How the family works in social intervention policy?

Abstract

In this paper, I review field data from two of my recent studies – on the reconfiguration of the field of intervention for adolescent violators in RS and on the policies for juvenile shelters in the city of Porto Alegre, RS – to reflect on the ways in which the family functions in policies of social intervention addressing children and youth in Brazil. My purpose is to understand certain processes in which the family not only appears as a key site for the formation of adults, but, in the Brazilian context, it is also set in the broader policy of democratic reconstruction. State policies prioritize decentralized forms of intervention making individuals and communities co-responsible for the construction and implementation of autonomy and protagonism, with a view to transforming individuals into “subjects of rights”. In this context, my aim is to dialogue with the literature on the subject, which highlights the “privatization of policy issues” as well as the expansion of a neoliberal rationality in contemporary governance practices that invest in the training of individual skills and capacities for self-government. I will argue that, despite the importance of the processes described above, the analyst should not overlook a parallel movement: the complexity of value dynamics, agents, and interests that co-produce such practices of change in the modes of governance of individuals and populations.