered, which is better.
5. Precarious offers
H: Working for others... Because you can handle too much, right? You can
stand others cursing you by talking loudly to you and here there is none
of that. Here no one talks loud to anyone. No one is better than anyone
here. There are those who are better, but who is know how to respect us.
Ah, I... stayed for a short time. I spent little time on the job, then I spent
a lot of time without work, doing nothing, without opportunities; I went
and headed back to where I had come from.” It is curious to note that the
abject place that social segregation produces for this young man does not
seem to be associated with the rupture condition of the social pact, but
is linked to the inevitability of fate, as he demonstrates by saying “I went
and headed back to where I had come from.
Such segregation, for Pellegrino (1983), translates itself into the social
place to which the poor are designated: “the absolute poor need not maintain
the social pact with a society that reduces it to a condition of waste” (s/p.).
The possibilities of insertion in the labor market for a young person with low
education and without qualification is characterized by precarious and lesser
options. With work in drug trafficking H. also remains in a precarious situa-
tion, as he is permanently crossed by the threat of police violence and has an
exhausting work routine: “But... here is my life. I wake up every morning, I
come here at 8 am, when it’s my day, I’m leaving at 10 pm”.
However, it is important to emphasize that working in trafficking enables
a position of status, power and money, translating into social visibility within
the community. We thus perceive the complications and various implications
of H.’s relationship with the illegal formal market. If, on the one hand, it repro-
duces precariousness and on the other, it reflects the possibility of insertion
in the consumer market, in still another side, H. recognizes the risks of this
illicit activity and makes entrepreneurship planning.
It is important to emphasize that managing work in trafficking requires
discipline similar to an entrepreneur’s bet: someone who makes a certain
number of bets defines a series of economic behaviors to increase their capital
(MALVASI, 2012). We believe that this element of entrepreneurship pres-
ent in the third act of structuring illicit activities may have influenced H. to
H: Plans is to change my life, right? Get out of here, somewhere else, live
quiet. This life we live in is not quiet. We don’t even get out of the favela.
It is just here. Every day, all day long. Go out, go out at night, go to the
club spend more money, a damned illusion [...].
H: I feel like it, but... I’m even raising some money, but working for others
is bad, man! I’m raising money so I can start my own business, see if it
works. If God bless, it will work
REFERENCES
BEATO, C; ZILLI, L. F. A estruturação de atividades criminosas: um estudo
de caso. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, v. 27, n. 80, p. 71-88, 2012.
MERTON, R. K. Social Theory and Social Structure. Nova York: The Free
Press, 1968.
1. Introdução
enquanto uma ausência, um vazio. De fato, nenhuma das jovens cita seu
envolvimento com o crime durante a narrativa e vemos registrado em seus
respectivos PIAs atos que nos fazem questionar a gravidade das sanções que
receberam, quando comparadas às dos meninos. Diante disso, nos pergunta-
mos acerca do lugar da criminalidade na economia psíquica dessas meninas
e das particularidades a que são submetidas socialmente por pertencerem ao
gênero feminino.
Notadamente, iremos tratar do caso de Lilith, uma jovem parda, pobre,
moradora de periferia urbana e sujeita a todas as implicações que essas carac-
terísticas trazem, como marginalização, preconceito, precocidade, falta de
oportunidades e de perspectivas. Porém, como especificidade, temos que Lilith
residiu com a avó materna, em uma cidade do interior de Minas Gerais, dos 4
aos 12 anos de idade, momento em que realiza uma visita à mãe e decide
morar com ela a partir de então. Das diferenças essenciais entre a convivência
com a mãe e a avó, temos que esta última é apontada pela adolescente como
sendo muito rígida, obrigando-a a ir à escola e a cumprir com seus deveres,
enquanto a primeira passa a maior parte do tempo trabalhando e não consegue
acompanhar seu dia-a-dia de maneira próxima. Além disso, Lilith não mantém
contato com o pai e cuida das duas irmãs menores enquanto a mãe trabalha.
A fim de pensarmos acerca de sua história de vida e dos eventos vin-
culados à sua relação com a criminalidade, faremos um percurso a partir do
relato do caso de Lilith e do que o diferencia dos demais, focando em como
o universal se singulariza e dá origem a um sujeito, individualidade que não
penetra a experiência coletiva. Depois, discorreremos acerca do que há de
mais compartilhado em sua experiência, as condições estruturais de pobreza
e marginalização, as diferenças marcantes entre o envolvimento de homens
e mulheres no crime, concomitantemente ao controle social exercido sobre
as mulheres a partir das instituições, como a família, a escola e o sistema
judiciário. Por fim, a partir da perspectiva da psicanálise freudiana/lacaniana,
iremos refletir sobre as particularidades do feminino e o possível impacto
do seu caráter de não todo – expresso em uma de suas principais facetas, a
histeria – na forma como essas mulheres se inserem no crime.
Lilith é uma adolescente que reside numa região periférica de Belo Hori-
zonte com sua mãe e outras duas irmãs. Inicia seu relato contando à equipe
que, apesar de ter nascido em Belo Horizonte, passou a maior parte de sua
infância – dos 4 aos 12 anos – na Bahia com a avó materna. Seu pai, que
nessa época residia na mesma cidade, chegou a cuidar dela por três meses, até
que, após um desentendimento, esta acabou retornando à casa da avó. Lilith
nos conta que o pai nunca lhe deu atenção e que seus cuidados sempre foram
desempenhados pela mãe e a avó. Nos conta ainda que sua mãe tinha dezesseis
anos quando ela nasceu e que quatro anos depois essa mãe mudou-se para
Belo Horizonte, deixando-a com a avó, que se sentia muito apegada à neta.
Conta que no outro estado morava no interior e que sua rotina era com-
pletamente diferente da que manteve e mantém na capital mineira. Na “roça”,
como nomeia, tinha que acordar muito cedo, às quatro horas da manhã, para
ir à escola. Já em Belo Horizonte, diz ter se acostumado a acordar tarde, sem
horários fixos para as atividades, o que culminou em duas reprovações na
escola e na posterior alteração de seu período de estudos da manhã para a
noite: “eu não conseguia acordar cedo para ir para a escola de jeito nenhum”
(sic). Estudando à noite, salienta que consegue cuidar das irmãs durante o dia,
enquanto a mãe trabalha, e frequentar a escola ao mesmo tempo. É interes-
sante observar que, para esta mudança de rotina e consequentes reprovações
na escola, ela parece responsabilizar sua mãe, dizendo que se ainda morasse
com sua avó já estaria formada: “eu não estudo igual eu estudava, porque
minha avó fazia eu estudar, me obrigava”.
A adolescente diz ter tido dificuldade para se adaptar à transição cultural,
apontando que sofreu algumas vexatórias por falar “estranho”, com sota-
que. Localiza ainda outras diferenças que aponta como importantes entre seu
passado no meio rural e o presente na cidade: “lá eu não saía, não conhecia
baile funk” (sic) e nos faz pensar sobre a centralidade adquirida pelo processo
de socialização quando se muda para BH e entra na adolescência. Conta de
diversas brigas que teve com a mãe por ela lhe impedir de sair e frequentar
bailes funks, afirmando que já a agrediu várias vezes. Nessa época, chegava
a ficar fora de casa por alguns dias sendo, inclusive, expulsa pela mãe e aco-
lhida por amigos. Essa situação se transformou em constantes movimentos
de expulsão e retorno à casa da mãe, sempre atravessados pelo impedimento
materno às saídas da filha que, para driblar isso, era expulsa e se expulsava
de casa. Ainda nesse período, recebia a incumbência de cuidar da irmã mais
nova enquanto a mãe trabalhava, mas afirma que isso não era empecilho,
pois levava a irmã para as festas. Nesse ponto, seu discurso parece se retificar
ao apontar que deixava a irmã, muito pequena nessa época, com fome: “eu
saía pra rua sem levar nada e a minha irmã com fome” (sic), mas ao mesmo
tempo, ri da situação, e seu tom de voz parece não acompanhar o arrependi-
mento que relata. Nessa época começou a beber e fumar – cigarro, acrescenta.
Conta orgulhosa que nunca usou drogas, lembrando de um tio viciado em
crack que foi assassinado pela parceira, também viciada. Em sua família tem
um “tiquinho de tudo” (sic), desde “viciado” (sic) até “traficante” (sic) e por
esse motivo “sabe um tiquinho de tudo” (sic), o que a fez não ter vontade de
experimentar drogas.
[...] por um lado, é socialmente menos esperado que uma mulher cometa
crimes, o que poderá ter como consequência a maior punição de uma
mulher que comete o mesmo tipo de crime que um homem. Por outro
lado, se uma mulher transgride a lei, mas assegura os papéis de gênero
que lhe são convencionalmente exigidos, como a maternidade, pode ser
menos punida do que uma mulher que não o faça (p. 38).
como grupo universal, não existe. A mulher encontra apenas uma ausência e,
assim, em sua busca por alguém que detenha este significante fálico, na ilusão
de que isto lhe faça Mulher, coloca o seu desejo intimamente relacionado
ao desejo do Outro: “o desejo da histérica não é desejo de um objeto, mas o
desejo de um desejo, um esforço de se manter em frente ao ponto no qual ela
convoca seu desejo, o ponto onde está o desejo do Outro” (LACAN, 1957-
1958/1999). Na busca de satisfazer o desejo do Outro, renunciando seu próprio
desejo, como um sacrifício, a histérica se coloca em um estado de constante
insatisfação, o que implica em uma intensa rede de queixas. Ocupa o lugar
de vítima,
5. Considerações finais
REFERÊNCIAS
ALMEIDA, V. P. de; Repercussões da Violência na Construção da Identidade
Feminina da mulher Presa: Um Estudo de Caso. Psicologia, Ciência e Pro-
fissão, v. 26, n. 4, p. 604-619, 2006.
1. Introduction
This paper continues the reflections and analysis of the results of the
research “Life course and delinquency trajectory: an exploratory study of the
events and narratives of vulnerable young people”, funded by the Institute of
Transdisciplinary Advanced Studies of the Federal University of Minas Gerais
(Instituto de Estudos Avançados Transdisciplinar da Universidade Federal
de Minas Gerais, IEAT/UFMG). This research, as its name implies, aimed to
investigate, from the transdisciplinarity between Sociology, Psychoanalysis,
Law, Education and Health, the life course of young people in vulnerability,
welcomed by the socio-educational system, in order to identify events that
are related to entry, stay and/or dropout, specific to the adolescent experience
with delinquency. For this, three main instruments were used: the Adolescent
Individual Care Plan (Plano Individual de Atendimento, PIA), the Narrative
Memoir method (GUERRA et al., 2017) and a survey prepared by the team.
In this sense, we are not interested in a thorough presentation of the
research, which can be verified in the opening chapters of this book, but reflect
on the female involvement with crime, especially considering the period of
adolescence, from a case study that it`s part of the scope of the results found
in the fieldwork. Thus, it is important to point out that, out of the PIAs that
were used in the research, only 12% were young female and, among the 109
addresses we tried to locate, it was only possible to find and collect the nar-
rative of two young women.
Among the points of convergence of their trajectories, we see that they
are young people who do not situate crime as a central point of their narratives,
establishing a connection that is difficult to analyze due to their presence as
an absence, a void. In fact, none of the young women cite their involvement
with the crime during the narrative and we see in their respective PIAs acts
that make us question the severity of the sanctions they received when com-
pared to the boys. Given this, we ask about the place of crime in the psychic
economy of these girls and the particularities to which they are socially sub-
jected because they belong to the female gender.
