Narratives on Violence and the Everyday Life of Children and Families Living in Favelas of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

This paper discusses the everyday life experience of violence of children and families living in favelas - impoverished communities - of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This research was conducted during 2012 and 2013 and aimed to understand the different possibilities of biographical construction in social contexts marked by intense violence, perpetrated by the police, by drug dealers and by parents against their own children. For that purpose, it was conducted two different narrative research instruments: biographical narrative interviews with two generations of families, and biographical episodic narratives interviews with groups of small children. Even though the violence issue was not put directly as a topic to be discussed by children and family members, the two instruments allowed the investigation on how violence is part of their everyday life, as well as the different strategies used by those living in favelas to deal with this reality, having their own perspective as the starting point for our analysis. The narratives of children aged 6 to 8 years old were collected through a discussion on drawings about their families and their communities, and then submitted to the discourse reconstructive analysis as proposed by Gabriele Rosenthal and Bettina Völter. The biographical narrative interviews of two generations of three families were conducted and analysed according to the approach proposed by Gabriele Rosenthal. The results showed that using this kind of “insider” approach enables access to new elements for the interpretation of violence experiences, in which the roles of victims and perpetrators are not very and always well defined.