O Bonde tá Formado: gangues, ambiente urbano e criminalidade violenta

Abstract

Having as a background the incredibly high homicide rates between teenagers and young people living in the slum and poor neighborhoods of Brazilian big cities, this study proposes a deeper and more complex approach to the case of the violence linked to gangs or, how we choose to define here, the groups of young people that share a common identity, systematically involved with violent acts or actions and/or criminal and territorialized conflicts. In these last decades, the juvenile homicides problem in Brazil have been manifested always through a social/spatial pattern clearly defined: the victims are young people, ages between 15 and 24, male, not-white (black or multi-racial), living in slums and rundown neighborhoods, with low educational and economic status. In most cases, the victims are killed by fire arm weapons, closed to their houses and in public areas. Moreover, many studies indicate that the profile of the victims and the crime authors are the same. The existence of a social/spatial pattern so evident to the homicide crimes in Brazil, makes clear that the situation has a strong structural issue. Therefore, the cause must be searched in the dialectic and complex relationship between chaotic urbanization dynamics, segregation, social/spatial exclusion and the consolidation in some territories, of violent socialization and sociability code. Our argument is that, many communities are characterized by a strong concentration of disadvantages (environmental/urbane degradation, precarious presence of the government and its services, police violence, segregation and social/spatial exclusion, low normative consolidation, a little or none democratic provision of justice and public services and low legitimacy of the public authority), come to pass violent socialization and sociability process, many times characterized in the armed juvenile groups and its sexist and conservative culture of territorial domain and particular resolution of conflicts with violence. In this context, the association of the young people in gangs and delinquent groups would be a differential associative response that confers to them better conditions of interactions and the possibility of accomplish transactions (material as well as symbolic) with the hostile environment that surrounds them. Through this more complete and extensive approach, we intend to comprehend the young people violence problem of the slum through identification and analysis of the structure that defines it and grants its existence and not through the observation of the numerous forms that appears. In this way, the case of the violence connected with the gang acting in Brazil, acquires a bigger comparability with international cases and works in a bigger study field, disconfirming the inertial and oversimplified tendency to attribute all violence between teenagers and juveniles to the drug trafficking consolidation.