Notably, we will deal with the case of Lilith, a black, poor, urban dweller
who is subject to all the implications these characteristics bring, such as
marginalization, prejudice, precocity, lack of opportunities and perspectives.
However, as specificity, we have that Lilith lived from 4 to 12 years old with
her maternal grandmother, in a city in the interior of Minas Gerais, eventu-
ally she visits her mother and decides to live with her from then on. Of the
essential differences between living with mother and grandmother, we have
that the latter is pointed out by the teenager as being very rigid, forcing her
to go to school and to perform her duties, while the former spends most of
her time working and can’t follow your day to day closely. In addition, Lilith
does not maintain contact with her father and takes care of the two younger
sisters while her mother works.
In order to think about her life story, and the events linked to her relation-
ship with criminality, we will walk from the account of Lilith’s case and what
differentiates it from others, focusing on how the universal is singularized and
gives origin to a subject, individuality that does not penetrate the collective
experience. We will then discuss what is most shared in his experience, the
structural conditions of poverty and marginalization, the striking differences
between the involvement of men and women in crime, concurrently with
the social control exercised over women from institutions such as family,
school and the judiciary. Finally, from the perspective of Freudian/Lacanian
psychoanalysis, we will reflect on the particularities of the feminine and the
possible impact of her not-all character – expressed in one of its main facets,
hysteria – in the way these women fit in with crime.
mother was sixteen when she was born and that four years later this mother
moved to Belo Horizonte, leaving her with her grandmother, who was very
attached to her granddaughter.
She says that in the other state she lived in the countryside and that her
routine was completely different from the one she kept and maintains in the
capital. In “the farm”, as she calls it, she had to get up very early, at four in
the morning to go to school. In Belo Horizonte, she says she was used to wak-
ing up late, without fixed hours for the activities, which culminated in two
failures in school and the subsequent change of her morning study period:
“I could not wake up early to go to school, no way”. Studying at night, she
points out that she can take care of her sisters during the day while her mother
works and attend school at the same time. It is interesting to note that, for
this routine change and consequent failures in school, she seems to blame her
mother, saying that if she still lived with her grandmother, she would have
already graduated: “I don’t study like I did, because my grandmother made
me study, obliged”.
The teenager says she had difficulty adapting to the cultural transition,
pointing out that she suffered some vexation for speaking “strange”, with
an accent. She also finds other differences that she points out as important
between her past in the countryside and the present in the city: “there I didn’t
go out, I didn’t know baile funk” and makes us think about the centrality
acquired by the process of socialization when moving to BH and entering
adolescence. She tells of several fights she had with her mother for preventing
her from going out and attending bailes funks, claiming that she has assaulted
her several times. At that time, she was even away from home for a few days
and was even expelled by her mother and welcomed by friends. This situation
became constant movements of expulsion and return to the mother’s house,
always crossed by the maternal impediment to the exits of the daughter who,
to circumvent this, was expelled and expelled herself from home. Still during
this period, she was charged with taking care of her younger sister while her
mother worked, but states that this was no obstacle, as she took her sister to
the parties. At this point, her speech seems to be rectified by pointing out that
she was leaving her very young sister hungry at the time: “I went out without
taking anything and my sister hungry”, but at the same time, laughs at the
situation, and her tone does not seem to accompany the regret she reports.
At that time she started drinking and smoking – cigarettes, she adds. She is
proud to say she never used drugs, remembering a crack addict uncle who
was murdered by his addicted partner. In her family she has a “little bit of
everything”, from “addicted” to “drug dealer” and for this reason “knows a
little bit of everything”, which made her unwilling to try drugs.
She lists the times when fights with her mother have lessened with the
moment she start hanging out with friends who have become “more friends
with her mother than with herself” since she trusted them. She reports that
she is a very quiet person, who has an easy relationship with people and who
is well liked by all. However, in addition to reports of fights with her mother,
she also reports complicated relationships at school, where she fought when
she felt mocked or when her “patience was over”. In one of these cases, she
says that they have reached the point of carrying a knife to beat her, but the
action has been prevented by other colleagues. In another situation, she says
she assaulted a classmate who, according to the teenager, used to intrigue
among her friends. She points out that this girl was much bigger than her and
laughs when she reports that she slapped her in the face. She adds that nowa-
days she no longer fights, she has “laziness” and “breathlessness”, because
she is a smoker. About smoking, she says that is the only thing that has not
managed to change in her life, but has greatly reduced the use of tobacco since
she began dating, because he has made this “control”. Now she only smokes
“three times a week”, repeating that “she does nothing wrong”.
Lilith concludes her story by saying “My story is a bit long, right, but
I’ve already done too much... nowadays I don’t do that anymore”. The content
of this statement seems to be present throughout the report. She says that she
regrets having physically assaulted her mother, not having listened to her in
situations in which she could later find out that she was right, and having failed
to care for and feed her sister. Nowadays, she describes herself as “someone
else”, doing chores she previously did not perform as “laziness”, such as feed-
ing her sisters and cooking. In addition, she adds that she no longer wants to
go out, preferring to stay home with her current boyfriend. Relating to him
about six months ago, she says he has her mother’s approval and that has made
their relationship easier. With that, it seems to mark, throughout the story, a
“before” and “after” having accepted the place her mother intended for her.
In this moment of conformation, the fights soften.
At no time throughout the report is any mention made of the offending
act by the adolescent. When we asked her to tell about her life story, there was
no inclusion of the offense as a landmark moment or possibly a turning point.
This brings us to several questions about the female relationship to crime that
will be discussed later. What are the female ways of being in crime? Does
crime have a centrality or does it happen in parallel to the course of life?
Does crime represent a traumatic point or is it just another secondary event?
Therefore, not appearing in the adolescent’s speech, we resorted to
the PIA process in order to verify her trajectory and relationship with the
offense. She tells, through her testimony to the reference technician of the
Socio-educational who marked it in her record, that she was involved in the
infraction through her friends. She says she had made some new friends and
asked them to use her home as a retail drug dealer during the afternoon when
her mother worked. In order to “have concept with people” eventually allowed.
During a police chase, one of these friends enters the house to hide and the
police found him with drugs. Everyone in the house was detained and sent to
the police station. Lilith also says that she had no involvement with the sale of
illegal drugs, which only offered the house, and says she regrets a lot because
the situation shook her relationship with her boyfriend, who scolded her.
Many women serve sentences in mixed institutions, but they are built
on the characteristics of the male audience and are unable to meet the needs
of spaces and services for women. Thus, we see that only 55 units across the
country reported having a cell or dormitory for pregnant women, 14% have
a nursery and/or maternal referral center for babies up to 2 years old, and 3%
have daycare space, presenting the capacity to receive a maximum of 72
children over 2 years old (BRASIL, 2017b).
The theoretical field presents a similar situation to that found in penal
establishments, with most of the theories thought and developed from the male
involvement with crime. As explained by Matos and Machado (2012), we have,
on the one hand, the invisibility of women in criminological studies, whether as
an aggressor or victim, and, on the other, their maladjusted presence, distorted
from the dominant stereotypes. Starting from Lombroso’s theories, which see
delinquency from a character of abnormality and pathology, to the focus on
social structure, which gave the criminal a resistant status to the prevailing
order, we have an absence of women both in the construction process and in
the content discussed of these theories (ASSIS; CONSTANTINO, 2001).
In this way, there are initial contests, interests and movements of femi-
nist perspectives in the field of criminology, criticizing the discourses about
women who commit crimes in an irrational and heterodeterminate manner,
while highlighting their victimization, especially sexual (MATOS; MACH-
ADO, 2012). As Barcinski (2012, p. 53) reinforce, “[…] the almost exclusively
emphasis on female crime as a result of their affective relationships removes
the protagonism and reinforces female invisibility in the practice of violent
crime and illicit activities”.
However, such a position generates a paradox, since, by contributing
to the construction of a strong, resilient, self-conscious and self-determined
woman, feminist theories seem to contribute to the increase of more punitive
regimes (MATOS; MACHADO, 2012).
In this sense, we have the notion defended by some authors that women
would be doubly deviant and, consequently, doubly stigmatized, since the
criminal practice would be a betrayal of the feminine, whose “nature” is ref-
erenced to domesticity and motherhood (CORDEIRO, 2017). That is, criminal
women would not only be transgressors of the laws, beholden to the legal
apparatus, but would also go against their “natural” role as a docile mother,
daughter and/or wife imposed by patriarchal society. As described by Matos
and Machado (2012):
[...] on the one hand, a woman is less socially expected to commit crimes,
which may result in greater punishment of a woman who commits the same
type of crime as a man. On the other hand, if a woman violates the law but
assures the conventionally required gender roles such as motherhood, she
may be less punished than a woman who does not (p. 38).
against the socially established female role and, consequently, against the
mother figure, who performed its transmission. It was observed that mother-
daughter relations were based on distance or direct conflict, with a prevalence
of ambivalent feelings and little dialogue, especially of a sexual nature. The
entry of the girl in adolescence marks a moment of youth rehearsals, the search
for achievements on the ethical, intellectual and affective-sexual level that
mobilize mothers, from their own failures, and daughters, for failing to meet
maternal expectations. As a result, the conflicts stem from attempts to escape
the enormous domestic responsibility that mothers place on adolescents, high-
lighting their refusal to assume the role of mother to younger siblings (ASSIS;
CONSTANTINO, 2001).
The destinations found to break this impasse are two, either they seek
the street, or turn to building their own homes, in the same parameters as the
maternal. In the words of the authors:
That is, we have a process in which the social limits imposed on women
are tested, but reaffirmed in the face of the scarcity of internal and external
resources of mothers and their daughters. As the position of male domination
is reaffirmed, what can be seen from the study by Cordeiro (2017), which
discusses the advantages of having a steady partner in the environment of a
female prison. According to the author, in addition to reducing loneliness and
emotional neediness, having a man by your side entitles you to individual cells,
more respectful treatment of other prisoners and agents, and even protects
against harassment of the most masculine detainees.
Idealization and appeal to the male that begins in adolescence, with the
very development of female sexuality. For Assis and Constantino (2001),
dreaming of great love is often presented as a priority for these girls, who see
in the affective relationship the ideal of their lives, reaffirming the absence of
professional or intellectual plans that integrate trajectories of distances and
lags school. Thus, cyclical stories are consolidated, of very young mothers,
without sufficient resources, who see their daughters placing their hopes in
marriage and motherhood, but who soon see themselves also without resources
and with no prospects for how to end this cycle.
5. Final remarks
rural area, but to reach that space, she needs to mother the younger sisters. As
a result, she sabotages this position by making her sisters hungry and claims
her right to public space, even physically assaulting her mother.
The mother-daughter relationship, especially in adolescence, is often
marked by conflict, as the former needs to review its own failures in view
of the daughter’s essays, and the latter feels guilty for not meeting maternal
expectations, even if she does not received the necessary support. As psy-
choanalysis demonstrates, the pursuit of the phallus involves demanding it
from the mother, who cannot give what she does not have, and thus presents
her daughter with a non-phallic jouissance that causes devastation. Think-
ing about Lilith’s case, we wonder about the limitations of her mother, who
seems to have also had a movement to refuse motherhood leaving her with
her grandmother and is now grappling with the demands of her daughter, but
is not able to answer.
