"Comandos" e "Bênçãos" face ao desamparo: expressões da função fraterna em adolescentes privados de liberdade.

Abstract

The theme of juvenile violence has aroused innumerable debates and attitudes in society, including the aspect of a higher strictness of measures intended to face it, many times without attention to the efficacy and the effects that these responses usually produce on the subjects who receive them. By taking the adolescent from a familiar socio-communitarian context to a strange or hostile environment, deprivation of liberty, as an extreme measure, may arouse the feelings of impotence and inadequacy, lived as incommensurable danger, thus characterizing a situation of helplessness. One of the ways to respond to this abrupt change is by joining a group that seem more welcoming and capable of easing their collapse, as, for example, the two formations present in this context: the “commandos” and the “blessings”. The latter is comprised of those who profess a religious faith; the first, of those who try to impose themselves as leaders and managers of the conflicts and needs of the others. Here, I propose thinking the constitution of groups with regard to the situation of helplessness lived by adolescents who are deprived of liberty and to which perspectives are potentialized by these fraternities. In order to do so, I used Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Sociology as resources for an approach of helplessness in contemporaneity and in the Brazilian context, as well as for considering the pertinence of the concept of fraternal function with respect to the forms of bond constitution among adolescents deprived of liberty. I did this study with four fifteen-year-old male adolescents in a “Centro de Atendimento Socioeducativo - CASE” (Socio-Educational Care Center) of the state of Pernambuco. I observed them in different groups, as well as united around pedagogical activities, and interviewed them individually. I used psychoanalysis as an interpretative resource to analyze the collected data. In the researched context, I found fraternities around “commandos” and only one adolescent pointed as “blessing”, besides other arrangements woven around soccer, capoeira circles and the painting workshop, which ease the discursive and social helplessness aggravated by the deprivation of liberty. Through the present dissertation I expect to contribute for critical thinking among stakeholders of the socio-educational system with respect to understanding the complexity and potentiality of fraternal formations among adolescents in conflict with the law. At the academic level, the issues raised here are expected to foment debate and production on the theme.