Discursos construídos entre becos e vielas: jovens, crime e território

Abstract

The complexity of the issue of involving young people with crime imposes the need for a careful look at contributions brought by theories in various areas, such as theories of social exclusion, organized crime and the institutional and cultural framework in which the criminal-ization of drug use is inserted in Brazil. Attention must also be paid to the way in which it reaches the territories most directly affected by these aspects and the ways in which young people appropriate these dynamics. Therefore, the present study aims to understand how young people who engage in crime produce speeches in this context, specifically considering their understandings about themselves, crime and the territory. For this, individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with three young people with involvement in crime, seeking to approach their life histories and their perceptions in this context. During the inter-views, it was possible to walk through the territory with two participants, which allowed to deepen in some questions, as well as to apprehend ways they were articulated with the space. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and added to the observations recorded in the field diary. The analysis was based on the contributions of the Bakhtin Circle in dialogue with the concepts of space, territory and territoriality and resulted in a thematic analysis, organized from three aspects: 1) Territory, which is about the spaces by which the interviewees circulate and how their occupation occurs, highlighting the different facets assumed in everyday life; 2) Territorialities: crime and use, which understands crime and use as one of the territorialities of the neighborhood and, thus, contemplates the relationships and experiences in the context of the sale and use of drugs from the interviewees; 3) Child Vision, which encompasses state-ments with considerations about being a child. Thus, the displacements carried out in this work allowed multiple apprehensions about confinements experienced in the daily life of the city, with respect to the ways in which the different subjects (not) circulate in the collective space. With this, it was possible to recognize the existence of "invisible barriers" in the city, which, although hidden in the physical plane, are strongly marked in the speeches of its inhab-itants, infiltrating rigidly in the construction of statements about the city, its neighborhoods and its residents. In the same way, these displacements set in motion understandings about crime, and their barriers, understood daily as closed and determinant in the lives of those who participate in it, have shown themselves to be fluid, as an element with which they dialogue in different ways, allowing approximations and deviations according to the context.