Juvenicide and access to justice: intersections of race, class and gender in the narratives and practices of victims' families and social movements in northeastern Brazil.
Juvenicide, families, northeast, social movements, justice access
Lethal violence has been the main cause of death among young people in Brazil. People aged from 15 to 29, black, poor, male, and from the Northeast, represent the majority of homicide victims in the country. After the death of these young men, the bereaved families, mostly made up of women and black people, are the ones who have to start dealing with the Criminal Justice System in the process of investigation, judgment and accountability. Analyzing the current crossings of class, race and gender in the narratives and practices produced in the process of seeking access to justice, memory and truth by the families of young victims of homicides and by the social movements that support them, is the objective of this work. The research is inspired by the Dialectical and Historical Materialism method, therefore, it considers that people and their stories are central to the process of knowledge production, in addition to the fundamental intersectional analysis for understanding how social structures sustain and complexify reality. This work is organized around three fronts of study (1) systematization and analysis of public data on homicides of young people, (2) analysis of the narratives of mothers/relatives of young victims about access to justice, and (3) the systematization and analysis of the narratives and practices of strategic social movements that support the families of young victims of homicide, focusing the research on the states of Bahia, Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte. As a result, in addition to raising specific components to fulfill the research objective, the present work also seeks to promote reflections on violence against Brazilian northeastern youth as an expression of the system that intentionally orchestrates juvenicide and that uses racism, capitalism and gender oppression as support, gears and technologies of death-producing policies.