Which leads us to the possible ways out of maternal conflicts, the kind
of socialization they have received, of becoming a woman, and we are faced
with the appeal to the masculine, the omnipotent and depriving Other. This is
what brings us to the end of Lilith’s narrative, which points out how her boy-
friend’s presence made her not so keen for the street and how her relationship
with her mother and sisters improved, as she doesn’t resent so much now to
take care of them. That is, we may think that from the hysterical structure we
have a joy that comes from deprivation, from being dissatisfied. Perhaps the
final piece to a cycle of becoming a woman that starts over with every girl.
REFERENCES
ALMEIDA, V. P. de; Repercussões da Violência na Construção da Identidade
Feminina da mulher Presa: Um Estudo de Caso. Psicologia, Ciência e Pro-
fissão, v. 26, n. 4, p. 604-619, 2006.
1. Introdução
1 IEAT/UFMG (2017). Curso de vida e trajetória delinquencial: um estudo exploratório dos eventos e narrativas
de jovens em situação de vulnerabilidade. Belo Horizonte, Edital 2017 do Instituto de Estudos Avançados
Transdisciplinares Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, IEAT/UFMG.
2 Sistema Único de Assistência Social – SUAS, responde pela execução das medidas socioeducativas, em
alguns estados brasileiros apenas pelo meio aberto.
3. A mãe na sociologia
3 Segundo Benson (2013), a teoria do curso de vida trata-se de uma sensível análise histórica, que percorre
caminhos em idades diferenciadas ao longo da vida. Para tanto três conceitos são centrais nessa perspectiva
de análise: A trajetória que consiste em uma sequência de estados interligados a partir de experiências
vividas. A transição que são as mudanças de um estágio para outro, relativas às trajetórias em questão.
E os turning points, são processos dinâmicos pelo qual a natureza interligada de trajetórias e transições
geram pontos de virada ou mudanças no curso de vida.
4. Maternidade na psicanálise
4 “Même dans les cas où le père n’est pas là, où l’enfant a été laissé seul avec sa mère, des complexes
d’Œdipe tout à fait normaux – normaux dans les deux sens, normaux en tant que normalisants d’une part, et
aussi normaux en tant qu’ils dénormalisent, je veux dire par leur effet névrosant par exemple – s’établissent
d’une façon exactement homogène aux autres cas. Premier point qui doit attirer notre attention” (LACAN,
1957-1958/1998, p. 168).
Lacan cita o exemplo freudiano da mãe do Pequeno Hans, no qual ela mesma
restringia algumas vontades de seu filho.5
Em Freud, não há uma teorização sobre “função materna”, mas a mãe
ocupa o lugar de representar a falta fálica e representar o objeto que deve
ser interditado à criança. Para Lacan (1957-1958/1998), toda criança precisa
mais do que a satisfação das necessidades e dos cuidados, do contato e da
presença da mãe. Ela necessita sobretudo do “apetite do seu desejo” da mãe
enquanto ser primordial.
5 “Mais pourquoi le père? L’expérience prouve que la mère le fait aussi bien. Rappelez-vous l’observation du petit
Hans, où c’est la mère qui dit – Rentre ça, ça ne se fait pas. En général, c’est le plus souvent la mère qui dit – Si
tu continues à faire comme ça, on appellera le docteur qui te la coupera” (LACAN, 1957-1958/1998, p. 172).
6 “La loi de la mère, c’est, bien entendu, le fait que la mère est un être parlant, et cela suffit à légitimer que je dise
la loi de la mère. Néanmoins cette loi est, si je puis dire, une loi incontrôlée” (LACAN, 1957-1958/1998, p. 188).
O relato dessa mulher parece fazer uma escansão entre antes e depois da
morte da sua mãe, mas Vera localiza as dificuldades com o filho mais velho
ainda em idade escolar e antes mesmo da avó falecer. Vera e os dois filhos
sempre viveram na companhia da avó, servidora pública aposentada, que
ficou dependente da filha durante os dez últimos anos de vida. Tempo em
que Vera localiza sua dedicação absoluta à sua mãe doente e aos filhos, “[...]
então durante esse tempo eu consegui manter ele na minha rédea, levava na
escola, buscava na escola [...]” (sic).
7 “[...] c’est que la mère n’est pas simplement celle qui donne le sein, elle est aussi celle qui donne le seing
s.e.i.n.g. de l’articulation signifiante. Cela ne tient pas seulement au fait qu’elle parle à l’enfant, [...] il y entend
quelque chose bien avant qu’elle ne se l’imagine. En effet, dès avant l’échange proprement linguistique,
toutes sortes de jeux, les jeux d’occultation par exemple, qui si vite déchaînement chez l’enfant le sourire,
voire le rire, sont déjà, à proprement parler, une action symbolique” (LACAN, 1958-1959/2013, p. 43-44).
8 “[...] la mère, c’est-à-dire le sujet primordial de la demande [...] La dimension de toute-puissance, dite de
toute-puissance de la pensée, la femme ne l’a pas en elle, il s’agit de la toute-puissance du sujet comme
sujet de la première demande” (LACAN, 1958-1959/2013, p. 365).
9 “[...] au niveau de l’agent de la frustration, à savoir, la mère. Je vous ai montré que, comme lieu de la demande
d’amour, elle était d’abord symbolisée dans le double registre de la présence et de l’absence, qu’elle se
trouvait être par là en position de donner le départ génétique de la dialectique, pour autant que, mère réelle,
[...] où nous avions placé le lieu effectif de la mère, nous inscrivons [...] le A de l’Autre, en tant que c’est là
que s’articule la demande” (LACAN, 1958-1959/2013, p. 411-412).
10 “Ce qui est essentiel, c’est que la mère fonde le père comme médiateur de ce qui est au-delà de sa loi à elle
et de son caprice, à savoir, purement et simplement, la loi comme telle” (LACAN, 1958-1959/2013, p. 191).
Jana, com a ajuda da mãe Elisa, nos reporta parte da sua história de vida
com os três filhos sempre na companhia da mãe. Jana apresenta certo grau de
dificuldade para organizar as ideias que nos parece ser de ordem emocional
e que a coloca na condição de dependente da mãe, Elisa. Contudo, isso não a
impede de relatar a história de sua família, mesmo que não seja com a mesma
eloquência de sua mãe.
Sobre Daniel, Jana afirma que o menino faz sua iniciação nas práticas
ilícitas aos 10, 12 anos e, desde então, inicia também a trajetória de vida nas
ruas que, a partir dos 17 anos, se transformará no modo de vida de Daniel.
Jana relata as diversas passagens do adolescente pelo sistema socioeducativo
com referência especial à Casa Dom Bosco um centro de internação provisória
até a restrição de liberdade no Centro Educativo Santa Clara.
No entanto, para Jana parece não haver maneira de contar a história de
Daniel sem mencionar a do filho mais velho assassinado aos 15 anos. A história
de vida de Daniel parece estar amarrada à do irmão. De fato, Daniel seguiu,
em grande medida, o percurso do irmão que também vivia nas ruas, chegando
a sofrer um atentado contra a sua vida quando teve o corpo todo queimado.
Jana não oferece muitos detalhes em relação a esse filho, afirma apenas
que “[...] ele era terrível” (sic). O adolescente estava sendo acompanhado
pelo Programa de Proteção a Crianças e Adolescentes Ameaçados de Morte
(PPCAAM) e por determinação judicial Jana foi levada com os filhos para o
município de Justinópolis na região metropolitana de Belo Horizonte na ten-
tativa de garantir a vida do adolescente, mas apenas quinze dia depois ele foge
e retorna ao bairro onde habita a família e é assassinado próximo à sua casa.
Jana encerra esse breve relato com a seguinte frase: “Quando não fez nem dois
anos da morte do primeiro o outro já estava procurando a morte também” (sic).
Daniel também foi acompanhado pelo PPCAAM e após as reincidências
recebe a primeira medida de internação, 1 ano e 6 meses por tráfico de drogas.
Na avaliação de Jana, o CIA – Centro Integrado de Atendimento ao Adoles-
cente Autor de Ato Infracional – por onde Daniel passou diversas vezes, foi
muito importante, “[...] eu recebi muita ajuda, tava com a cabeça muito ruim”
(sic). Já a avó materna de Daniel, dona Elisa, faz críticas ao sistema que,
em sua opinião, não considerou a condição de fragilidade da filha, em suas
palavras, “O juiz tinha tirado ela daqui. Na situação que tem eles entenderam
mais o lado dos meninos do que o dela. [...] Tirou ela daqui e levou ela lá pra
Justinópolis.” Jana não tinha nenhuma rede social na cidade, apenas o suporte
material e técnico do PPCAAM e, ainda que a família compreenda a função
desse programa, dona Elisa parece acreditar que nessas condições a filha é
que corria risco “[...] eu não tinha como cuidar dela lá”.
Com a morte do filho mais velho, Valquíria retorna para casa de sua
mãe, contudo, dois meses após a morte do filho, Jana é novamente levada
para Justinópolis, agora por causa de Daniel também ameaçado de morte. No
entanto, para dona Elisa, “[...] mas com todo tipo de ajuda, não resolveu nada
pra eles, porque pode ter toda a ajuda, se a pessoa não quer ser ajudada, não
tem jeito”. Davidson está preso há 2 anos por tráfico de drogas e se tornou
morador de rua (assim como o irmão). Dona Elisa se queixa do desamparo em
que os filhos deixaram Jana, “[...] da história toda só ficou eu pra cuidar dela.
[...] e ela pelejou de todas as formas e o que restou pra ela foi ficar sozinha...”.
“Ele me beija na boca se eu deixar” diz sobre a força da relação dos dois,
expressando o elemento erótico e a sexualidade presente. Lucas não gosta do
namorado da mãe e tenta colocar dinheiro dentro de casa.
Vera conta o embaraçoso momento do divórcio conjugal e suas incidên-
cias na sua imagem de mãe para Lucas. Vera estava solteira desde que seu
companheiro partiu até o falecimento de sua mãe. Depois disso, ela retomou
um namoro que tinha antes de conhecer o pai de Lucas. Porém, as tensões
mãe-filho começaram aí, o filho não gosta do novo companheiro de sua mãe,
pois crê que que sua mãe foi infiel e que isso causou o afastamento do seu pai.
Vera não explica exatamente esse mal entendido, mas se defende afir-
mando que não traiu. Afirma apenas que foi uma história mal resolvida e mal
contada que nunca se resolveu de fato. O que se transmitiu de mãe para filho
foi um silêncio embaraçoso sobre qual seria o desejo de Vera?
O filho apenado parece colocar em cena um comportamento desviante
do próprio pai de Vera, que chamaremos aqui de José. Este vivia sem renda
sustentado integralmente pela mãe da genitora. Depois da morte da progeni-
tora, ele ficou em situação de rua e envolvido com consumo de drogas. Nada
declarou sobre envolvimento de José com tráfico.
O lugar de Vera na família é do sacrifício e de fazer o trabalho maternal
sujo que ninguém deseja fazer, nem ajudar. Além de ter sua vida profissional
parada durante dez anos com os cuidados de sua mãe, resgatou, cuidou e
conseguiu aposentadoria do seu pai que hoje não é muito grato a ela. Enfim,
as demandas familiares pesam bastante e planeja se mudar com companheiro
atual para tomar distância do universo familiar tão adoecedor para sua saúde
psíquica. A condição de saúde de Vera se agrava com o envolvimento do filho
com crime que impõe um estresse importante e também responsável pelo
quadro depressivo atual.
Diz que Lucas é uma tempestade, e seu filho mais novo é a bonança,
expressando o quão difícil é o convívio com Lucas. Algumas de suas afirma-
ções nos levam a identificar algo mais além da tormenta. Algo da ordem do
movimento, da irrupção e da intensa carga de vida que Lucas parece transmitir
e que fascina sua mãe. Repetindo as palavras da mãe “[...] ele é mais pare-
cido comigo, ele é alegre, divertido e determinado”. Talvez não haja mesmo
descrição melhor que a expressão de pavor e fascínio que causa o espetáculo
de uma tempestade.
