Interrupted paths

educational trajectories of young homicide victims in Porto Alegre

Abstract

The research in question aimed to identify the relationship between youth mortality and the access and permanence of young people in public policies, especially with regard to their educational trajectories. Starting from a qualitative approach, document analysis techniques were used as a way to identify records that allow partially reconstructing the educational paths of a sample of 18 young people who were victims of homicide in Porto Alegre in 2018, residents of the three territories with the highest rates of juvenile mortality in the municipality, according to data from SIM (Mortality Information System). We carried out a search for records of these young people in the municipal and state education network, as well as information about their educational trajectories in their attendance records in socio-education policies, social assistance, and Guardianship Council files. Some markers were found to be regular in the trajectories of the majority of young people who made up the research sample, with four main similarities identified: 1) The presence of non-linear school trajectories (with episodes of school failure, dropout, age-grade distortion); 2) Passing through the Youth and Adult Education (EJA) modality; 3) The intersection of the juvenile justice system and the educational trajectory of these young people; 4) Evidence of the need for specialized care in the educational context; and 5) Temporal proximity between episodes of school dropout and records of entry into the juvenile justice system.