The Favela (Slum) As A City – Children Growing Up In Territories Of Public (In)Security

Studies about children in the Global South often miss the wealth of possibilities of living a childhood and making sense of oneself as a child in places where adversities are rife. In territories inhabited by the lower classes in Brazil, like the ensemble of slums known as “favelas of Maré”, in Rio de Janeiro, the lack of infrastructure, the uncountable violations of human rights, economic hardships and other challenges lived by the great majority of children, have significant impacts on their development and subjectivities. However, these are territories that have histories of struggle, including both the “slow resistances” before military and police interventions to the capacity to preserve one’s livelihood in the midst of rivalries between armed drug factions and militia. In the present paper, we seek to analyze how being a child in the Maré favela implies living the street as contiguous to home. Notwithstanding the fact that streets are often considered a dangerous place where children should not be allowed by themselves, in Maré, children choose to be on the streets where they can exert more autonomy on their lives as they get to know and learn the local social codes and build up their knowledge about this public space. To consider the favela a city for children becomes relevant insofar as it defies the history behind the numbers of children killed by “stray bullets” which, for many, consists but a cold statistic of violence in some part of Rio de Janeiro.