Acolhimento institucional de crianças e adolescentes: desafios e práticas dos educadores sociais

Abstract

Institutional care for children and adolescents is a measure of temporary and exceptional removal from the family, applied when other alternatives are exhausted and while the factors that motivated the removal are reversed. The social educator is the professional who works in shelter institutions that serve these children and adolescents. In reception, he must be prepared to deal with the specificities of the young people served and with the demands of the institutions, as well as to develop his work guided by the legislation that protects the rights of children and adolescents, the ECA. This master's thesis research aimed to understand what care is like, the challenges and difficulties that social educators — figures present daily in the lives of children and adolescents — find in their practice and what is their perception of the adolescents living in institutional care. To achieve the proposed objectives, a descriptive, exploratory research was carried out. Data collection took place through a semi-structured interview that was applied individually to nine social educators in the state of Rio Grande do Sul-BR. The interviews were carried out in person and through the Google Meet digital platform, from August to October 2022. The survey results emphasize the importance of offering adequate emotional, social and educational support to adolescents in foster care, including positive experiences that guarantee the protection of fundamental rights and meet their physical, social and emotional needs. Social educators point to violence and involvement with crime as points that make it difficult to meet the emotional needs of adolescents, making it necessary to take special care with these young people. Given these data, the importance of the social educator professionals involved in this care being prepared and trained to act in this context, so that they can positively impact the reality of these children and adolescents residing in shelter institutions.