Children in Brazil's Urban Wars: Responses to Troumatisme

Abstract

Violence permeates the daily lives of many children in Brazil, whether when they witness crimes, police confrontations, and violent deaths, or when violence manifests itself at home and is directed toward them, causing them, as in a war zone, every kind of suffering. What do these children, the vast majority of whom are Black and come from the peripheries of cities, do to cope with such a brutal everyday reality? In light of this, the present article seeks to present a study based on the narratives of some of these children, found in written and audiovisual sources, concerning the way they deal with the real of violence by inventing their own responses to the "troumatisme" of violent scenes, since these evoke the dimension of the real, producing numerous instabilities in the subject. Grounded in psychoanalysis as both theoretical framework and method of investigation, we analyze these narratives from the perspective of the subject's relation to an Other evoked by violence, which gives rise to subjective responses — fantasy, fear, inhibition, symptoms, and, at times, violence. These responses reveal both the inventive capacity of the child subject and the profound effects of structural violence on childhood, indicating the need for clinical listening, social intervention, and public policies sensitive to this reality.