YOUTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE CITIES by DiploBrasil

YOUTH

AND INEQUALITY IN THE CITIES

LE MONDE

diplomatique

BRASIL

YOUTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE CITIES

Urban Inequalities and Youth INTERVIEW WITH KÁTIA MAIA*

How can anyone sleep or live at ease, knowing that wealth is so concentrated? Confronting inequality is urgent and relates to a society’s ethics on what is acceptable for a civilization. Inequality weakens society and provokes tremendous tension because it reveals the borders

between the fantasy islands, where everything works and nothing is questioned, and the places where people have no access to anything at all. This is why inequality is a priority when we think about a country’s development. There is inequality in both the countryside and cities. Why is Oxfam Brasil focusing now on the urban dimension? Oxfam Brasil is part of the Oxfam Confederation, launched 70 years ago, in 1942, in England. At that time, most of the population was rural, especially the poor. Things have changed in recent decades, particularly in regions like Latin America, where the majority now lives in cities. In continents with other specificities – Africa, for example – work in rural areas is still a priority for Oxfam.

Why is the issue of inequality a priority for Oxfam Brasil? For global society and the planet as a whole, no one can deny the increasing concentration of wealth. The richest 85 individuals in the world, together, own as much wealth as the poorest half of the planet’s population. From March 2013 to March 2014, those 85 people increased their wealth by US$ 668 million a day! Something is wrong. This inequality is blatant, as we realize that over 700 million people today, in the 21st Century, are hungry.

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It is challenging to observe cities – big, swollen cities full of people – where inequality and poverty are getting worse all the time, and even more so due to violence and to gender and race divisions. Our urban focus is a continuation of the struggle against poverty and inequality. Oxfam Brasil is in solidarity with new movements emerging in recent decades in all these cities. People’s dissatisfaction in urban centers comes out in a variety of forms of mobilization and social organization.

At the first National Youth Conference, black youth were able to influence the decision to prioritize the genocide of poor black youth in the periphery. Do you expect to see more public policies like that? The example of genocide against black youth is very important, and is emblematic of situations that demand the creation and implementation of specific policies to integrate the work of various public authorities. That expectation for the creation of other similar youth-oriented public policies is well grounded.

Most of those mobilizations are driven by young people. Is that why you decided to focus on the youth? Throughout the diversity of the mobilizations, the social exclusion of young people is an undeniable reality. This means excluding a whole generation and an important segment of the Brazilian population. The focus on youth has to do with the situation of this 15 to 29 year-old segment and the fact that young people are offering society new ways to discuss problems caused by inequality, and alternative ways of thinking. Young people are freer and have a different outlook on the world, which is very important for all the other generations. Young people make us think about different kinds of solutions, based on their own daily experience. Observing and learning with young people can help people come up with larger solutions for Brazilian society as a whole.

Why does Oxfam Brasil want to distribute this publication at the National Youth Conference? The hope is to make a contribution and join the discussion. We see the National Youth Conference as an important opportunity for young people to reflect and come together in their thinking and discussions about youth in Brazil. It is a well-established arena that deserves to be valued. Oxfam Brasil is part of a global movement for social change and transformation whose actions have a rights-based focus. One of Oxfam’s values is to work in partnership with other organizations. The organizations sharing in this publication – Ação Educativa (Education Action), Federation of Organs for Social and Educational Assistance (Fase), Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (Ibase), Socio-Economic Studies Instute (Inesc) and the Pólis Institute, along with professor Regina Novaes – are long-standing partners with concrete experience in the fields of rights, inequality, cities, youth, gender and race. Oxfam Brasil, along with those organizations, plans to collaborate with collectives in processes to coordinate amongst young people, enhance their struggles and resist gender, racial and territorial discrimination in the cities. Young people are mobilizing to criticize the economic development model and devise new utopias for Brazil. And they are making history. Young people come in a variety of groupings, whether institutionalized or not, with different outlooks but a shared desire for a more just, sustainable and egalitarian country, where they can fully enjoy their rights and build a different society.

Are you talking about young people in general, or young people on the periphery? Inequality is more explicit when we look at territorial situations of young people in certain urban areas, as well as race and gender issues, especially differences in their socio-economic situations. So part of the approach relates to their context, but other youth-related issues transcend territoriality. The dialog between generations is not entirely dictated by economic situations. There is room for solidarity and coordination among young people in different economic situations, such as in the Ocupe Estelita movement, in Recife, with young people from different social groups. We can think about the problems faced by youth and promote discussions for all young people, including young people in São Paulo’s Pinheiros or Vila Madalena boroughs, for example, where Oxfam Brasil’s office is located.

*KÁTIA MAIA IS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF OXFAM BRASIL.

YOUTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE CITIES

Urban Youth: What Can We Do Together? BY REGINA NOVAES*

ince the turn of the century, youth movements from various social sectors have become more visible and found more horizontal, dynamic and multicentric forms of communication. This was clear during experiences of the Intercontinental Youth Camp, at successive World Social Forum sessions in Porto Alegre. Young people came together there both from classic arenas for social participation (political parties, trade unions, student movements, Church ministries) and from new initiatives targeting globalization, environmental issues and cultural expressions. The camps found “strength in diversity,” showing that no kind of organization has a monopoly on “representing” contemporary youth.

2005: A landmark for the formation of youth movements At the 2005 World Social Forum, a group of intergenerational social movements and organizations (such as the MST, Via Campesina and Consulta Popular) launched the Young People’s Uprising (Levante Popular da Juventude). Its objective was to “multiply groups of young people in different arenas and social sectors” and its purpose to “go out to Brazil together, joining peripheries and favelas, young people who want their rights.” As they take on urban struggles, the Uprising’s mobilizations feature camps, performances and “shamings” (esculachos), always using a variety of communication techniques and artistic languages. That same 2005 World Social Forum hosted the funding plenary of the Free-Ticket Movement (MPL-Brazil). Movements for less expensive and free public transportation – particularly the Buzu

NOVEMBER / 2015

Revolt (in Salvador, 2003) and the Turnstile Revolt (Florianopolis, 2004) – led to the creation of the MPL-Brazil as a “an autonomous, horizontal and non-partisan social movement for transportation, whose local collectives, in a federation, are not submitted to any central organization.” Its repertoire highlights the use of the independent media, horizontal assemblies, public classes, lobbying around legislative bills and “direct action” such as occupying bus terminals, blocking urban thoroughfares and jumping turnstiles. Born out of a high-school student movement, the MPL does not classify itself as a “youth” movement and seeks to work as a United Front for Zero Fares. The 2005 World Social Forum also saw the emergence of the National Encounter of the Hip-Hop Movement, with youth from different regions of the country, in a major process to turn living in urban peripheries from a stigma into a symbolic generator of art and social commitment. Finally, in the same arena at the World Social Movement, the final document of the Youth Project was published by the Citizenship Institute (Instituto Cidadania), at the request of then President Lula. Following a nationwide consultation process, the document demanded the creation of an institutional “youth” arena in the federal government, which materialized in June 2005, through Law 11,129, that established the National Youth Secretariat, the National Youth Council and the National Program for the Inclusion of Youth. Ten years later: victories, old challenges and new contradictions In the public sphere, after ten years there are now more municipal and State youth departments and councils. National Conferences on Public Policies for Young People were held in 2007 and 2011, the Youth Statute was signed into law in 2013 and there are more public programs and activities aimed at young people. It has not, however, been easy to interlink the “cells” of sectoral policies or to integrate amongst different States and municipalities. There is still a gap between policy making and enforcement, along with contradictions between electoral calendars and the time it takes for policies to mature. For young people involved in policy bodies, “being in government” is also a challenge. Internally they are considered inexperienced in public administration, while externally they can be accused of cooptation and/or favoring a given cause or political grouping. Being seen as militants can also make it harder for them to reach out to socalled “unorganized youth.”

For those in civil society, globalized, interconnected capitalism has no doubt led youth movements to take on (and adapt) features of world-wide protests (like Black Blocs and the SlutWalk). As also befits the times, physical and virtual events interact in vulnerable neighborhoods and on social networks. Among the new youth collectives coming together with a variety of objectives we would highlight the “mediactivists” and local cultural groups. Art activism, flash mobs, occupations and other forms of “direct action” use artistic and cultural expressions to make political protests fun, irreverent and performatic. It is thus no surprise, as we saw during the 2013 demonstrations, that beyond their points of convergence, heterogeneity prevails amongst mobilized collectives and individuals. Youth from different backgrounds, taking on multiple (not necessarily exclusive) identities and with varying (simultaneous or consecutive) experiences as militants all move through civil society and/or official spheres. Life and rights for black youth: urgency and opportunity Even after a decade of changes in Brazil’s social thinking, the serious situation of violence experienced by black youth in Brazil’s cities has become a priority for youth movements, networks and collectives. They recognize that killing young people is the outcome of historical processes and the criminalization of youth by police and the media. They also recognize that the situation calls for fighting institutional racism, an integration of policies (public safety, education, labor, leisure, health and psycho-social assistance), access to justice, an end to the “resisting arrest” excuse and a reform of police forces. Stopping that process is urgent because those deaths – at warlike statistical levels – tend to be played down and do not arouse socalled “public opinion.” At the same time, however, by moving people to solidarity, this urgent cause may offer a special opportunity for convergence of actions with and among young people. In other words, with no pretension of homogenizing youth and their backgrounds, prioritizing the black young people’s right to life is a chance to promote unprecedented dialogs and perhaps innovative responses to the question: what can we do together? Intensifying democracy in Brazil depends on finding new ways for equality and diversity to interact. *REGINA NOVAES IS AN ANTHOPOLIGIST WHO TEACHES AT THE FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF RIO DE JANEIRO (UFRJ).

YOUTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE CITIES

Culture and appropriation of the city by young people’s initiatives

hrough multiple agendas and organizational approaches, youth activism has managed to produce interesting forms of resistance and to appropriate and re-signify urban spaces, especially in big cities like São Paulo. The core of their political action is the direct link to these young people’s cultural practices. The right to culture has been a major demand for young people in São Paulo and has also been a way to put together their own stories and identities, in a context of severe social and spatial segregation. In the city’s outskirts or periphery, year in, year out, there are ever more collectives, groups and initiatives involved in various cultural expressions, in which making art connects with the struggle for the

rights of blacks, women, LGBTs and other players. This protagonism of young people’s cultural groups and collectives in the periphery did not emerge overnight, and has actually been perceptible ever since the 1980s, when peripheral youth started doing hip hop downtown and the punk movement and groups of graffiti artists appeared, all of them sharing a capacity to protest, subvert and provoke. The suburbs of São Paulo and other regions in Greater São Paulo were always poverty pockets, beyond the reach of public policies, with little or no cultural infrastructure. Yet it was there that one of the most interesting public initiatives ever to target young people actually came into being: the Program to Uplift Cultural Initiatives (Programa

BY GABRIEL DI PIERRO SIQUEIRA AND MARIA VIRGINIA DE FREITAS*

NOVEMBER / 2015

de Valorização das Iniciativas Culturais), known as the “VAI” Program. Launched in 2003 through an ordinance drafted in dialog with the city’s youth, VAI for the first time earmarked public funds directly for young cultural producers, with no go-betweens and a minimum of bureaucracy. It turned the tables on rhetoric about youth being dangerous or imprudent, and prioritized their autonomy as subjects in the urban periphery, allowing collective initiatives with people aged 18-29, using a range of cultural languages, to receive up to R$ 20,000 (adjusted up to R$ 30,000 since 2013). With hundreds of groups benefited by both funding and technical assistance, the program has helped drive cultural production by young people, just when the soirées had also emerged in the peripheries. The dissemination of cultural activities in the city’s more faraway suburbs led the periphery to experience a kind of creative explosion in the second half of the 2000s, even though they only reached a fraction of these areas’ residents. One of the effects most often mentioned by the groups and collectives, public officials and researchers in the area is the emergence of cooperation networks among cultural producers, including the creation of inter-suburb cultural circuits, promoting exchanges among these areas and neighborhoods, and different kinds of coordination around demands for cultural policies. In 2010, for example, the Free East Network, an umbrella of several groups and collectives in eastern São Paulo, launched its Policentric Manifesto, demanding proper facilities to produce and disseminate their art production and denouncing obstacles to the creation of partnerships for the use of existing public cultural facilities. The Free East Network also gave rise to the Eastern Zone Cultural Forum and the Front for Cultural Centers. Later on, a network of cultural producers from all regions of the city came together around a new ordinance to promote the peripheries, approved as a priority of the 2014 Municipal Cultural Conference. More than a significant contingent of artists stimulating the cultural scene, therefore, the periphery surrounding the city of São Paulo has also managed to pull together agendas, dialog and lobby public authorities. Another important outcome is a change in young people’s outlooks on their own city and, even more so, on their own identity, with a shift in the connotation of the terms “peripheral” and “periphery.” Historically associated with negative impressions, those words were appropriated by cultural movements to describe the art they produce there. As it gains internal and external visibility and recognition, the periphery’s cultural production becomes proof that “peripherals” are

