Memória de mulheres negras e o acolhimento institucional de seus filhos: um debate relevante para o serviço social

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze how inequalities of race, gender and class impact the need for institutional care for black children and adolescents. The institutional reception of black children is certainly not something recent, it had its birth in colonial Brazil and since then it clearly demarcates the issue of race, gender and class, insofar as they are, historically, children of black and poor women who are removed from the their homes. The onslaught in the process of destitution of the humanity of black women has been going on since the slavery era and is operationalized by numerous mechanisms, and here we consider that the removal of their children is another one of them. The research was developed from the bibliographic review on racial relations in Brazil, on the institutional reception of children and adolescents, highlighting the social public policies accessed - or not - by black women and in the light of Sheila's life trajectory, participant of this study. Thus, life history was chosen as a data collection technique, for conceiving it as the most adequate to the research purposes and to the epistemological proposal that crosses all its development. To do so, we take as a starting point the history of struggles and resistance of black women in favor of their freedom and that of theirs, as well as the struggle for their right to motherhood. We continue to historicize the institutional reception of black children and adolescents, hoping to identify which issues from the past still persist and reflect in the present in the lives of black children and adolescents, as well as their families. Finally, in the last chapter, we present the life story of the participant of this study, in order to make her story visible as a black woman who had children in institutional care in the city of Salvador/BA and experienced all the "bad luck" of being born. woman, black and poor. Data analysis was performed using the technique of Discourse Analysis (AD), from the perspective of the sociology of absences and emergencies by Boaventura Santos (2010). As a result of the research, we found that the historical condition of subordination in which black Brazilian women were placed, reflects on their living conditions, as in the case of Sheila, and is intrinsically linked to the removal of their children from their coexistence today, as well as it was once. We also identified that black women figure in the worst rates of access to public policies - health, education, employment and income, housing, basic sanitation - due to racism and sexism that perversely operate on their lives, which directly affects their protective capacity. in relation to their children. On the other hand, we also find records of the historical and constant struggle of black women for freedom and better living conditions, as evidenced by the life story of the research participant.