A carta que Vera hesita em entregar ao seu filho afirma um amor com
dor muito tempestuoso. “Não se esquece que o amor de mãe é incondicional
e não existe ninguém que quer seu bem quanto eu quero. Te amo muito”. Fala
também de algo que errou na educação do filho mas não sabe o quê. “Não
queira estar sempre errado. Por favor acorde enquanto é tempo”. Porém,
Lucas parece decidido, como sua mãe. Vera sempre esteve presa para cuidar
dos outros. Lucas parece estar colado ao fantasma materno de uma liberdade
absoluta, livre de tudo até mesmo do “temor de Deus”. Livre dos freios da
vida civilizada, nem que seja dentro de uma prisão.
meio de visitas ao presídio ou, numa condição fora da norma, via internet
(e-mail, redes sociais etc). As visitas, segundo Vera, estão fora de questão,
“[...] não dou conta, não consigo!” (sic). Cabe dizer também que aquilo que é
dito pelo rapaz é desacreditado,” [...] ele não me fala a verdade e eu também
não acredito nas coisas que ele fala. [...] ele já tentou falar, mas eu não quis
ouvir, não quero saber dessas história de violência” (sic). A palavra em seu
registro oral aqui interditada não cria condições de aproximação entre Lucas
e Vera, que parece mesmo determinada em não saber. O que será que esse
filho denuncia que lhe é tão insuportável? Sabemos apenas que Vera elege um
meio tão antigo quanto inusitado – em tempos de digitalização da vida – para
dirigir-se ao filho, a carta de próprio punho.
Por tudo isso e por tantas outras afirmações duras registradas em sua
narrativa que nos trazem uma imagem austera e rigorosa de Vera, a carta
endereçada ao filho que ela se oferece para ler, nos surpreende. Vera lê emo-
cionada para a pesquisadora a carta que escreveu para Lucas, mas não enviou.
“Filho amado!” (sic), essa será a primeira frase que Lucas lerá, caso venha a
ter essa carta em suas mãos algum dia. Até aquele momento, a carta perma-
necia sem chegar a seu destino. E qual seria esse destino? Vera faz com que
sua carta seja ouvida, não pelo destinatário anunciado, mas por um outro no
qual, talvez, ela suponha algum saber, e por ela própria.
Segundo Lacan (1976-1977), uma carta que não chega, une lettre en
instance, é uma carta suspensa, uma carta em espera. Para Fingermann (2013),
a condição de carta não enviada expressa “algo da ordem da constância, da
perseverança, da insistência, algo de uma iminência em suspenso”, portanto,
de um certo devir. Nessa perspectiva, talvez possamos afirmar que a carta em
questão demonstra que a mãe persiste, à sua maneira, na possibilidade do filho
construir uma outra saída, diferente do crime, para suas questões.
No entanto, Lacan (1976-1977) afirma que uma carta em suspenso, esse
escrito em espera é um escrito que não tem resposta no Outro. Fingermann
(2013, p. 123), compreende essa afirmação de Lacan, da seguinte maneira,
“algo acontece que causa desconforto, ou delícia, mas abala, desconcerta,
deixa estupefato, faz furo – trauma, portanto – ‘sintoma escrito em letras
de sofrimento na carne do sujeito’” (LACAN, 1953/1998, p. 307)11. A carta
enquanto recurso que, como tantos outros é parcial – “ameniza o pathos” e
os sintomas no corpo, como Vera e Jana podem testemunhar, “forjam uma
outra escritura”. Fingermann reconhece na carta en souffrance, que pode ser
traduzida por a letra em sofrimento (ou em espera), “um ponto de emergência”
como que da ordem do grito que não se transmuta em apelo.
11 A referência apontada nesta citação é: LACAN, J. Função e Campo da fala e da linguagem em psicanálise
(1953). In: LACAN, J. Escritos.Tradução Vera Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 1998, p. 238-324.
Entre grito e escrito [cri et écrit], alguma coisa alcança, atinge, toca. Joyce
desenvolveu isso, se assim pudermos dizer, em seu sintoma: o que alcança,
no sentido do impacto, não o sentido, mas o gozo. Um escrito para não
ser lido, mas ouvido, como dizia Joyce [...]: “Ah, não é de forma alguma
escrito. Tampouco é feito para ser lido; é feito para ser olhado e ouvido”
(FIGERMANN, 2013, p. 124).
Outra carta não menos famosa, mas que não fora roubada como no conto
de Poe e sim retida como no caso de Vera, “Carta ao Pai” de Franz Kafka
(1952), também foi submetida a um estudo na perspectiva psicanalítica. O
filósofo e psicanalista português Filipe Pereirinha (2013) se dedicou a discutir
a mesma questão:
Pode uma carta chegar a seu destino mesmo quando não é enviada? [...]
Aparentemente, A “Carta ao pai”, de Kafka, parece desmentir a afirmação
lacaniana de que “uma carta chega sempre ao seu destino”, uma vez que
ela não chegou efetivamente a ser enviada e, como tal, o pai também não
pôde recebê-la de facto (PEREIRINHA, 2013, p. 2017).
12 POE, E. A. A Carta Roubada (1844). Tradução de William Lagos. São Paulo: L&PM Pocket, 2003.
Talvez seja esse também o destino da carta que Vera, vale lembrar, car-
rega sempre consigo. Destino esse de refletir como num espelho às avessas
um estranho íntimo que o filho realiza na própria existência, implicações da
ambiguidade materna que faz oscilar seu desejo.
O caso de Jana nos parece tanto mais dramático quanto trágico. Jana
parece fixada num vácuo entre um passado de lutas e a impossibilidade de um
futuro. Jana que depôs suas armas e se abrigou definitivamente no não saber,
na impotência e no esquecimento velados por sua mãe. O filho continua a
lhe escrever e, talvez, nem haja a expectativa de uma resposta, mas um com-
promisso com a perseverança, com a insistência, é um “não largar de mão”
(PEREIRINHA, 2013) como Kafka com seu pai. Para Fingermann a letra só
chegará a seu destino quando ela esvaziar esse valor de troca, de mensagem
cifrada pelo sintoma “[...] então que pode fazer uso dela para qualquer outra
coisa [...], outra coisa que não reiterar o romance do qual pode enfim des-
conectar-se (se désabonner), descolar-se” (FINGERMANN, 2013, p. 128).
As cartas que aqui comentamos e que se apresentam como uma alegoria
da regra do não dito estabelecida entre estes jovens e suas mães cumprem
a contento seu papel de sustentar minimamente o laço entre eles. Contudo,
mantendo a todos a uma certa distância do enigma de um desejo que se extra-
viou, talvez por não encontrar seu ponto de basta. Uma distância de segurança
exigida desde muito cedo por esses jovens e recrudescida pelas grades que
agora os separam de suas mães.
7. Considerações finais
Nesse estudo buscamos refletir, a partir das narrativas das mães de dois
jovens em conflito com a lei, a posição da mulher-mãe quando convocada pelas
políticas a responder, no cenário público, pela função de cuidado e proteção
desses jovens. Mesmo antes dessa convocação, mesmo antes do drama que se
desenrola desde muito cedo na vida desses jovens, devemos reconhecer ali histó-
rias de vida que envolvem diversos atores e contingências – num cenário quase
sempre de exclusão e pobreza – e que dão ao tema uma enorme complexidade.
Pautamos nossa argumentação dentro de duas perspectivas teóricas, a
sociológica e a psicanalítica que, acreditamos, conservam abertos os canais
de diálogo e, num esforço transdisciplinar, tentam enfrentar tal complexidade
e suas contradições. Pelo viés sociológico, consideramos os laços sociais
constituídos no âmbito familiar, bem como, o exercício do controle social
informal e o suporte da rede social.
Nas análises dos casos estudados, as evidências apontam para uma maior
dificuldade dos indivíduos pobres na criação e na manutenção de suas redes.
Isso, conforme Marques (2007), poderia estar relacionado à trajetória dos
adolescentes e suas famílias, em que o problema da manutenção das relações
pode, ainda, estar associado ao processo de migração, ao tipo de sociabilidade
e recursos que esses indivíduos dispõem em diferentes grupos sociais.
Na divisão de responsabilidades entre família, sociedade e Estado quanto
à segurança e desenvolvimento desses adolescentes e jovens, poucos são os
cenários de proteção. A desproteção parece estar na pauta do dia, seja pela
precariedade de nossas políticas e equipamentos públicos destinados a esse
público, seja pela fragilidade das famílias já descrita anteriormente.
Para além desse enquadre objetivo, abordamos também outro universo
ainda mais desafiador, de ordem psíquica, que contesta os manuais, métodos
e protocolos dos sistemas públicos. É a cena subjetiva que expõe nossa per-
plexidade diante do sujeito desejante, ainda que um desejo mortífero, que
não recua nem mesmo mediante a experiência aterradora do encarceramento.
Portanto, acreditamos na importância de evitar a reprodução de julga-
mentos e preconceitos das mães de jovens autores de ato infracional. Obser-
vamos, ainda, uma tendência à culpabilização das mesmas, ainda que pesem
suas sobrecargas de trabalho, deveres domésticos e negligência dos genitores
dos jovens. Contudo, vale reconhecer a tensão entre a culpabilização social
e a necessidade de análise da implicação na cena inconsciente dos sujeitos
envolvidos. Tais eixos de análise, supostamente polarizados, podem e devem
dialogar para juntos melhor apreender as dimensões das experiências de sofri-
mento em jogo na trajetória infracional de jovens brasileiros.
REFERÊNCIAS
AMORIM, C. G. M.; CASTRO, S. G. da S. de. Histórias de Ausências e a Cul-
pabilização da Mulher: estudo de casos. Igualitária: Revista do Curso de His-
tória da Estácio BH. Belo Horizonte, n. 12, ago./dez. 2018. ISSN 23170174.
BENSON, Michael. Crime and the Life Course: An Introduction. 2nd Edi-
tion. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013.
1. Introduction
1 IEAT/UFMG (2017). Curso de vida e trajetória delinquencial: um estudo exploratório dos eventos e narrativas
de jovens em situação de vulnerabilidade. Belo Horizonte, Edital 2017 do Instituto de Estudos Avançados
Transdisciplinares Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, IEAT/UFMG.
we highlight the premise of the Child and Adolescent Statute (BRASIL, 1990)
– (Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente – ECA) – regarding families and the
conditions they may or may not offer their children in relation to this protec-
tion/unprotection formula.
Under what conditions do we recognize actions, situations and scenarios
of youth protection or unprotection? Beyond the call for public policies of
attention to this public, how would the mother, with all subjective implications,
be in a position to respond to the appeal of protecting these young people
as proposed by state policy? Who do these women really want to talk about
when they ask to speak?
Considering these issues, we worked with three narratives of women,
mothers of young people in conflict with the law, guiding our listening to
collect the gestures, actions, words or the absence of all expression of these
mothers towards their children in the fragments of the narrative. The narra-
tives will not be reproduced here in their entirety because we prioritize the
discussions and essential debate that addresses the recognition of singularities
– the psi field – in relation to public policies of universal character. However,
these women will be present in all the analyzes developed here, as well as
their families in relation to the social field.
