Cuidado como proteção e punição: a ambivalência do cuidado produzida em processos judiciais de “abrigamento” de crianças em contexto de violência doméstica e familiar contra suas mães

Abstract

This research focuses on the analysis of court cases dealing with the foster care of newborn children in the civil sphere, which were accompanied by the Public Defender's Office Specialized in the Rights of Children and Adolescents of the State of Minas Gerais, in the city of Belo Horizonte. It is based on the context of "compulsory removal of babies" and the assumption that foster care is an exceptional and temporary protection measure applicable to children and adolescents, with the objective of overcoming a "risk situation" to which they were supposedly subjected by their family of origin. The identification and verification of the existence of this alleged "risk" takes place within the scope of decisions issued by the Judiciary in proceedings known as "Protection Measures", in which it is sought to identify which children should be protected because they are "under inadequate care" or "under lack of care", so that, then, judicial decisions justify the maintenance of the child in foster care, or their reintegration into the family of origin, or even their referral to a substitute family, starting an adoption process. Based on the methodological warnings of documentary ethnography and guided by the literature about “care” from an intersectional perspective, this work will analyze "Protection Measure" processes in which the care revealed by women in situations of domestic and family violence is analyzed by the Judiciary as a risk situation to which the mother subjected the newborn child under her care. In this context, this research’s theme-problem is structured around the possibility that these judicial decisions produce ambivalent notions of care – or, more specifically, protective-punitive notions – being responsible for influencing and defining the course of these judicial proceedings – including the addition or not of social reports to the proceedings, the holding or not of hearings, the citation or not of parents, the delivery or not of judgements and the filing or not of appeals –, delimiting, consequently, the fate of each newborn child. Thus, this work proposes to identify whether such protective-punitive notions related to care expose, in the end, the disarticulation between the Child and Adolescent Rights Guarantee System in relation to the Network of Assistance to Women in Situations of Domestic and Family Violence, and how this specifically impacts black and poor women in the Civil Law system for childhood and youth.