INSTITUTIONAL PROTECTION OF CHILDREN AND TEENAGERS THROUGH THE PERSPECTIVE OF FAMILIES
Family. Familism. Social Policy. Institutional Care. Child and teenager.
This research project aims to analyze the process of institutional care for children and adolescents from the families perspective. The research chooses to listen to families about the childcare process, considering that, in working with families, professional actions of a moralistic and authoritarian character still persist. Overcoming the blaming of families in the Social Assistance policy involves structural changes, but also thinking about new forms of intervention. Aligning with the fundamentals of Social Work, the research will be of a qualitative approach, being theoretically guided by the Marxist perspective and supported by the Marxian method. Among the research techniques, we will use documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews. Regarding the documentary analysis, it will take place from the following documents: childcare guides, PIA - Individual Service Plan, Reports, letters and Dismissal Guides. The purpose of analyzing these documents is to identify the violations of law that motivated the care of children/adolescents, access to other services, and also to investigate how families participate in the institutional childcare process. The primary data will be obtained through semi-structured interviews with three families that were accompanied by each of the 3 (three) childcare units that are part of the public social assistance network in Natal-RN and that have been disconnected from the unit within 6 months of the beginning of the research. On the theoretical basis, this study will privilege authors who work from a critical perspective, with the theme of the research and who discuss, mainly: family, social policies, State, rights of children and adolescents, institutional care and the social assistance policy. In this way, the study proposes to produce critical knowledge around the social issue, in the field of defending the human rights of children and adolescents and working with families, also expressing importance for productions in the field of Social Work. The proposed reflection questions the place of families in social policies, through study in the field of Social Assistance Policy, but specifically in institutional care services. This work also seeks to echo the voices of the families of boys and girls who have already passed through institutional shelters and who are sometimes made invisible and criminalized.