The family is seen by public policies as a vector and guarantee of conti-
nuity for state actions aimed at children and youth. Public policies developed
within the logic of the State to serve children and adolescents invariably have
a relentless partner in family, after all, family is still the main guarantor of
protection and development for children in terms of health and affection.
Therefore, it is through family that the policies of any sector reach children
and fulfill their objectives.
In official documents, such as the Child and Adolescent Statute or in the
National System of Socio-educative Support (Sistema Nacional de Atendimento
Socioeducativo – SINASE) (BRASIL, 2006), which are particularly relevant
to this paper, family or “parents or guardians” are quoted many times. These
quotes are always in the perspective of the adolescent’s right to have a family
reference during the whole process. However, we find from professional expe-
rience and research conducted by the authors of this paper that when we read
“families” in official texts, in practice, we understand that this is a reference
to mothers. It is the mothers (grandmothers, godmothers, aunts and sisters)
who generally respond to the call for justice and align themselves with the
socio-educational project of adolescents who infringe the law. Rarely are men,
fathers or the like, seen in the corridors of courts or in welfare2 institutions.
2 Unified Social Assistance System (Sistema Único de Assistência Social – SUAS), is responsible for
the implementation of socioeducational measures, in some Brazilian states in measures that do not
include confinement.
In Brazil, the state only started to discuss the social issue as a public
issue in the first decade of the twentieth century. Later, it was considered a
guaranteed right in public policy during the 1980s, with a Federal Constitu-
tion that brought a new dimension of public policies through Social Security,
composed of a tripod: social welfare, social assistance and health.
Since then, the centrality of women in social policies has become more
evident through public social assistance policy, organized by the National
Social Assistance Policy (Política Nacional de Assistência Social – PNAS)
promulgated in 2004, as well as income transfer programs, substantially the
Family Grant Program (Programa Bolsa Família – PBF). The Family Grant
Program integrates the actions of the Ministry of Citizenship through the
Special Secretariat of Social Development and aims to reduce poverty and
extreme poverty in Brazil.
According to the Ministry of Citizenship, in 2015, 98% of the benefits
were given to women, with 68% of this percentage being black women. This
data points in three directions: the increase in the number of female household
heads in Brazil (CAVENAGHI; ALVES, 2018); the possibility of guaranteeing
women’s autonomy through access to income; and the state that reinforces the
3 According to Benson (2013), the theory of life course is a sensitive historical analysis, which walks paths at
different ages throughout life. Therefore, three concepts are central to this perspective of analysis: trajectory
which consists of a sequence of interconnected states from lived experiences. The transition which are the
changes from one stage to another, relative to the trajectories in question. And the turning points are dyna-
mic processes whereby the interconnected nature of trajectories and transitions generate turning points or
changes in life course.
Thus, for Sampson and Laub (1993), emotional attachment ties are nec-
essarily connected with forms of control and monitoring, and also facilitate
the link between family and society. On the other hand, the authors argue
that social structure tends to directly influence the social processes of family
functioning and, in a specific way, the social control exercised by the family.
In addition, other factors that may directly affect the family’s social
control mechanisms are:
4. Motherhood in psychoanalysis
reflection intends to understand the choices of the subject itself in their own
psychic structure. Psychology usually approaches the family from only three
foundations: father, mother and child. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand,
thinks about the family from four: father, mother, child and phallus.
For Lacan, the notion of function is a signifier, or a set of signifiers, or
a letter that establishes a link between a series of signifiers. The father, for
example, translates into a function: the fatherly function. Thus, the father is
a signifier who introduces castration in the subject, establishing desire from
the phallic significance.
Since it is mainly the exercise of a function, the mother can perform
this function even in the absence of a father. Lacan (1957-1958/1998), in
his work The seminar, book V: The formations of the unconscious, says that
even when a child was raised alone with their mother, the Oedipus Complex
is as “normal” as if the father were present performing his function4. The
castrating instance of the paternal function, for example, can be performed
by the mother, as Lacan cites the Freudian example of Little Hans’s mother,
in which she restricted some wishes of her son herself5.
In Freud, there is no theorizing about “maternal function”, but the mother
takes the place of representing the phallic absence and representing the object
that should be prohibited to the child. According to Lacan (1957-1958/1998),
every child needs the contact and presence of their mother more than the
satisfaction of the mother’s needs and care. They need above all the mother’s
“appetite for her desire” as a primordial being.
4 “Même dans les cas où le père n’est pas là, où l’enfant a été laissé seul avec sa mère, des complexes
d’Œdipe tout à fait normaux – normaux dans les deux sens, normaux en tant que normalisants d’une part, et
aussi normaux en tant qu’ils dénormalisent, je veux dire par leur effet névrosant par exemple – s’établissent
d’une façon exactement homogène aux autres cas. Premier point qui doit attirer notre attention” (LACAN,
1957-1958/1998, p. 168).
5 “Mais pourquoi le père? L’expérience prouve que la mère le fait aussi bien. Rappelez-vous l’observation
du petit Hans, où c’est la mère qui dit – Rentre ça, ça ne se fait pas. En général, c’est le plus souvent
la mère qui dit – Si tu continues à faire comme ça, on appellera le docteur qui te la coupera” (LACAN,
1957-1958/1998, p. 172).
6 “La loi de la mère, c’est, bien entendu, le fait que la mère est un être parlant, et cela suffit à légitimer que je
dise la loi de la mère. Néanmoins cette loi est, si je puis dire, une loi incontrôlée” (LACAN, 1957-1958/1998,
p. 188).
7 “[...] c’est que la mère n’est pas simplement celle qui donne le sein, elle est aussi celle qui donne le seing
s.e.i.n.g. de l’articulation signifiante. Cela ne tient pas seulement au fait qu’elle parle à l’enfant, [...] il y entend
quelque chose bien avant qu’elle ne se l’imagine. En effet, dès avant l’échange proprement linguistique,
toutes sortes de jeux, les jeux d’occultation par exemple, qui si vite déchaînement chez l’enfant le sourire,
voire le rire, sont déjà, à proprement parler, une action symbolique” (LACAN, 1958-1959/2013, p. 43-44).
8 “[...] la mère, c’est-à-dire le sujet primordial de la demande [...] La dimension de toute-puissance, dite de
toute-puissance de la pensée, la femme ne l’a pas en elle, il s’agit de la toute-puissance du sujet comme
sujet de la première demande” (LACAN, 1958-1959/2013, p. 365).
9 “[...] au niveau de l’agent de la frustration, à savoir, la mère. Je vous ai montré que, comme lieu de la demande
d’amour, elle était d’abord symbolisée dans le double registre de la présence et de l’absence, qu’elle se
trouvait être par là en position de donner le départ génétique de la dialectique, pour autant que, mère réelle,
[...] où nous avions placé le lieu effectif de la mère, nous inscrivons [...] le A de l’Autre, en tant que c’est là
que s’articule la demande” (LACAN, 1958-1959/2013, p. 411-2).
For the inscription of paternal law, it is essential that the mother upholds
the paternal instance as a mediator of maternal “whim”10. Thus, the mother’s
word conveys a law that is not its own “law” but a law of an Other. In this
way, even the mother’s object of desire is taken by the reality of the Other,
equally subjected by the paternal law. Hence, we have possible conditions
for the establishment of the oedipal relationship.
This woman’s account seems to scan between before and after her moth-
er’s death, but Vera finds the difficulties with her eldest son still in school-age
and even before her grandmother dies. Vera and her two sons have always
lived in the company of the grandmother, a retired civil servant, who became
dependent on her daughter for the last ten years of her life. A time when Vera
locates her absolute dedication to her sick mother and children, “[...] so dur-
ing that time I managed to keep him under my rein, I took him to school, I
picked him up at school [...]” (sic).
Her narrative – over sixty minutes long – begins with the following
sentence: “I don’t really know what he did.” This not knowing, or a certain
“poorly concealed knowledge” returns sometimes in her account. Her ambigu-
ous narrative presents a woman who was very strict with her son and other
mothers in the same situation as her, but a very positive assessment of the
mother she was to Lucas and the family that always supported him. Later we
will bring other elements of the case that we will comment from the perspec-
tive of Sociology and Psychoanalysis.
Jana, with the help of her mother Elisa, tells us part of her life story with
her three children, always with her mother. Jana has a degree of difficulty in
organizing ideas that seem to us that it might be an emotional issue which
puts her in a condition of dependency on her mother, Elisa. However, this
does not prevent her from telling her family history, even if it is not with the
same eloquence as her mother.
About Daniel, Jana states that the boy initiated illicit practices at about
the age of 10, 12, and since then had also begun his life on the streets which,
10 “Ce qui est essentiel, c’est que la mère fonde le père comme médiateur de ce qui est au-delà de sa loi à elle
et de son caprice, à savoir, purement et simplement, la loi comme telle” (LACAN, 1958-1959/2013, p. 191).
from the age of 17, becomes Daniel’s way of life. Jana recounts the adoles-
cent’s various passages through the socio-educational system with special
reference to Casa Dom Bosco, a temporary detention center until his freedom
restriction measure at Santa Clara Educational Center.
However, for Jana, there seems to be no way to tell Daniel’s story without
mentioning that of her eldest son, murdered when he was 15. Daniel’s life
story seems to be tied to his brother’s. In fact, Daniel followed the path of his
brother to a high degree, who also lived on the streets, and suffered an attack
on his life when he had his body completely burned.
Jana does not offer much details about this son, only stating that “[...]
he was terrible” (sic). The teenager was being accompanied by the Program
for the Protection of Children Threatened with Death (Programa de Proteção
à Crianças e Adolescentes Ameaçados de Morte – PPCAAM) and, by court
order, Jana was taken with her children to the municipality of Justinópolis
in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte in an attempt to protect the
adolescent’s life, but only a fortnight later, he escapes, returns to his family
neighborhood and is murdered near his home. Jana ends this brief account
with the following sentence: “When it was not even two years after the first
one’s death, the other was looking for death too” (sic).
Daniel was also accompanied by PPCAAM and after recidivism receives
the first measure of confinement: 1 year and 6 months for drug trafficking. In
Jana’s assessment, the Integrated Center for Care of Adolescent Authors of
Infringing Act (Centro Integrado de Atendimento ao Adolescente Autor de
Ato Infracional – CIA), which Daniel went through several times, was very
important, “[...] I received a lot of help, my mind was awful” (sic). Daniel’s
maternal grandmother, Dona Elisa, criticizes the system which, in her opinion,
did not consider her daughter’s condition of fragility, in her words, “The judge
had taken her out of here. In their situation they understood the boys’ side
more than hers. [...] He got her out of here and took her there to Justinópolis.”
Jana had no social network in town, only PPCAAM’s material and technical
support, and although her family understands the role of this program, Dona
Elisa seems to believe that under these conditions her daughter was at risk
“[...] I had no means of taking care of her there”.
With the death of her eldest son, Vera returns to her mother’s home, how-
ever, two months after her son’s death, Jana is again taken to Justinópolis, now
because Daniel is also threatened with death. However, for Dona Elisa, “[...]
but with all kinds of help, it didn’t solve anything for them, because you can
have all the help, but if the person doesn’t want to be helped, there’s no way.”
Davidson has been in prison for 2 years for drug trafficking and has become
homeless (as is his brother). Dona Elisa complains about the helplessness in
which the children left Jana, “[...] after all the story I was the only one left to
take care of her. [...] and she fought in every way and what was left for her
was to be alone... ”.
