Representação social de adolescentes acautelados e não acautelados sobre violência

Abstract

This paper presents a qualitative descriptive study which aims to describe and compare the social representations of violence manifested by adolescent offenders from a Juvenile Development Center in Minas Gerais and by apperceived lawabiding nonoffenders from a regular school. Prior approval for this study was granted by the Federal University of Minas Gerais Research Ethics Committee. The datacollection instruments were a semi-structured interview and a self-reported life history. A total of twenty-two adolescents (eleven from each environment) participated in the study. The data were submitted to thematic content analysis without previous categorization. The themes revealed were: perception of violence: what is violence?; family involvement in violent situations and/or drug use; influences to the perpetration of violence and/or drug use; the immediacy and banality of violence; the juveniles future and the possibility of change. The regular school adolescents view violence across a broader spectrum, seeing it as spanning more types of violence, whereas the Juvenile Development Center ones render it clear that violence is mainly related to that which involves higher, potentially lethal, risk. The diverging representations likely arise on account of the life courses the groups presented. The main contributing factors to the perpetration of violence and/or drug use were: poverty-related lack of money to meet basic needs, labor market detachment due to job skill/opportunity deficits, and, primarily, the need to obtain money to buy drugs; easy means of financial and material gain; school dropout; negative peer influences; lack of parental supervision and father absence; and negative family role models.