productive and creative people, while they also symbolize growing ties and general collective fronts for their struggles. As Renato de Almeida, an MA in anthropology and leader of the Paulista Youth Institute, has put it, cultural production inside neighborhoods in the periphery also involves a reconstruction both of space and of visions of urban space, in which “neighborhoods come to mediate relations with the city and with the structures of power.”1 Working closely with this movement, Ação Educativa has published the Periphery’s Cultural Agenda as a monthly guide on cultural activities since 2007, filling a gap left by cultural supplements in the major press. To the same end, it has partnered with a variety of groups and collectives to hold five editions of the event Aesthetics of the Periphery, to discuss the periphery’s production of art in the form of shows, exhibitions, workshops and debates. At a time when the right to the city has emerged as a young people’s concern, São Paulo’s youth realize they need to make culture, focused on leisure and on culture as a right. Even closer to downtown, in more well-off neighborhoods, the privatization of public spaces has suffocated opportunities for people to socialize, cloistering the population in closed spaces, grey areas and daily traffic jams. Not surprisingly, the demand to reappropriate public spaces has flourished, unleashing countless projects and actions targeting spaces available for the production of new ways to come together. Besides the periphery’s artists, there are new movements of bikers, for street carnivals, to create and refurbish squares and parks, for access to housing; as well as discussions on the conflict between public and private realms, on the militarization of spaces and police violence, among many other issues. Public tenders and other policies try to keep up with and promote this cultural effervescence as it keeps finding new directions. Even in times of uncertainty, countless young people’s cultural experiences are erupting, very different from each other but all part of a significant counterpoint to dominant cultural mores and to the contemporary crisis of representativity. *GABRIEL DI PIERRO SIQUEIRA IS AN ADVISOR FOR YOUTH WORK AT AÇÃO EDUCATIVA; AND MARIA VIRGINIA DE FREITAS COORDINATES YOUTH WORK AT AÇÃO EDUCATIVA.

1 Renato S. Almeida, “Juventude, direito à cidade e cidadania cultural na periferia de São Paulo”, Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, # 56, pp. 151-172, June 2013. Available at: <http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2316-901X.v0i56p151-172>.

YOUTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE CITIES

Segregation as the rule

BY ITAMAR SILVA*

he Speaker of the House, Deputy Eduardo Cunha, accused of sending some R$ 9 million to Switzerland, lies to his peers and the nation, claiming it is not true. After proving the accusation, Brazil’s courts are working to repatriate the money deposited in his Swiss bank accounts. Despite the evidence, Cunha plays the victim and continues to rule. He manipulates Congress and, with support from conservative lobbies, pushes agendas that threaten what democracy has been achieved in the last 30 years. He blackmails the government and prances about, invulnerable. Civil society is unable to reach a minimal consensus on how to deal with these abuses in Congress and avoid setbacks. The dominant media treat the acts of the Speaker of the House like minor misbehavior problems, something about his style, making a spectacle of what should be criticized. In the midst of the political, economic and institutional crisis paralyzing Brazil, Rio de Janeiro’s own private war has chosen to control poor, young black people. Once again emotions prevail and fear justifies abuses and the violation of rights.

Summer in the Olympic city of Rio de Janeiro At least in Rio de Janeiro, the greatest danger to authorities and the local middle class lies in poor, young black people who take buses from the city’s north and west suburbs, and even from some favelas in the more prosperous South Zone, to the ocean side, where they dare to invade the beaches, especially in Copabana and Leblon, and some groups carry out “dragnet” (arrastão) group robberies of other beachgoers, laying bare the city’s social contrasts. For some years, the arrival of summer revives that term “dragnet.” It would be no surprise of the it soon enters Brazil’s dictionaries, as a group of poor black and brown youth walking together through upper-class neighborhoods. During the first weekend in September, on a hot, sunny day, “Dragnets and holdups frighten residents and tourists in Rio de Janeiro,” and “Minors do dragnets during a weekend with packed beaches in Rio de Janeiro.” That was the tone of headlines that motivated an early deployment by the government of police patrols on the beaches and nearby streets. The State government reacted quickly, mobilized its police forces and, in partnership with the city government’s Social Development

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Department, blocked the exits of tunnels into Copacabana. Young, black and brown men with no documents, no money and looking like naughty kids, dressed with no class, are all stopped. With the aid of professional social workers, they are removed from the buses and taken to a city screening center. After an assessment by more social workers, their destination is to be either sent home or admitted to a municipal shelter. An article in the Extra daily paper on October 22 was outstanding: “Manguinhos: with no parks, residents swim in sewage. Fearing arrest if they go to the beach, young people would rather play in the pollution.” The photograph shows four black boys diving into the polluted water where the Jacaré River (literally, pure sewage) meets the Cunha Canal. They are from the Mandela favela, one of the 14 in the Manguinhos complex. The article goes on: “When times are tough near the ocean, with hundreds of policemen hunting kids like them, the Mandela boys prefer not to run risks in the South Zone.” Elsewhere in the city, in a favela in the South Zone, a worried mother warns her son: “Where are you going? To the beach?! Not like that you aren’t. Change that shirt and put on some decent Bermuda shorts. Do you have any money in your pocket? You know the police are picking people up. Don’t forget your ID.” All this, because a 15-year-old who is black and lives in a favela decided to go to the beach on the weekend. Mom watches TV and knew that that Operation Summertime was on, when the police keep “punks” off the beach. To protect her son, a black favela resident, Mom resorted to the subordination strategy: if you’re well dressed, behave and submit without reacting at police check points, you can go wherever you want around town. Everything looks like it’s in its place. On weekends, the police beef up their watch as buses come out of the tunnels leading to the beach. The staff of the Municipal Social Development Department is on call to be there with the police and do whatever screening is needed. Mothers, in the favelas and peripheries, make sure their kids know how to be invisible on the street. And the kids in Mandela will continue to swim in the sewer. There’s a thing about Rio de Janeiro. Social and racial inequality are there every day throughout the city, mostly invisible, with no hassles. In that sense, the favelas stick out, as they harbor and expose several dimensions of urban segregation: territorial, social, racial, age, etc. That may be why so many abuses take place in these areas, with no collective indignation as a result.