The social realities presented by Jana and Vera are found in the solitary
exercise of caring for their children and in their father’s absence. The reports
reveal women isolated on their islands who, with a scarce social support net-
work, witness the involvement of their children in infringement trajectories,
still during adolescence. In the scenario experienced by these women, social
networks can function as support in informal social control. Characterized
as internalization of values and socialization, this social control is performed
by parents or their representatives – with the support of neighbors, family
members and community institutions – who supervise their children in the
absence of their guardians.
Jana elucidates, in her emotion-filled speech, that she left her home
early to work and to provide for her family, and in the meantime, she had the
support of her mother. With her son’s involvement in the trajectory of infrac-
tions and his permanence on the street, Jana insisted on trying to change her
son’s reality. “[...] from the age of fifteen to now it was just street, he came
home, he went to the street, he came home, he went to the street, and I would
go after him, I got tired of running after him[...]” (sic). With the infractional
involvement of her child, Jana’s social network is now complemented by social
institutions for the protection of adolescents, as well as social and educational
institutions for confinement.
The trajectory of infractional involvement of the children made Jana fall
ill. She had to interrupt her work activities, putting the family in a situation
of social vulnerability. In an attempt to protect her children, who were threat-
ened with death, Jana moved twice with the support of PPCAAM. However,
informal social control were succumbed by institutional social control: from
drug trafficking, which murdered her first child, and from the criminal system,
which sentenced her second child to serve time for drug trafficking.
Likewise, Vera’s tense reality drove her to neglect the facts “in fact I
don’t know what he did” (sic). Initially, Vera was not socially vulnerable, she
was immersed in her mother’s care. And during that time, she was able to
exercise social control over her son. However, she reports that since child-
hood, Lucas demanded more of her severity, especially in school where he
presented challenging behaviors. After her mother’s death, Vera had to work
to secure the livelihood of her family nucleus. At this moment, the social
controls hitherto exerted by Vera, become weak[...] “he felt free, now he has
no one to watch over him as he used to. And he went with bad company and
was arrested three or four times as a minor. [...] And then I didn’t want to
study, I didn’t want anything [...] (sic).
Sampson and Laub (1997) understand that the private exercise of social
control is also treated as the effect of social ties, and these as a mechanism
of inhibition of criminal offense. In such a way that the social bond would be
relative to the attachment and commitment secured in the parental relationship
between parents and children. In the authors’ conception, emotional attach-
ment bonds are necessarily connected with forms of control and monitoring,
as well as facilitating the connection between family and society. On the
other hand, the authors argue that social structure tends to directly influence
the social processes of family functioning and, in a specific way, the social
control exercised by the family.
Given the responsibilities delegated to Vera, refraining from dealing with
her son’s infractional involvement would be one less problem. Thus, in light of
all the challenges required in caring for Lucas since his childhood, persisting
in attempts to encourage him to go to school, preventing him from engaging
in criminal activities, and still having to worry about other concerns – taken
as the sole head of the household – would require more energy than she had
already invested all this time. Thus, Lucas’s arrest would be the possibility
for the state to exercise the social control which Vera could no longer achieve.
The realities of the adolescents’ mothers analyzed here amount to the
discussion about all these family and social crises. And they appear to be
linked to the rise of violent crime. Moreover, these crises bring the frontier
of the crime world closer to family life. It is as if the trajectories allied with
the “world of crime” appeared as an “option” to the deprivations proper to
the social fabric. In short, “when the family breaks down, crime embraces
it” (FELTRAN, 2008).
Vera says she does not (want to) know about her son’s crime that moti-
vated his arrest. In fact, she knows. Her son’s involvement in drug trafficking
was known but disapproved by her. Vera would take money from her son; she
would not even eat pizzas that her son bought with suspicious money. This
showed her attitude of disagreement with her child’s illegal source of income.
Vera addresses her child’s boundless determination. Sometimes it makes
her fascinated, sometimes horrified. For her, Lucas is someone who has made
his choice. And so he remains unbending even after arrest. How can he “not
fear God” (sic)? In Vera’s speech, the fear of God is what could act as a brake
on illegal or dangerous situations, or as a limit on Lucas’s speech and attitudes.
The religious metaphor expresses the weak inscription of the paternal function
to deal with the risks he takes in criminal life.
At the same time, Vera does not resign herself to her son’s lack of pros-
pect of changing his criminal way of life and says that his unbending deter-
mination is a maternal trait. She said that with a smile on her face, despite
the consequences this “stubbornness” has on family life. The “vida louca”
(crazy life) style marked by transgression and boundless enjoyment was, is,
and will be Lucas’s choice.
His father disappeared shortly after the divorce with Vera when Lucas
was 2 years old. There was an uncle Lucas had ties to, but he doesn’t even
mention him as someone he respects, admires, or fears. He does not approach
this uncle as a symbolic father or in the place of paternal substitution. He just
says he liked his uncle.
As for Vera’s relationship with Lucas, the tones are much more intense.
Single during most of her child’s upbringing, the mother says that he is closer
to her image: cheerful, fun and “determined”. “He kisses me on the lips if I
let him” she says about the strength of their relationship, expressing the erotic
element and the present sexuality. Lucas doesn’t like his mother’s boyfriend
and tries to bring money to the house.
Vera tells us about the awkward moment of marital divorce and its impact
on her motherly image to Lucas. Vera was single since the moment her partner
left until when her mother died. After that, she resumed a relationship she had
before meeting Lucas’s father. However, the mother-child tensions started
there, the son does not like his mother’s new partner, because he believes that
his mother was unfaithful and that caused his father estrangement.
Vera does not explain this misunderstanding exactly, but defends herself
by saying that she did not cheat. She merely states that it was an unresolved
and miscommunicated story that never really resolved itself. What passed
from mother to son was an awkward silence about what was Vera’s desire?
The imprisoned son seems to put on stage the deviant behavior of Vera’s
own father, which we will call José. This one lived without an income, sup-
ported entirely by his grandmother. After his mother’s death, he was home-
less and involved in drug use. She said nothing about José’s involvement
in trafficking.
Vera’s place in the family is one of sacrifice and of doing the dirty
maternal work that no one wants to do or help with. In addition to having her
professional life stopped for ten years to take care of her mother, she rescued,
cared for and managed to help her father – who is not very grateful to her
nowadays – get a retirement plan. Finally, family demands weigh heavily and
she plans to move with her current partner to distance herself from the family
universe which is so detrimental for her mental health. Her health condition is
aggravated by the involvement of her child with crime that imposes a major
stress and is also responsible for her current depressive condition.
She says Lucas is a storm, and her youngest son is the bonanza, express-
ing how difficult living with Lucas is. Some of her statements lead us to iden-
tify something beyond the storm. Something of the order of movement, the
outburst, and the intense life that Lucas seems to convey and that fascinates
his mother. In the words of the mother “[...] he is more like me, he is cheerful,
fun and determined”. Perhaps there is no better description than the expression
of dread and fascination that the spectacle of a storm causes.
The letter which Vera hesitates to deliver to her son expresses a stormy
love with pain. “Do not forget that motherly love is unconditional and there
is no one who holds you as dear as I do. I love you very much. She also talks
about something that went wrong in her child’s education but does not know
what it is. “Don’t be wrong forever. Please wake up while it’s time.” However,
Lucas seems determined, like his mother. Vera who was always trapped taking
care of others. Luke seems to be glued to the maternal phantom of absolute
freedom, free from all, even the “fear of God.” Free from the brakes of civi-
lized life, even if it is within a prison.
The cases here presented display the letters as a signifier that seems to
articulate the unspoken or the unspeakable between these mothers and their
children. The act of writing, by itself, receives in Lacanian theory a rather
peculiar and challenging treatment for even the most experienced theorists.
Is it certain that writing as such holds a signifier status? This is a very
justified question, since:
denounce as unbearable to him? We only know that Vera chooses a way which
is as old as it is unusual – in these times of digitalization – to address her son,
a letter in her own handwriting.
For all this and for so many harsh statements recorded in her narrative
that bring us an austere and rigorous image of Vera, we are surprised at the
letter addressed to her son she offers to read. Vera reads – in an emotional
manner – to the researcher the letter she wrote, but did not send to Lucas.
“Beloved Son!” (sic), this will be the first sentence Lucas will read if he ever
holds this letter in his hands. Until that moment, the letter remained there
without reaching its destination. And what would its fate be? Vera makes her
letter heard, not by the advertised recipient, but by another in which, perhaps,
she supposes some knowledge, and by herself.
According to Lacan (1976-1977), a letter that does not arrive, une lettre
en instance, is a suspended letter, a waiting letter. According to Fingermann
(2013), the condition of an unsent letter expresses “something of the order of
constancy, perseverance, insistence, something of an imminence in suspense”,
therefore, of a certain becoming. With this perspective, perhaps we can say
that the letter in question demonstrates that the mother persists, in her own
way, in the possibility of the child constructing another exit, different from
crime, for their questions.
However, Lacan (1976-1977) states that a pending letter, this writing in
suspension is a writing that has no answer in the Other. Fingermann (2013,
p. 123) understands this statement by Lacan as follows: “something happens
that causes discomfort, or delight, but shakes, disconcerts, stuns, punctures
–traumatizes, therefore – a symptom written in letters of suffering in the flesh
of the subject (Lacan, 1953/1998)”11. The letter as a resource that, like so many
others, is partial – “softens the pathos” and the body symptoms, as Vera and
Jana may testify, “forge another scripture.” Fingermann recognizes in the letter
en souffrance (which can be translated as the letter in distress or on hold), “an
emergency point” as of the order of the cry that is not transmuted into appeal.
In “The Instance of the Letter”, Lacan (1972/1998) warns that although
there is no answer in the Other, “[...] keeping there in any case the price of
this letter that I say always reaches where it should”. A commentary which is
consistent with his Seminar “The Purloined Letter” (1966/1998) in which he
reaffirms Poe’s proposition12 (1844/1978) that a letter always reaches its des-
tination. If so, what is our part in this? We who made ourselves circumstantial
recipients, what would be our response to this appeal? Or what would be the
final destination of this letter? Fingermann also turns to Joyce for this answer:
11 The reference pointed above is: LACAN, J. Função e Campo da fala e da linguagem em psicanálise (1953).
In: LACAN, J. Escritos.Tradução Vera Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 1998, p. 238-324.
12 POE, E. A. The Purloined Letter. In: MABBOTT, T. O. The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Tales &
Sketches II. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978. v. 3.
Another letter which is no less famous, not stolen as in Poe’s tale but
retained as in Vera’s case, Franz Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” (1952), was
also subjected to a study from the psychoanalytic perspective. Portuguese
philosopher and psychoanalyst Filipe Pereirinha (2013) dedicated a discus-
sion to the same question:
Can a letter reach its destination even when it is not sent? [...] Apparently
Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” seems to belie Lacan’s statement that “a let-
ter always reaches its destination,” since it was never actually sent, and as
such, the father could not receive it in fact (PEREIRINHA, 2013, p. 2017).
In fact, this father to whom the author addresses his recriminations, who
gives the opportunity to object, whom he replies again, will not finally be
an ecstatic symptom of himself, that is, something that is his most familiar
(intimate) thing and strange at the same time? Perhaps that is why the
letter – which was written and rewritten – has never been sent, since the
sender coincides, after all, with its recipient (PEREIRINHA, 2013, p. 212).
Perhaps this is also the fate of the letter that Vera – let us remind – always
carries with her. It is a destiny to reflect, as in a reverse mirror, an intimate
stranger that the child realizes in his own existence, implications of the mater-
nal ambiguity that oscillates their desire.
