There are several other legal (and constitutional) provisions in Brazil related to protection of children against all forms of abuse, violence, and sexual exploitation. Some lawyers hail the country’s constitutional and statutory protections to be a model to the world in all it says about children’s rights.

UNICEF, for instance, describes Brazil’s Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA), a legislation created to implement constitutional provisions regarding the protection of children’s rights, as one of the most advanced in the world.

Likewise, jurists from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights maintain that the ECA embraces a “special concept” of children’s rights, “introducing innovations in the policy of promotion and defence of their rights in every dimension: physical (health and food); intellectual (the right to education, professional training, and protection in the workplace), emotional, moral, spiritual and social (the right to liberty, to respect, to dignity, to harmonious family and community relationships)”.

The basic problem in Brazil is nonetheless the huge distance separating children’s rights as inscribed in law from their effective exercise or guaranty in practice. For although the 1988 Constitution and the ECA provide children with “fundamental” rights, such rights frequently do not meet with compliance.

According to Joseph A. Page, “Nowhere does the gap separating rhetoric and reality emerge more starkly than in the contrast between the guarantees afforded children by the 1988 Constitution and the cold-blooded assassination of boys and girls who live on city streets. If there is anything that most vividly symbolizes the perversity of the contemporary wave of violence in Brazil, it is the way it has victimized children.”

One of the ECA authors has suggested that the law is in this sense not properly applied because Brazilians still have to “become aware of the fact that… parents are supposed to protect their children, local authorities should assist parents and, finally, the right place for a child is in school”.

In reality, however, the ECA and constitutional provisions on this particular matter are very far from being “good” laws.

Whereas teenagers are allowed to vote at the age of 16, they are not criminally liable until 18 years of age. According to the Brazilian Constitution, “minors under 18 years of age may not be held criminally liable and shall be subject to the rules of the special legislation.”

As a result, every 17-year-old murderer, even if a notorious serial killer, is interned no more than three years in an “education establishment.” This status of impunity has led thousands of children to work (and risk their lives) in criminal organizations.

In Brazil, explains Ambassador J.O. de Meira Penna, “Minors often form the backbone of criminal gangs, feeling secure against police enforcement on account of legal impunity… The absurd situation that has brought disrepute to Brazil results from the legal and intellectual pretence of classifying murderous teenagers as ‘abandoned children.’ As they cannot be legally incriminated or kept out of trouble by legal means, the easy way out for brutal and ignorant police officers is simply to kill them right away, whenever possible”.

The number of homicides committed against children and teenagers has risen dramatically over the last 15 years, since the “progressive” ECA was enacted as federal legislation in 1991, growing 77% between 1994 and 2004.

In 2003, 72% of all deaths of teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 were due to violent causes related to homicide, suicide, and traffic accidents. Homicide is actually the major cause of death for children aged 10 to 14, although less than 2 percent of their murderers serve prison sentences.

It is important also to consider that both the 1988 Constitution and the ECA stipulate that teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 cannot work in hazardous, unhealthy, nocturnal, or morally harmful environments.

In practice, however, even small children have been working in activities such as drug trafficking and prostitution. A 2002 report from the International Labor Organization (ILO) reveals that about 3,000 girls from the sparsely populated state of Rondônia were subject to conditions of forced labour and prostitution.

Working children are the most vulnerable to all sorts of accidents in the workplace. There are many reports of children illegally working in areas like the charcoal, sugarcane, and footwear industries. They have reportedly suffered accidents like “dismemberment, gastrointestinal disease, lacerations, blindness, and burns caused by applying pesticides with inadequate protection”.

The law also states that children can only travel with the permission of their parents. But in practice, everybody knows that many children are trafficked for prostitution. Girls from rural areas have been recruited at major cities as prostitutes by strip clubs, modelling agencies, and wanted ads. In places along the coast, sexual tourism involves the prostitution of children by travel agents, hotel workers, taxi drivers, etc.

The United Nations estimates that no less than 500,000 children in Brazil are victims of sexual exploitation. The U.N. also reveals that in some parts of the country, particularly in the northern and northeastern regions, “most sexual crimes against children and adolescents are not investigated, and in some cases representatives of the judiciary are involved in those cases.”

In 1992, members of Brazil’s National Congress set up a special parliamentary commission to investigate the problem of child prostitution. The commission discovered, among others, the involvement of police officers in child prostitution.

In fact, even politicians themselves are involved in this sort of prostitution. In 2003, for instance, police caught five Porto Ferreira (São Paulo) city councillors having group sex with minors between the ages of 11 and 16, whom they had paid with drugs and/or US$ 11 to US$ 18.