“A report by Amnesty International recorded a 39% increase in the number of homicides following police interventions in the State of Rio de Janeiro, from 2013 to 2014. The document also stresses the high rate of impunity of officers who committed the murders. The organization stated that of the 220 homicide cases filed in 2011, involving police officers, nearly 80% were still unsolved in 2015, and only one had led to an indictment by public prosecutors.” (Aug. 3, 2015 – BBC Brasil) Every week the media reports violent deaths in favelas. Most of the victims are young and black, and the official explanation is confrontation with the police (resisting arrest). That term has been assimilated as true by local society, with no need for further investigation. Every once in a while, however, someone breaks into the script and exposes the drama. That happened in the Providência favela recently, with the emergence of “pictures of military police officers changing the crime scene where Eduardo Felipe Santos Victor, 17 years old, was killed in the Morro da Providência”. The official record reports that the youth was shot point-black while lying on the ground. The offers were members of the local Police Pacification Unit (UPP). It is less and less likely every day that new officers dispatched to work in the UPPs might act any differently, in the way they do their patrols and enforce the law. Unfortunately, this was not an isolated case, but it reveals that new police officers take on old habits. Whose city is it? The “Marvelous City” is putting on its final touches for another mega-event: the 2016 Olympic Games. In response to moments of tensions, once again, City Hall resorts to the rhetoric of fear to legitimize the excessive use of force, as it begins a social clean-up to keep its promise to the market. Their problem is that the city is dynamic and the periphery, more and more, is taking leadership in the fight for rights. New forms of resistance are being forged by young people in their struggle for visibility and to occupy the city. The challenge is how to supplant the authorities’ evasive, mediaoriented rhetoric, stuck on the surface of problems; how to break down the hate and intolerance that are gaining space in social networks; how to avoid the trap of short-term solutions that ignore the roots of problems; and how to work through dialog, togetherness and shared solutions. *ITAMAR SILVA IS THE DIRECTOR OF IBASE.

YOUTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE CITIES

The invisibility of youth in public policies

hough highly decanted, diversity remains unrecognized. We have the Law of the Elderly, but cities are still not prepared for an aging population. The Children’s and Adolescents’ Law has been on the books for 25 years now, yet much of the population, ignorant of its content, favors changes in features that have not even been put into practice, like recognizing children and adolescents as an absolute priority in public policies. There is also a law for young people, in force now for just two years and still ignored by the population and even by public authorities, although the Constitution provides in Article 227 that young people’s rights must be ensured as an absolute priority not only by the State but also by society as a whole. The overall federal budget and the budget of the Federal District show how far young people are from planning. The federal office responsible for youth affairs, for example, lost its status as a ministry and is now in a limbo with no clear role to play. In the Federal District, the equivalent office, responsible for what should be a policy for young people, was shifted to the Department for Children and Adolescents, which has no power either, since its central focus is on the socio-educational system, over which there was already a consensus between public authorities and much of society that it was to be ignored. There is nothing concrete underway, since the only activities planned to target that audience – support for commemorations of Youth Month and building youth support centers – were gutted by budget cutbacks.

Not only were measures nominally targeting youth never carried out, they would not have been enough to respond to the cries of black youth and periphery residents – subjected to all sorts of violence, with no public policies to hold it in check – if they actually had been put into practice. The only things related to black youth in the Federal District’s budget for the Department of Justice and Citizenship were support for the Black Faces and Culture project and its events, and even so those two items were not implemented. In the federal budget, the highlight for “youth” has been the Youth Autonomy and Emancipation Program, with actions in three agencies: the former Ministry of Labor and Employment, the Office of the President and the Ministry of National Integration. The program was earmarked to receive nearly R$ 60 million, as we see in Table 1. As of October 2015, only 30% of that had actually been spent, most of it to cover expenses accrued from 2014. Less than 5% was actually spent on current activities, in the “Paid” column. The program covers several important activities, ranging from organizing the National Youth Conference to paying financial aid to expand schooling and provide vocational skills for young people from 18-29 years of age, as part of the Working Youth Program (Projovem Trabalhador). Through October 2015, according to the Federal Senate’s “Siga Brasil” data, 30% of the Projovem budget had been spent, including expenses accrued from 2015. For activities to be carried out in 2015, the figure is only 3%. That is very little, almost