Jana’s case seems to us all the more dramatic and tragic. Jana seems to
be locked in a vacuum between a past of struggle and the impossibility of a
future. Jana who laid down her weapons and took shelter definitively in the
unknowing, helplessness and oblivion veiled by her mother. The son continues
to write to her, and perhaps there is no expectation of an answer, but a commit-
ment to perseverance, with insistence, to “no let go” (PEREIRINHA, 2013)
like Kafka with his father. According to Fingermann the letter will only reach
its destination when it empties this exchange value, the message encrypted
by the symptom “[...] so that you can make use of it for anything else [...],
other than reiterating the romance from which you can finally disconnect (se
désabonner), detach yourself ” (FINGERMANN, 2013, p. 128).
The letters we have commented on here, which are presented as an alle-
gory of the unspoken rule established between these adolescents and their
mothers, fulfill their role of minimally sustaining the bond between them.
However, keeping everyone at some distance from the riddle of a desire that
has gone astray, perhaps because it does not find its sufficient point. A safe
distance demanded by these young people from an early age and increased
by the bars that now separate them from their mothers.
7. Final remarks
In this study we seek to reflect, from the narratives of the mothers of two
adolescents in conflict with the law, the position of the woman-mother when
summoned by public policies to answer for the care and protection of these
young people in the public scenario. Even before this call, even before the
drama unfolding at an early age in the lives of these young people, we must
recognize life stories that involve various actors and contingencies – almost
always in a scenario of exclusion and poverty – and which give the subject
enormous complexity.
We base our argument within two theoretical perspectives, the socio-
logical and the psychoanalytic, which we believe keep open the channels of
dialogue and, in a transdisciplinary effort, try to confront such complexity
and its contradictions. From the sociological bias we consider the social ties
established in the family as well as the exercise of informal social control and
the support of the social network.
In the analysis of the studied cases, the evidences point to a greater dif-
ficulty of the poor individuals in creating and maintaining their networks. This,
according to Marques (2007), could be related to the trajectory of adolescents
and their families, in which the problem of maintaining relationships may
also be associated with the migration process, the type of sociability and the
resources that these individuals have in different social groups.
In the division of responsibilities between family, society and state
regarding the safety and development of these adolescents, there are few
protection scenarios. Unprotection seems to be on the agenda of the day, either
because of the precariousness of our policies and public facilities aimed at
this public, or the fragility of families already described above. Beyond this
objective framework, we also approach an even more challenging universe
of psychic order, which challenges the manuals, methods and protocols of
public systems. It is the subjective scene that exposes our perplexity in the
face of the desiring subject, albeit a deadly desire, that does not recede even
through the terrifying experience of imprisonment.
Therefore, we believe in the importance of avoiding the reproduction of
judgments and prejudices of the young offenders’ mothers. We also observed
a tendency to blame them, even though they face high workloads, domestic
duties and the neglect of the fathers of the adolescents. However, it is impor-
tant to recognize the tension between social blaming and the need to analyze
the implication in the unconscious scene of the subjects involved. Such axes
of analysis, supposedly polarized, can and should dialogue together to better
grasp the dimensions of the experiences of suffering at play in the offensive
trajectory of young Brazilians.
REFERENCES
AMORIM, C. G. M.; CASTRO, S. G. da S. de. Histórias de Ausências e a
Culpabilização da Mulher: estudo de casos. Igualitária: Revista do Curso de
História da Estácio BH. Belo Horizonte, n. 12, ago./dez. 2018.
1.1 Problema
1.2 Encaminhamento
2.1 Problema
2.2 Encaminhamento
3. A família processual
3.1 Problema
processuais” essa lógica, reconhecendo mais sua dinâmica e menos sua con-
figuração estática. Longe de inventar novos nomes para os mesmos processos
(KEHL, 2003), reconhecemos e confirmamos na pesquisa atual, uma outra
lógica de pertencimento entre esse público infanto-juvenil, questionando quais
seria suas consequências em termos de filiação e transmissão.
A noção de parentalidade (BROUSSE, 2010) tem servido à função de
atualizar o tema, deslocando dos papéis tradicionais as funções materna e
paterna, passíveis de serem simbolicamente orientadas por quaisquer outros
suportes afetivos. Mais recentemente, porém, temos testemunhado deslizes
entre as figuras que ocupam essas funções simbólicas estruturantes: paterna
e materna, colocando em xeque a própria noção de parentalidade, assentada
na lógica simbólica do exercício de funções em estruturas fixas, com variação
apenas quanto a seus elementos (DELEUZE, 1973).
Nesse sentido, a noção matemática de categorias1, que podem interrela-
cionar objetos matemáticos diversos, tem sido mais útil que a lógica clássica de
conjuntos e pertencimentos, com as noções de união, intersecção, pertencimento
e não pertencimento, para pensar a lógica contemporânea de pertencimento
familiar. A teoria das categorias pode ser entendida como um “jogo de setas”,
em que se abstrai o significado das construções. Nesse sentido, ela fornece meca-
nismos lógicos para analisar diferentes estruturas, correlacionando-as. A única
operação exigida em uma categoria é a composição, relacionada às funções.
Se, conforme a psicanálise em transdisciplinaridade com a sociologia e
o saber do jovem, depara-se com situações traumáticas reeditadas na relação
com o crime, podemos nos perguntar se aí não confirmamos a hipótese de que a
família teria origem no mal-entendido, na decepção, no abuso sexual ou no crime
(MILLER, 2007). Em outros termos, é o campo do gozo e do real que não se
traduz que, no final das contas, configura o que pode vir a constituir um campo
semântico, que hoje ainda denominamos família. Nessa perspectiva, a família será
marcada pelo que não se inscreve, seus segredos, seus traumas (MILLER, 2007).
Hipótese fartamente confirmadas pelas narrativas ao longo dessa obra.
1 A teoria das categorias é uma teoria matemática que trata de forma abstrata das estruturas matemáticas e
dos relacionamentos entre elas. A teoria das categorias foi pela primeira vez apresentada por Samuel Eilenberg
e Saunders Mac Lane em 1945, como uma teoria relacionada com topologia algébrica. Ela é uma generaliza-
ção da teoria dos conjuntos. Nela são estudados objetos e morfismos entre estes. Estes objetos podem ser
entendidos como conjuntos estruturados e os morfismos (também chamados de setas) como funções entre
estes conjuntos, embora, nos casos mais gerais de categorias, este paralelo não possa ser feito (Wikipedia).
seu limiar. O modo como a língua se prende ao corpo não é, assim, uma
questão de aprendizagem. Trata-se de um trabalho subjetivo que passa pelo
Outro para operar uma solução além dele. O Outro não deixa de ter aí sua
função (GUERRA; MOREIRA; MALTA; GALHARDO, 2019, p. 210-211).
3.2 Encaminhamento
REFERÊNCIAS
BROUSSE, M. H. Un neologismo de actualidad: la parentalidad. In: TOR-
RES, M.; FARAONI, J.; SCHNITZER, G. (org.). Uniones del mismo sexo:
Diferencia, invención y sexuación. Buenos Aires: Grama Ediciones, 2010.
p. 139-148.
In the course of the investigation which we are now reaching the end of,
we focused on the main discussions that bring an innovative dimension to
the analysis of crime dropout among adolescents, a matter which is not suf-
ficiently explored, and received a transdisciplinary treatment here. Recalling
the research steps, we added those findings that overlapped the initial plan as
emerging categories (GALLO; RAMIREZ, 2012) of fieldwork.
If at the time of the research proposal we had – as specific objectives – the
analysis of the events and turning points that determine entry, permanence
and withdrawal of adolescents in vulnerability into delinquential trajectory,
its main results are found, especially, in chapters 4, 5 and 6 of this work. Here
we will dwell on the institutional cross-sections and the impact of life course
events on its dialectical-reflective character on the conduct of youngsters.
As stated in the Methodology chapter, the team started from a trans-
disciplinary dialogue between sociology, psychoanalysis, law, education
and health, in relation to the criminological theory of crime withdrawal
(GLUECK; GLUECK, 1950), based on life course analysis (SAMPSON;
LAUB, 1993; THORNBERRY; KROHN, 2001); and Lacanian criminology
(LACAN, 1950/1998). Thus, for this purpose, we bring together two main
theoretical matrices, namely: life course theory and psychoanalytic approach
to crime. From the sociological perspective, we proposed an explanation of
the factors that influence the onset, persistence and interruption of infractional
activity throughout the individuals’ life course. Factors which are interrelated
to the turning points. Its central assumptions are:
1.1 Problem
Now, since the terms, our field, and our object are established, we present
our discovery of the early entry into the criminal pathway, to conclude, as a
transdisciplinary novelty in collaboration with criminology: imaginary aggres-
sion adds to the structural death drive when a lack of symbolic adequacy, from
the field of the Other, aborts a resolute identification in adolescence. This
moment can thus determine a certain type of object that becomes criminogenic
1.2 Referral
2.1 Problem
associated with the territory and how they can act as fertile ground for the
establishment of criminal behavior by some young people.
Therefore, occupying the territory means that “Man finds his home at
a point located in the Other” (LACAN, 1962-1963/2005, p. 58). Hence the
house, the inhabited space, is always marked by the gaze of the watching
Other. The construction of protected spaces indicates – in addition to protec-
tion from the weather – a defense against this look. In this sense, the construc-
tion of the space of intimacy always has a unique structure and a personalized
history that indicate research paths for comprehending urban migration and
its relationship with crime.
2.2 Referral
3.1 Problem
The failure to fully transmit a way of life for the Other reveals a structural
situation: the living enjoyment of the body, not realizable by language,
always forces its inscription, even if partial. Between the body spoken
by the Other and the real of the speaking body that insists, each subject
constitutes its threshold. How language attaches to the body is then not a
matter of learning. It is a subjective work that goes through the Other to
operate a solution beyond it. The Other does not lose its function there
(GUERRA; MOREIRA; MALTA; GALHARDO, 2019).
1 Category theory is a mathematical theory that deals abstractly with mathematical structures and the rela-
tionships between them. Category theory was first introduced by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane
in 1945 as a theory related to algebraic topology. It is a generalization of set theory. It studies objects and
the morphisms among them. These objects can be understood as structured sets and the morphisms (also
called arrows) as functions between these sets, although this parallel cannot be made in the most general
cases of categories (Wikipedia).
The family, or rather, the structure in which the nucleus around the young
person is formed, is fundamental in understanding the ties and trajectories
established by the young person. One cannot help but consider that it is
precisely in this universe of the family, whatever its shape, that the child is
exposed to definitions (SUTHERLAND, 1947) as well as where all the formal
and informal learning that this subject adds to their biography is processed.
The data then led us to confirm the hypothesis that there is a continu-
ous logic of symbolic agency over the real and the imaginary, which con-
figures a new analytical plan to think, in contemporary times, the modes of
familiar affiliation and disaffiliation. The effect of this continuist logic is
the discontinuity and dispersion of transmission formulas that coexist in a
multiple and uncentralized way within each family and, consequently, each
societal arrangement.
3.2 Referral
As one can see, there are new contributions on the horizon of this research
to be properly and thoroughly explored. Let us get to work!
REFERENCES
BROUSSE, M. H. Un neologismo de actualidad: la parentalidad. In: TOR-
RES, M.; FARAONI, J.; SCHNITZER, G (orgs.). Uniones del mismo sexo:
Diferencia, invención y sexuación (pp. 139-148). Buenos Aires: Grama Edi-
ciones, 2010. p. 139-148.
