O racismo institucional nos percursos da adoção

Abstract

The study addresses the phenomenon of adoption from a socio-historical perspective, aiming to problematize readings that consider adoption as a practice based on love and the child's interest, giving an abstract, ahistorical and essentialist character to the issue. The adoption of children has always been linked to socio-political development, with its re-functionalization linked to societal changes, the maintenance of religious traditions, the preservation of property, power and social prestige. Adoption takes place around the interests of adults, families and religious people, in a clearly adult-centric society. Over the years, the adoption practice is institutionalized within the scope of the legal system and this occurs in the midst of a space that also reflects societal disputes and restores racialized, gendered and classist social values. Brazil is no exception to this social dynamic and imposes “legal assistance” on families, children and adolescents, which does not protect this segment more than it effectively protects it. The thesis reveals that the determinations of race, gender and class are repercussions of a capitalist social organization based on racism and sexism, above all, directed at the Brazilian periphery. As a work methodology, bibliographical and documentary research was carried out in public archives in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Research that allowed us to state that the adoption path in Rio de Janeiro has always been permeated by institutional racism, sexism and the reaffirmation of inequality evidenced in the historical penalization of families, with institutional (re)welcoming, separation of family groups and the use of adoption as a mechanism for violating fundamental rights such as the right to family life. It made it possible to verify that the Statute of the Child and Adolescent needs to go beyond “what is written on paper”, to face racism and sexism in order to effectively think about guaranteeing the rights of children and adolescents. It became evident that this is a complex, structural task that requires breaking with institutional racism in the justice system itself. This is because the legal system is a vital element for maintaining the capitalist social order and the place of childhood in the bourgeois family space, to the detriment of other forms of family organization. The Eurocentric bourgeois family is perceived as ideal and the entire institutional-normative and professional apparatus is structured to (re)produce this model. On the other hand, even with the break with minorism, we have a contradictory protective model, as it combines the binomial protection versus punishment. Racialized adoption is inserted in the expanded reproduction mechanism of capital, which is based on racism to keep individuals in a continuous place of subalternity, exploitation and expropriation, since childhood. We conclude that racism crosses the protective system aimed at children and adolescents in Brazil, as they are mostly black children and adolescents who have historically been (re)accepted in public and private shelters in Brazil. It reaffirms that there is a minorist legacy that naturalizes the breakdown of the family group of black ethnic-racial origin, the permanence rates of black children and adolescents in institutions even today, the perpetuation of the punishment of black families with (re)entry and necro-childhood.