Column*
| Published date | 01 September 2001 |
| DOI | 10.1177/092405190101900301 |
| Date | 01 September 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Column·
Invisibility and Impunity: Identifying a Problem; Locating Solutions
IInvisibility and Impunity
In Brazil, this author has studied youthful street workers - their daily labour' and their
murder
by off-duty police and/or private 'rent-a-cops'. Each small group
of
street youth
earns little more than 'pennies' in their 'informal-sector' work selling candy, washing car
Windshields, running errands, carrying shoppers' bags, 'protecting' parked cars, and selling
their mother's pastries. Such youth toil ten to twelve hours a day, either within abiological
family work team or in one headed by an older-youth 'supervisor'. Far from abandoned
orphans, most working street youth return home daily, or as frequently as earnings permit.
Working youth
tum
over most
of
their paltryearnings to their families, who desperately need
the extra income
just
to stay alive. Nevertheless, when many Brazilians (and other nationals)
view the 'problem'
of
youthful street workers, they criminalise it: 'those kids steal, usedrugs,
sniffglue', or present their labour as an economic danger:
'they
scare shoppers and tourists
away and make business and residential areas look bad'. Yet while the publicimage
of
street
youth is that they are criminals, in fact, social science research points to much less criminality
among working street youth than their image conjures up. However, as long as the street
youth
'problem'
is criminalised, it will continue to be difficult to designate the correct and
legitimate role
of
human rights legal instruments in monitoring, regulating, and prohibiting
the small-group economic activities
of
under-age youth whose 'informal sector' work is
outside government and State regulation and control.
Just as working street youth are treated as
if
marginal to theirnational states and societies,
and therefore as outsideregulation by most national and international labour standards, many
of
those who abuse and murder youthful street workers - often paid by local shop owners
who consider 'street youth' anuisance - are likewise assumed to be unconnected to their
governments. The image
of
such 'vigilantes' (a term that implies taking 'justice' into
one's
own hands) is that they are either acting on their own or simply under private contract to
murder for some other person. So
if
such murders and other abuse are individualised and
personalised, it follows that this violence can only be dealt with as a private contractual
relationship between a seller and a purchaser
of
murder and labor services. The victims -
believed to be 'deviants', and in any case as non-citizens - are mere 'commodities' within
this privatised social control relationship. Since the State seems not formally involved in the
murders by 'informal' death squad 'vigilantes', administrations can neither be blamed nor
Martha K. Huggins, Roger Thayer Stone Professor at
Union
College (Schenectady,
New
York), was a
visiting researcher at SIM, Spring, 2001. Her book, Political Policing: The United States and Latin
America,Duke, 1998, was awarded two
'best
book'
prizes. Hugginshas
just
completed Violence Workers:
Brazilian Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Atrocities (Mika Haritos Fatouros and Philip Zimbardo,
second authors), Berkeley, University
of
California Press, forthcoming.
Views expressed in this column are
of
astrictly personal nature and are note necessarily shared by the
editors.
Rodrigues, Sandra and Huggins, Martha K, 'Working Kids on Sao Paulo, Brazil's Paulista Avenue',
Forthcoming.
Huggins,Martha K. and Mesquita, Myriam, 'Civil Invisibility, Marginality, Moral Exclusion:The Murders
of
StreetYouth in Brazil' , in: Michelson, R. (ed.), Children on the Streets
of
the Americas: Globalization,
Homelessness, and Education in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba, London, Routledge, 2000.
Netherlands Quarterly
of
Human Rights, Vol. 19/3,231-234,2001. 231
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