A
adolescência 22, 47, 52, 59, 65, 84, 108, 131, 133, 138, 139, 143, 147, 163,
168, 191, 208, 225, 227, 229, 234, 235, 236, 239, 259, 269, 304, 305, 306,
307, 308, 311, 339
adolescentes 3, 4, 7, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30,
41, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 87, 88, 94, 105, 134, 136, 144, 146,
171, 192, 203, 208, 225, 233, 234, 235, 240, 256, 260, 261, 268, 271, 277,
290, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309
ato infracional 7, 11, 18, 24, 25, 34, 47, 50, 55, 75, 87, 88, 103, 137, 138,
140, 145, 146, 154, 169, 193, 195, 230, 231, 268, 270, 277, 290, 305, 308
ausência 18, 57, 87, 105, 135, 143, 145, 166, 192, 195, 199, 200, 228, 232,
234, 236, 238, 239, 260, 264, 265, 267, 269, 304, 306
C
crianças 17, 26, 30, 41, 46, 203, 232, 235, 260, 268, 290, 309
criminalidade 8, 9, 11, 27, 43, 47, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 64, 76, 89,
90, 93, 94, 96, 99, 134, 137, 165, 166, 167, 170, 171, 172, 174, 191, 193,
194, 195, 197, 198, 200, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 224, 227, 228, 230, 231,
232, 233, 234, 238, 240, 241, 256, 257, 259, 261, 264, 271, 306, 308, 309,
336, 337, 338, 339
criminologia 20, 21, 22, 192, 193, 198, 207, 224, 232, 241, 257, 264, 303,
306, 313, 325, 335, 337, 338
curso de vida 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 63,
65, 84, 89, 101, 137, 165, 166, 168, 170, 177, 190, 191, 192, 227, 230, 259,
264, 279, 281, 301, 303, 305, 307, 335, 336, 337, 338
D
delinquência 20, 21, 49, 134, 135, 140, 143, 145, 146, 147, 163, 227, 232,
303, 307
desistência 8, 11, 19, 20, 21, 24, 47, 49, 65, 84, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171,
172, 173, 174, 175, 192, 193, 194, 206, 208, 225, 227, 303, 305
drogas 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 28, 32, 44, 87, 88, 98, 100, 103, 109,
132, 136, 138, 139, 140, 143, 169, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200,
201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 224, 229, 231, 232, 234, 240, 256, 268, 269, 270,
271, 272, 306, 338
E
Édipo 236, 237, 265, 304
educação 11, 20, 25, 137, 191, 227, 235, 262, 263, 272, 303, 336, 339
envolvimento com a criminalidade 167, 191, 194, 195, 204, 227
escola 20, 23, 26, 36, 49, 55, 59, 63, 138, 140, 143, 192, 194, 196, 228, 229,
230, 234, 264, 267, 270, 278, 300, 303
J
jovens 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 43, 47, 48, 53, 54, 55,
56, 57, 58, 59, 64, 65, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101,
103, 104, 105, 109, 132, 133, 137, 138, 141, 144, 145, 146, 165, 167, 169,
170, 177, 190, 191, 193, 194, 197, 203, 207, 224, 227, 228, 232, 235, 236,
259, 260, 276, 277, 279, 281, 301, 304, 305, 306, 309, 335, 337, 338
M
mãe 24, 25, 88, 99, 100, 102, 103, 139, 142, 143, 194, 195, 196, 202, 228,
229, 230, 231, 233, 235, 238, 239, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265, 266, 267,
268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 277, 311
maternidade 49, 193, 233, 235, 236, 239, 261, 263, 265
mulheres 227, 228, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 240, 247, 248,
256, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 269, 278, 300
N
narrativas memorialísticas 8, 11, 25, 53, 54, 55, 59, 61, 66, 85, 89, 107, 165,
168, 169, 174, 306, 309
P
pai 139, 142, 143, 144, 194, 195, 228, 229, 237, 238, 262, 264, 265, 266,
271, 272, 275, 276, 280, 302
pais 24, 100, 102, 105, 133, 135, 139, 196, 260, 261, 264, 265, 269, 270
pesquisa 8, 11, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 36, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52,
53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 84, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101,
107, 137, 138, 140, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 191, 192,
193, 194, 199, 210, 227, 233, 259, 260, 263, 278, 285, 300, 303, 305, 306,
307, 309, 310, 311, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340
polícia 16, 98, 99, 103, 104, 108, 131, 138, 139, 143, 171, 194, 198, 201,
202, 203, 231
Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais 61, 66, 85, 335, 336, 337,
339, 342, 343, 344
prisão 20, 36, 232, 236, 270, 271, 273
psicanálise 3, 4, 11, 25, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 63, 65, 73, 84, 133,
135, 137, 147, 163, 165, 173, 176, 189, 191, 195, 198, 207, 224, 227, 228,
236, 239, 259, 260, 265, 268, 274, 279, 296, 301, 303, 304, 305, 310, 312,
313, 324, 325, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340
psicologia 11, 61, 65, 66, 84, 85, 87, 169, 176, 177, 189, 190, 240, 241, 256,
257, 265, 312, 324, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340
R
relacionamentos 310
S
segurança pública 11, 16, 18, 25, 27, 28, 29, 32, 43, 44, 45, 56, 76, 101, 104,
202, 240, 256, 308, 336, 337, 338, 339
sistema de justiça 18, 24, 25, 87, 89, 95, 96, 203, 336
situação de vulnerabilidade 11, 65, 84, 137, 191, 227, 259, 270, 279, 281,
301, 306, 335, 337, 338
sociologia 3, 4, 11, 19, 20, 25, 36, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 63, 108, 109,
131, 132, 137, 165, 169, 191, 227, 259, 260, 262, 264, 268, 280, 302, 303,
305, 310, 336, 337, 338, 339
T
tráfico de drogas 16, 24, 98, 100, 109, 132, 136, 169, 191, 192, 193, 196,
197, 199, 205, 207, 224, 232, 240, 256, 268, 269, 270, 271, 338
trajetória delinquencial 11, 47, 50, 52, 55, 56, 65, 84, 89, 137, 166, 191, 227,
259, 279, 281, 301, 303, 335, 337, 338
transdisciplinar 7, 11, 26, 47, 49, 50, 52, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 89,
107, 137, 191, 227, 243, 259, 277, 303, 305, 306, 307, 309, 335, 337, 338
U
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais 11, 53, 56, 65, 84, 177, 190, 191, 227,
243, 259, 279, 281, 301, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344
C
children 33, 38, 123, 155, 210, 220, 248, 250, 282, 284, 285, 286, 289, 290,
291, 292, 294, 321, 345
criminality 13, 150, 179, 180, 183, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216, 223,
225, 244, 285, 342, 343, 344
criminology 28, 29, 36, 37, 44, 45, 209, 210, 216, 248, 285, 313, 315, 318, 325
D
delinquency 27, 28, 29, 30, 36, 37, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 67, 69, 72, 74, 76, 78,
113, 150, 151, 155, 159, 160, 161, 162, 209, 243, 248, 280, 302, 312, 313,
315, 319, 324, 325, 341, 343
delinquency trajectory 39, 67, 69, 72, 74, 76, 78, 113, 209, 243, 341, 343
desistance 13, 21, 22, 37, 38, 166, 168, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 186, 187,
188, 189, 209, 210, 211, 223
drugs 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 38, 40, 46, 126, 154, 156, 159, 217, 218, 219, 220,
245, 247, 250, 318
drug trafficking 32, 40, 121, 123, 124, 151, 157, 183, 209, 210, 211, 214,
215, 217, 222, 248, 290, 291, 293, 344
E
education 13, 34, 36, 39, 40, 111, 152, 209, 222, 243, 248, 250, 284, 285,
294, 315, 342, 345
F
father 155, 158, 159, 212, 213, 214, 244, 253, 254, 284, 286, 287, 288, 291,
293, 294, 297, 298
federal university of minas gerais 13, 73, 76, 209, 243, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345
I
imprisonment 42, 208, 225, 248, 299
involvement with crime 156, 180, 212, 213, 222, 243, 248, 254
J
justice system 13, 33, 39, 40, 111, 113, 119, 221, 342
L
life course 13, 14, 28, 29, 35, 36, 37, 38, 44, 45, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74,
76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 125, 152, 166, 179, 180, 209, 243, 278, 281, 285,
300, 315, 317, 319, 342, 343
M
mother 41, 112, 123, 125, 126, 155, 158, 159, 211, 212, 213, 214, 220, 244,
245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 254, 255, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 287, 288,
289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 298, 323
motherhood 69, 249, 250, 252, 255, 283, 284, 286
N
narrative memoir 13, 29, 40, 41, 42, 45, 65, 69, 73, 74, 78, 80, 84, 153, 176,
181, 182, 187, 189, 240, 243, 256, 318, 321
narrative memoirs 179
O
Oedipus 252, 287, 316
P
parents 40, 123, 125, 128, 149, 151, 155, 282, 286, 291, 292
police 16, 28, 31, 32, 35, 44, 121, 122, 126, 127, 154, 157, 159, 161, 184,
186, 211, 212, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 247
pontifical catholic university of minas gerais 80, 341, 343, 344, 345
psychoanalysis 3, 4, 13, 40, 67, 69, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 83, 149, 151, 152,
179, 186, 209, 212, 216, 243, 244, 252, 254, 255, 281, 286, 287, 289, 315,
316, 317, 322, 341, 342, 343, 345
psychology 13, 29, 45, 65, 80, 84, 111, 176, 189, 240, 256, 287, 341, 342,
343, 344, 345
public security 32, 34, 76, 124, 127, 220, 320, 342, 343, 344, 345
R
relationships 36, 112, 126, 156, 223, 246, 248, 249, 250, 285, 299, 318, 322
research 13, 14, 27, 29, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 65, 67, 68, 69,
70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 108, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116,
118, 119, 120, 124, 125, 130, 131, 152, 153, 156, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182,
183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 207, 209, 211, 212, 217, 224, 240, 243, 249,
256, 281, 282, 315, 317, 318, 319, 321, 323, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345
S
school 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 40, 69, 75, 79, 82, 108, 131, 154, 155, 156, 159,
207, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 223, 224, 244, 245, 246, 249, 250, 251, 286,
289, 291, 292, 315, 340, 342, 345
sociology 3, 4, 13, 35, 40, 67, 69, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 83, 109, 132, 152, 179,
182, 209, 243, 281, 284, 285, 289, 315, 317, 322, 342, 343, 344, 345
T
transdisciplinary 13, 14, 42, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 83, 113, 130,
152, 209, 243, 281, 298, 315, 317, 318, 319, 321, 341, 343
V
violence 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 44, 72, 115, 117, 126, 128, 151, 152, 154,
186, 217, 220, 221, 222, 249, 250, 283, 285, 295, 319, 342, 343, 345
vulnerability 70, 112, 179, 184, 209, 243, 281, 291, 315, 321
W
women 243, 244, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 281, 282, 283,
284, 285, 291
Y
young people 31, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 67, 68, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78,
83, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128,
129, 149, 152, 153, 156, 159, 160, 161, 162, 179, 181, 182, 184, 209, 211,
212, 215, 220, 243, 247, 281, 282, 298, 316, 317, 321, 341, 343
Juliana Morganti
Mestranda em Psicologia pelo Programa de Pós-graduação em Psicologia
da PUC-Minas. Graduada em Psicologia pela PUC-Minas e em Letras pela
UFMG. Bolsista CAPES.
Juliana Morganti
Master’s student in Psychology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas
Gerais. Bachelor in Psychology from the Pontifical Catholic University of
Minas Gerais. Degree in Letters from Federal University of Minas Gerais.
CAPES Scholarship.