More recently, another detailed investigation conducted by Congress in July 2004 discovered hundreds of politicians, judges, and businesspeople participating in the sexual exploitation of minors, which included the appalling sexual abuse of nursing babies.

It was found, among others, that the vice-governor of Amazonas was procuring sexual services from a prostitution network that recruited 16-year-old girls. However, the congressional committee’s coordinator, Patricia Saboya, accused the Lula administration “of doing practically nothing to investigate or punish those involved.”

Figures now reveal that 7 million children live on the streets of Brazilian cities. The simplistic suggestion that all these children live on the streets because of poverty must be rejected.

In contrast to what is commonly believed, the testimony of children themselves reveals other pressures beyond the need to earn money. They are homeless mainly because of parental neglect, speaking of episodes of sexual abuse and other forms of extreme violence. Naturally, they would not be on the streets if it were not for the lack of government action as well as the actions of civil society.

Street children are utterly deprived of their most basic needs. They do not have home, school, adequate food, or medical care. They often become victims of death squads or other forms of violence born of their precarious condition.

Since street children often resort to theft to survive, some pay death squads to “clean up the streets” and rid them of this “inconvenience.” Many people in Brazil, unfortunately, strongly believe that the extra-legal killing of street children is a valid measure to combat criminality and violence, arguably because they have utterly rejected the unrealistic legal ‘solutions’ for the problem.

As Joseph A. Page properly asserts: “What rackets up public outrage against street urchins even higher is the cloak of impunity that protects children who kill, assault, and rob. The legal system does not brand them criminals but instead uses the more euphemistic term infratores (lawbreakers) and does not subject them to punishment.

“Under a statute enacted in 1990 (i.e., the ECA), a lawbreaker under 12 years of age is generally released into the custody of his family or surrogate family. A lawbreaker over 12 will be sent to a state institution specially designed for adolescents. These facilities are so antiquated and overcrowded that there is constant pressure to release the wrongdoers as soon as possible, and children escape from them regularly”.

The incidence of violence against Brazilian children since the “progressive” ECA was enacted has been so high that a quotation attributed by the press to Amnesty International in the 1990s declared:

“Brazil already knows how to resolve the problem of its children –  kill them”. As for street children who manage to survive another day, they have then to worry about the next meal and finding a safe place to sleep for the night.

“A social worker has therefore explained that these children are currently subject to an ongoing process of “natural selection” where “the weak die early from disease and violence, (and only) the strong survive to adulthood”.

Augusto Zimmermann is a Brazilian Law Professor and the author of the well-known books Teoria Geral do Federalismo Democrático (General Theory of Democratic Federalism – Second Edition, 2005) and Curso de Direito Constitucional (Course on Constitutional Law, Fourth Edition – 2005). His e-mail is: augzimmer@hotmail.com.

On his 13th birthday he was locked up in Padre Severino, a notorious young offenders’ institute. When he escaped, weeks later, he headed back to the city center, where he now lives, scavenging leftovers from local restaurants and trying to avoid the police.

“The police might arrive at any time and kill me if I’m not switched on,” explains the 15-year-old, huddled under the Lapa viaduct in central Rio.

Around him lie heaps of squalid mattresses, home to dozens of ‘colleagues’.

“Anything is enough for them to start giving us trouble,” he says.

Researchers say Jefferson is one of up to 3,000 street children living an increasingly dangerous existence in Rio de Janeiro.

More young Brazilians are killed here than in any other Brazilian state, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), with 128 deaths for every 100,000 15-24-year-olds.

Street kids, some as young as nine, are among the most at risk, trawling the city’s cracked pavements day and night in search of food and money.

During the 1980s and 1990s Brazilian ‘death squads’ made up of off-duty police officers routinely murdered street kids.

Udi Butler, a leading researcher into Brazil’s street children from the International center for Research and Policy on Childhood (CIESPI), believes these squads are now less common.

“Organized extermination groups specifically targeting children on the streets don’t still seem to be operating like they did in the early 90s,” he says.

But for street kids like Jefferson the threat seems no less real.

“The other day the police turned up here and asked if we had homes to go to. My friend said no, so he started attacking him with a stick. I said I was from the Morro dos Prazeres – a slum in central Rio – but he beat me anyway.”

The execution of seven under-18s in Nova Iguaçu last month again underlined the dangers facing young people in Brazil’s poorer communities.

“With the rise of the drug gangs, you have another kind of extermination,” says Butler.

“The boundary between police and the drug gangs has become very blurred and the killing of young people is happening all over the place, whether they are members of the drug gangs or not. People on the streets have been caught up in the escalating violence relating to this,” he added.

Yvonne de Mello, a campaigner and social worker, says most street children in Rio are fleeing the drug wars that plague many of its 680 favelas, or slums.

