Trajetória e perfil dos adolescentes em conflito com a lei atendidos pelo NAI - São Carlos-SP

Abstract

Abstract Segments of the teenager population in Brazilian cities are in situations of personal and social risk and some of these young people are involved in illegal activity. Each district, however, while sharing common factors of teenager vulnerability with others can have specific factors affecting the kind of infractions committed. Detailed knowledge of the context of a specific population is crucial to the implementation of public policies that answer the needs of that population. In Sao Carlos there is a Center for Integrated Procedures (Nucleo de Atendimento Integrado NAI) that channels centrally all the juvenile actions taken by official and unofficial institutions in that city. The Centre is, therefore, an important agency in the field of public policies toward the teenager population and a privileged source of data for those aiming to research the behavior of the adolescent population, since it collects all information about teenagers who break the law. Therefore, accessing these data by document analysis allowed the following objectives to be attained: i) to identify the infractions that led to teenagers being seen by NAI; ii) to analyze the changes over the years (from 2002 to 2008) in the incidence of these infractions; by surveying the literature, it will be possible (and this is the third aim of this study) to compare the results obtained in Sao Carlos with those in other towns Sao Paulo city, Brasilia and Ribeirao Preto and even with those in Sao Carlos itself in periods prior to the implementation of NAI. The literature review, focused on the question of social relations existing in the teenagers´ world, especially the types of vulnerability that put them at risk such as violence and their active or passive contact with drugs. This was an explanatory study and the quantitative data, taken from the period 2002 2008, were collected in NAI and organized with the computer package Statistica. The results were followed up by field research, based on a predefined questionnaire approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the University of Sao Carlos. Hence, the fourth objective was achieved: the interviews allowed the identification of the elements of teenager vulnerability, in other words those factors that led the adolescents to break the laws, as well as affording a more complete characterization of the interviewees.