Adolescents with live experience in the streets: understanding the meanings of maternity and paternity in a context of vulnerability and disaffiliation

Abstract

Children and adolescents whose make the street as their surviving place, reflects the social vulnerability process experienced by a lot of Brazilian families living in misery, abandonment and violence situation. For groups similar to that, Castel (2005) identifies an increasing rupture process to their insertion in the working world and social relationship that supports daily life, which could culminate in disaffiliation conditions, becoming them an extra-number, because they float in social structure where they don’ find a designated location. In this context, many adolescent live their sexuality and the possibility or the experience to become fathers or mothers, based on individual values, but also related to the limitations and subjacent possibilities to these processes. The aim of this study was to analyze the meanings of maternity and paternity by adolescents with life experience in streets, relating it to the vulnerability and disaffiliation process by Castel. It was a strategic social research developed on two non-governmental institutions in Goiania, where adolescents that lives in streets are assisted. The subjects of this study was adolescents in age among 12 and 17 years old, whose were living in street by 6 months at least. Data were collected by semi-structured interviews and participant observation, and analyzed by the Senses Interpretation Method, through the themes “Damned Street” and “Father Supports; Mother is 24 Hours”. It was possible to identify how the vulnerability and disaffiliation process is characterized and determines the life trajectory of these adolescents. Moreover, that the signification processes of maternity and paternity are impregnated as by living context as by related values with genre relationship considered traditional in the contemporary society. Thus, it was possible to identify a large potential of maternity as a factor that motivates the adolescent girl to search for alternatives beyond the street life, reverting the social disaffiliation to the vulnerability situation, in opposition to the observed in paternity meaning for adolescent boys of this study.       

Key words: Social vulnerability; Homeless youth; Pregnancy in adolescence.