“This everyday violence makes favelas a constant source of street children,” she explains at her project in the Baixa do Sapateiro slum where drug traffickers recently cut the legs off a local boy before executing him.

“They come from the slums where you have shootings every day,” adds de Mello.

Life on the streets is seldom an improvement. At best, street kids are shunned or verbally abused by the public. At worst, they are threatened, sexually abused, or beaten by police.

Many, like 14-year-old Godói, turn to cheap hallucinogenic drugs like ‘thinner’ (paint stripper) as a means of escape.

Godói’s parents were always fighting, he says. Aged eight, he moved in with his grandma and, when she died, he chose the streets over the constant rows back home.

He won’t be homeless forever, he says. He already plans to have two sons and doesn’t want them to grow up, like him, on the streets.

“There are only two things that take away the fear of violence: drugs and the presence of God,” explains baby-faced Godói, stashing a can of paint-stripper under his torn shirt. “With God by your side you don’t even feel hungry.”

“For them using drugs is like a survival strategy to forget stressful conditions where they come from or the hardship of life on the street,” explains Butler, whose documentary “Coming of Age on the Streets of Rio” examines the lives of the city’s street populations.

It’s impossible to ignore the clusters of scruffy street children who beg at traffic lights in cities like Rio de Janeiro, as much part of the landscape as the statue of Jesus Christ that towers above the chaotic city.

Butler describes these children as “a bitter fruit in a complex tree of poverty and inequality”.

Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world in terms of wealth distribution, with the country’s richest 10 per cent controlling nearly 50 per cent of its wealth, according to the World Bank.

For kids like Jefferson and Godói, trapped in a cycle of drug abuse and physical violence, there seems little escape.

“When I see kids going home from school with their parents at five O’clock, running along happily, I can’t understand why I don’t have this,” says Jefferson.

Some are lucky. Fábio Campos de Oliveira, 23, spent 10 years on the streets and still has the wounds to show for it. Five years ago his right leg was shattered by a bullet after a failed robbery attempt in Rio’s city center.

“There were five of us and we saw a man coming out of the Bingo Hall with a big bag. We started to follow him but a security guard came out and spotted us… We didn’t stop and another guard came out and began shooting,” he recalls, pointing to a thick bullet scar still coursing across his thigh.

After being taken in by social workers at the Madame Satã radio station in Lapa, Fábio turned his hand to DJ-ing.

“Lots of street kids get out but come back. But there are others who sorted themselves out. I don’t think I’m an exception,” he explains giving the example of his friend Renato de Souza, who starred as Marreco in the hit film “City of God.”

Fábio now hosts two radio shows and wants to go to college.

Butler believes cases like these show a growing determination on the part of the authorities to confront the problem’s roots, but accepts that such incidents are rare.

“There are positive things going on. There are a number of NGOs and government agencies trying to improve the conditions of the street population,” says Butler. “But Brazil’s social and economic problems will take longer to solve.”

“Unless these kids are given more alternatives and opportunities, the street can actually be a very attractive option. A number of people say it has an addictive quality – it’s a space of freedom… from being told what to do.”

Brazil’s estimated 18,000 street kids live by a complex set of codes.

“Life on the streets teaches you something being in school or university or the army never will – survival in the school of life,” explains Fábio.

“On the streets you learn to be humble, to share things and what friendship really means. It gives you the sensation of having a real family.”

It’s common for street kids to ‘marry’ as young as 12 in search of stability and compassion. But the underlying violence is never far away.

“If you see a girl with a cut face it’s because she stole someone else’s husband’,” Fábio says.

Twelve years ago vigilantes stunned Brazil, murdering eight street kids in Candelária, central Rio.

At the time, research by Human Rights Watch, an organization dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world, showed that 5,644 kids aged between five and 17 met violent deaths in Brazil between 1989 and 1991.

Academics like Udi Butler who thought ‘death squads’ had stopped targeting street kids are now more cautious.

“Until recently I would have said that the really bad things that happened in the early 1990s like Candelária haven’t happened to that extent since. But then recently several under-18s were murdered by thugs on the streets of São Paulo.”

At street level the vision is bleaker still. Fearful of being killed in their sleep, the kids clustered around Lapa’s viaduct keep a constant vigil until dawn, chanting rap lyrics and smoking cigarettes.

“Some of us sleep whilst the others stay awake,” explains Jefferson. “If everybody went to sleep at the same time you never know what might happen.”

Tom Phillips is a British freelance journalist who has lived in Brazil for two years. He writes for the “Independent” and the “Sunday Herald” and has had his work published in newspapers around the world. You may visit his blog at http://globalnoticias.blogspot.com or contact him on atphillips@gmail.com.

This article appeared originally in Scotland’s “Sunday Herald.”