BY CLEOMAR MANHAS*

NOVEMBER / 2015

nothing, for an activity whose official objective is to “expand access to job, employment and income opportunities for youth.” Youth in an age-grade distortion or who drop out before finishing high school, for whatever reason (need to work young, adolescent pregnancy, racism, sexism or anti-LGBT prejudice), need Youth and Adult Education (EJA) or literacy programs to gain access to higher education or even to get an elementary school diploma. The Ministry of Education’s “Basic Education” program provides incentives, described in Table 2, to support literacy and EJA. Almost all the funds, however, go to bills outstanding from the year before. This small sampling of governmental activities on the local and federal scales demonstrates how young people become invisible in public policies and, as a result, in budgets. What little we see deals only with secondary needs and never touches the core of grievous issues such as the genocide of black youth, which must be funded through public policies for education, culture, employment, income and transportation, with the participation of young people in their design, implementation and evaluation.

One positive example of a policy targeting youth, which young people in many regions of Brazil have long demanded, is the “zero fare” or “free ticket”, and not just the free tickets for students, which in Brasília, for example, has a very narrow scope, only to commute between schools or universities and home. The program ignores rights to culture and leisure, especially in such unequal metropolitan regions, where facilities for culture, leisure and even employment are centralized, far from the periphery. The right to the city is fenced off by countless inequalities, while opportunities in downtown regions are even more concentrated by difficulties in access and circulation. It is also important that these policies be funded by progressive taxes, as part of a tax policy with social justice, and not be subject to cutbacks or restrictions to meet primary surplus targets, since what we have seen so far is the progressive non-achievement of rights, or even setbacks in their pursuit, since public planners have done little to demarcate youth-oriented policies, although the Constitution recognizes in young people a sector to be supported as an absolute priority. *CLEOMAR MANHAS IS AN EDUCATOR AND A POLICY ADVISOR TO INESC.

Table 1: Program 2044 – Youth autonomy and emancipation R$ 1,00 nominal Agency (Code/Descrip.) 20000 – Office of the President 38000 – Ministry of Labor and Employment 53000 – Ministry of National Integration Total

initial budget

Authorized

Committed

Executed

Paid

Accrual Pd.

40.480.000

3.173.194

1.512.462

1.488.015

8.862.685

17.502.026

584.953

5.360.886

1.500.000

171.912

124.793

53.191

222.048

59.482.026

3.930.059

2.222.208

2.126.159

14.445.620

Source: Siga Brasil/Senado Federal, Oct. 2015.

Table 2: Program 2030 – Elementary education R$ 1,00 nominal Agency (Code/Descrip.) 8790 – Literacy and education of youth and adults

initial budget

Authorized

Committed

Executed

Paid

Accrual Pd.

314.000.000

147.814.914

3.816.181

107.914

115.804.141

Source: Siga Brasil/Senado Federal, Oct. 2015.

YOUTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE CITIES

Young black women in Brazil and the transmission of racism and inequality over generations BY EVANILDO BARBOSA DA SILVA AND RACHEL BARROS*

ÂŠ Daniel Kondo

istorically, young people in Brazil have faced an uphill battle to defend their rights. The situation of poor, young black women, however, is dramatic and has become unsustainable. Dire risks faced every day by young black women have direct negative impacts on Brazilian democracy, since their plight is the historical outcome of socially perverse collective behavior. The fact that Brazilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s society and state have refused to disseminate a new political culture through organized social movements, that might keep one generation after another of black women from being submitted to age-old processes of rights violations, also helps explain their current situation. Various statistics highlight the precarious situation of black women, who are 25% of Brazilian women as a whole (Pnad/IBGE, 2011). On the average, they live five years less than white women.1

