(Des)acolhidos : um olhar sobre o acolhimento institucional da Comarca de Capão da Canoa/RS.

Abstract

The Child and Adolescent Statute, published in 1990, introduced numerous new principles into the legal system, adopting the doctrine of integral protection and elevating children and adolescents to the condition of absolute priority. Among the protection instruments, the legal diploma disciplined institutional shelter care, which ceased to be a segregating mechanism – as it was during the military regime – to adopt protective contours. The shelter measure is exceptional and temporary, and keeps children and adolescents away from situations of risk, ensuring the existence of a space of time for the violators – constantly the parents themselves – to rehabilitate themselves in order to recover the care of their children. Institutional shelter care, therefore, serves as a bridge between the return of the child or adolescent to the natural or extended family or even between their inclusion in an adoptive family. Based on this conception, the present work, through a quantitative, qualitative and bibliographical research, intends to investigate the profile of shelter care in the city of Capão da Canoa and understand if this instrument is proving itself as an effective solution to the existing risk situation. To carry out the quantitative research, data were collected from 61 cases where this measure was applied in both the cities of Capão da Canoa and Xangri-lá. The built profile demonstrates a high rate of recurrence of the specific sheltering measure (53%) and a considerable rate of inclusion of adolescents in the socioeducational system (42%), leading to the conclusion that the studied measure, in the mediate aspect, does not present itself as an effective protection tool to all of those it intends to protect, which is confirmed by the high rate of recurrence, validating the perception that the original violating situation was not reversed and that the follow-up visits were insufficient to prevent a new risk situation. However, in the immediate aspect, it is effective, as it results in the child’s or adolescent’s instant removal from the risk situation.