NOVEMBER / 2015

Black women hold the most precarious jobs and account for over 60% of domestic workers. They also die more – 48% more than whites women – according to the 2010 Violence Map. For young black women it is even worse. In terms of health, black women from 15-19 years old get pregnant more than white women: 14.1% and 8.8%, respectively.2 A study by Janaína Aguiar3 shows that the younger, darker and poorer a woman is, the more likely she is to suffer violence during delivery. Also in terms of violence, for black women the number of homicides is highest for those between 15-19, at a rate of 11.5 out of 100,000, as opposed to 4.6 for white women in the same age range.4 In addition, a growing number of young, black women go to jail. Data from the Ministry of Justice reveals that two thirds of the women arrested in Brazil are between 18-34 years old, 45% are black or brown, 50% have not completed elementary school, and of every fifteen women arrested, fourteen are heads of families. Such data, besides showing that women arrested in Brazil are mainly of young and black, warns us that this group has been targeted by practices that criminalize young people. Far from helping us identify any simple alternative, this situation raises an issue that is mostly ignored in Brazil. The dreams, aspirations and projects of young black girls from peripheries are being cut off, silenced, removed or pushed back on the time lines of their families and communities. This means that, even if we consider and expect transformations in this situation through Brazil’s channels for participation – conferences, public hearings, congressional inquiries, denunciations – or through the international judicialization of rights violations, our democracy is incapable of recognizing that Brazil has no agreement, covenant or substantial project to halt the intergenerational transmission of racism and inequality against young black women. The silence is not absolute on living conditions of young black women in the country’s periphery, thanks largely to initiatives by the women themselves and by feminist, youth, ethnic-racial and humanrights defense groups. Yet a certain cynicism prevails on the future they can expect, on their demands, the ways they find to demonstrate and resist and, above all, on the content of their struggles and their collective desires. Overcoming that cynicism depends on recognizing that racism and other biases go hand-in-hand with the authoritarianism and inequality that keep crushing human rights. It also depends on making it clear that racial and gender discrimination enhance violence as a method for controlling this population, and that economic

inequality can only offer future generations of young, black poor women more discrimination and inequality, lest we ever forget our colonial past. Our problem is this perpetual motion machine against young, black poor women, that clearly passes racism and inequality from one generation to the next. Despite many persistent obstacles, women and their organizations are now more aware of their future and give greater value to assuring rights like education and health. They know their rights better and are willing to defend them. To do so, they need the strength and dynamism of organizations, social movements and other networks, fora and connections throughout the country to support actions aimed at making young black women in the peripheries less invisible and more able to organize social and political conditions to break out of generations of inequality and racism. Black women are speaking out and prioritizing the fight against racism, as they question and oppose the kind of development now taking place. The 2015 Black Women’s March, held on November 18, in Brasília, raised the need to fight racism and violence and to promote well-being, through an understanding that racism is responsible for keeping half of Brazil’s population in unequal socio-economic conditions. The point is to uplift practices that this population has created for their material and symbolic survival, especially black women, and to have a chance to achieve alternatives that can actually transform their lives and bring development with sovereignty and dignity. Having a collective impact on aggressions against young black women helps confront those historical inequalities, for the good of future generations. *EVANILDO BARBOSA DA SILVA IS A DIRECTOR OF FASE, A HISTORIAN AND A PHD IN URBAN DEVELOPMENT (UFPE/MDU); RACHEL BARROS IS A SOCIOLOGIST, A PHD STUDENT AT UERJ/IESP AND AN EDUCATOR AT FASE, IN RIO DE JANEIRO.

1 The study Retratos da Desigualdade, by Ipea, shows that in the year 2000 the life expectancy for black women was 69.5 years, and 73.8 for white women. 2 Data from the study Estatísticas de Gênero – Uma análise dos Resultados do Censo Demográfico (IBGE, 2010). 3 Janaina Aguiar, Violência institucional em maternidades públicas: hostilidade ao invés de acolhimento como uma questão de gênero. Doctoral dissertation. São Paulo, 2010. The same observation comes out in the study Mulheres Brasileiras e Gênero nos Espaços Público e Privado, by the Perseu Abramo Foundation and Sesc. 4 Data from Diagnóstico dos Homicídios no Brasil: Subsídios para o Pacto Nacional pela Redução de Homicídios, 2015.

YOUTH AND INEQUALITY IN THE CITIES

Social-territorial segregation, young people and the right to the city

lthough social indicators have improved in recent decades, the city of São Paulo still displays blatant socialterritorial inequalities, rooted in a centripetal approach to urban development, guided by market forces rather than the common good. The Youth Map of São Paulo, sponsored by the Municipal government’s Human Rights and Citizenship Secretariat and produced by the University of Campinas in 2014,1 underscores the differences between the city’s territories, with the best indicators always in downtown, for all the variables that were measured: education, housing conditions, employment, income, violence, health, etc. Territorial inequalities are compounded by gender and – above all – race and skin-color inequalities, creating multiple segregations that show the city’s dual nature and the challenges to making it more just and democratic.

Counterpoised to this centripetal urban configuration that excludes people is the spatial distribution of projects selected by the VAI.2 The Youth Map highlights the program’s relatively egalitarian distribution, supporting initiatives led by youth in the periphery and in the city’s more central regions, as a major step towards spreading opportunities for access to cultural production. With that exception, the data systematized by the map confirms the conclusions of other studies, and the focus on 15-29 year olds is even more revealing about disparities produced by this style of urbanization. Regarding housing conditions, the study reports that “while in 2010 the percentage of young people in very high household densities had fallen, it continued to affect more black youth and youth in poor families, revealing how vulnerable housing conditions are concentrated in certain social segments” (p. 100). Other striking indicators on disparate living conditions for young people in São

BY ANNA LUIZA SALLES SOUTO*

NOVEMBER / 2015

Paulo speak for themselves. For example, in the southwestern Capão Redondo district, 10.7% of young people live in households with inadequate sewage treatment, and 46.6% take more than an hour to commute from home to work. In Jardim Paulista, closer to downtown, with upper and upper-middle class residents, those percentages are 0.1% and 5.6%, respectively. Comparing the same two areas of São Paulo, the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in the 15-29 yearold range is 41 in Capão Redondo, and 2 in the other neighborhood. How do young people react to these contradictions? Youth groups and collectives with various profiles from different regions of São Paulo took part in a gathering organized by Pólis and by Ação Educativa3 where they spoke about the challenges they face in the city to exercise their rights. The genocide of black youth, racism, police violence and the criminalization of young people and of social movements were foremost among aggressions they described against young paulistanos [people from São Paulo city]. The city’s duality also emerges as a crucial issue. The concentration of opportunities and resources closer to downtown, in contrast to the paucity of facilities and services in peripheral regions, as well as limited urban mobility and difficulties in accessing the benefits of urban life stand out as major obstacles to achieving the right to the city. The desire to move around and have access to central neighborhoods, better equipped and with more cultural activities, is just as strong as the value they put on the periphery and the social capital accumulated there. As a space to build identities and to do politics and culture, the periphery stood out in discussions. Some spoke emblematically of strong ties to their territory, and this feeling of belonging nourishes activities to improve the place. “We love the chaos where we were born … We don’t want to take the kids off the streets, we want better streets for the kids,” commented one of the participants. Other issues clearly mentioned on the agenda of groups and collectives at the gathering were education and employment, communication and democratizing the (largely conservative) media/ free media, described as a precondition for making the strength of young people and of the periphery more visible and promoting democratic issues and values. Health problems also mobilize people. They criticize the quality of health services and raise the relationship between our bodies and our cities, a sensitive topic especially for young women. They

question how the agitation of cities make people sick, tense and exhausted. Packed public transportation, how hard it is to move around the city, little free time after work and study and even the right to one’s own body are all part of this difficult relationship between youth and urban space. The fragmentation of public spaces, the commodification of services and the scarcity of urbanity, especially in the periphery, cut across many issues raised by participants at the gathering. Socialspatial segregation denies rights of young residents in the peripheral regions, who bear the burden of policies guided by private interests and by capital. The shortage of public facilities and services, precarious urban infrastructure and violence are all concentrated in certain territories, revealing a city split into social partitions. Youth who participated in the gathering are a sampling of the vigor of activities to defend rights and oppose discrimination, racism, oppression and intolerance. They occupy squares and public facilities, mobilize culture, art, bodies and communication as languages to denounce inequalities, pressure institutions that can democratize urban spaces and reaffirm their citizenship. Strategies diverge and agendas are multiple, yet they all converge towards the right to the city. According to David Harvey, “The right to the city, as I began by saying, is not merely a conditional right of access to what already exists; it is an active right to make the city different, to shape it more in accord with our collective needs and desires … and define an alternative way of simply being human. If our urban world has been imagined and made, then it can be reimagined and remade.”4 *ANNA LUIZA SALLES SOUTO IS A SOCIOLOGIST AND COORDINATES YOUTH AFFAIRS AT THE PÓLIS INSTITUTE.

1 Mapa da Juventude da Cidade de São Paulo. Youth Policy Coordination, at the Municipal Secretariat for Human Rights and Citizenship of the City of São Paulo/ Unicamp. Final Report, 2015. Available at: <www. portaldajuventude.prefeitura. sp.gov.br/noticia/mapa-da-juventude-de-sao-paulo/>. 2 The Program to Uplift Cultural Initiatives (VAI) is a cultural incentive program underway in the city of São Paulo. It provides “financial support, through subsidies, to artistic-cultural activities, mainly by low-income youth in regions of the Municipality deprived of cultural resources and facilities.” See: <www.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/cidade/secretarias/cultura/fomentos/index. php?p=7276>. 3 The workshop was held by the program Inequalities in the City: Youth, Race and Gender, organized by Oxfam Brasil and carried out in partnership with three other organizations (Fase, Ibase and Inesc), as well as Pólis and Ação Educativa. 4 David Harvey, published in Portuguese as “A liberdade da cidade”. In Cidades rebeldes, Boitempo/Carta Maior, São Paulo, 2013, p. 33.

TRABALHANDO COM WORKING WITH OTHERS OUTROS PARA ENFRENTAR TO OVERCOME INJUSTICE, POVERTY A INJUSTIÃ&#x2021;A, A POBREZA AND INEQUALITY E A DESIGUALDADE.