[{"jcr:title":"Mayara Silva de Souza is appointed as General Coordinator of Diretoria de Proteção da Criança e do Adolescente","cq:tags_0":"tipos-de-conteudo:acontece-no-insper/institucional"},{"richText":"The Insper alumna says her main mission is to transform the socio-educational policy to youths — which today, in her opinion, strengthens an exclusion cycle that starts early on","authorDate":"21/03/2023 13h22","author":"Bárbara Nór","madeBy":"Por","tag":"tipos-de-conteudo:acontece-no-insper","title":"Mayara Silva de Souza is appointed as General Coordinator of Diretoria de Proteção da Criança e do Adolescente","variant":"image"},{"jcr:title":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"themeName":"transparente - turquesa - vermelho"},{"containerType":"containerTwo"},{"jcr:title":"Grid Container Section","layout":"responsiveGrid"},{"text":"The coming years will bring a lot of challenges to Mayara Silva de Souza, an alumna of Insper’s Advanced Public Management Program(PAGP). She has just been appointed by the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship as the general coordinator of the  Diretoria de Proteção da Criança e do Adolescente  (freely translated as Child and Teenager Protection Council) within the National Secretariat for the Rights of Children and Adolescents. This new position is the result of her long career in the area of the socio-educational system, which refers to the set of policies in Brazil aimed at adolescents who have committed offenses — a situation Souza wants to help change.   Her involvement with the issue began at an early age. Born and raised in the outskirts of São Paulo, where there is often a complete lack of public policies, she relied on her mother’s struggles as a domestic servant to access the most basic rights. During her adolescence, she witnessed several classmates and friends being marginalized by the state. At the age of 16, she remembers one of her friends suddenly stopping attending classes and only returning the following year, having to repeat the year. “He carried that label of having been arrested, something that marked him a lot,” she says. “To me, it didn’t make any sense: how could that happen to someone my age?”   Sousa also witnessed people close to her, black youths and kids from the outskirts, being constantly targeted by police searches — with the constant fear that they might be stopped themselves. She herself was the embodiment of many youths who end up in the socio-educational system: black, the daughter of a single mother, and exposed to the violence of the outskirts. Due to the fear of “getting involved with the wrong things,” she studied and was admitted to college just as she graduated from high school — she didn’t want to risk wasting even a single year. “As a young black woman, I couldn’t afford to make mistakes — I had to either study or study.”   Today, what started as an attempt to escape what seemed to be her destiny has become her professional life. While studying law at university, Souza began studying the socio-educational system independently, as there was no subject in her course curriculum that addressed the rights of children and adolescents. Since then, all of her academic and professional experiences have been in this field, and she believes that there is still much work to be done.   “This public policy has had legislative regulation for eleven years already, but we still have not managed to make it effective”, says Souza. Although provisions such as the Statute of the Child and Adolescent and the National Socio-Educational System (Sinase), in addition to the Federal Constitution, guarantee children’s and adolescents’ rights, such as access to education and healthcare, in practice, many of these young people do not have access to these rights. “This policy failure disrupts cycles and processes in the lives of many families,” she states.   Another evidence of the flaw in this system, in Souza’s opinion, is the fact that many adolescents serving time in the socio-educational system — which may be either in an open or a closed facility, such as institutions like São Paulo’s former  Febem , currently  Fundação Centro de Atendimento Socioeducativo ao Adolescente  (freely translated as Foundation-Center of Socio-educational Care to Adolescents) — are recidivist. In other words, they have already served one or more socio-educational sentences. “If a teenager goes repeatedly through the socio-educational system, it is clear the policy is leaving many loose ends in the service”, explains Souza. Additionally, many adolescents serving a sentence are out of school. “The sentence, at its maximum degree of severity, deprives adolescents of their freedom, but it cannot deprive them of access to education, health, recreation, and social interaction.”   And to make matters worse, according to Souza, the debate around the socio-educational policy still tends to focus on controversial and ineffective issues. One example is the emphasis on topics like the reduction of the age of criminal responsibility. “People want to discuss it without understanding the system’s operation, flaws, limitations, and areas for improvement,” she says. “We need to make significant progress by investing in these gaps and in the adolescents themselves before we can have a discussion at that level.” For Souza, the lack of recognition of the socio-educational policy as important and urgent reflects how society as a whole treats children and adolescents.   “There are many highly committed people working in the system, yet we still have adolescents dying in the socio-educational system, even while deprived of their freedom,” she adds. “My goal is not to assign blame, but to identify the causes and come up with proposals and solutions to address what is happening. It is our collective responsibility to approach this issue with the utmost care and attention, recognizing that society as a whole is responsible for that death.”   A complex challenge   Now, Souza’s expectation is to strengthen and bring the networks within the socio-educational system closer, in order to ensure the protection of rights across all socio-educational care programs in Brazil. One difficulty in this process, in fact, is the lack of data. Many freedom deprivation units, for example, were shut down during the pandemic, but the real conditions of each of the current units are still uncertain.   The latest official nationwide survey of the policy was conducted in 2017 and released in 2019. Although there was an attempt to assess the socio-educational policy in 2020, it was not successfully completed. “There is still a lack of a lot of information. For instance, we don’t even know how many units offer regular schooling,” she says. “It is very difficult to successfully implement a public policy without data, without being able to base it on evidence and statistics.”   The size of Brazil is also another challenge. “The policy in Acre works completely different from the policy in Amazonas, which is also different from the one in Alagoas, in São Paulo and in Rio Grande do Sul”, she adds. “Each state has its characteristic, both in terms of the state machine, climate and territory. Acknowledging those specificities will be very interesting and challenging, but also very powerful.” That is because, in Souza’s view, it is by acknowledging diversity and respecting those particulars that it will be possible to identify areas for improvement and share lessons learned.   In addition to having a team of prepared individuals, which is fundamental in her opinion, Souza wants young people to play a more active role in this transformation. “They have a lot to contribute to improving the care provided, as they are the ones experiencing it — and that is very powerful,” she says. “We still have a low culture of listening to our audience, so we need to learn to do that: listen to the adolescents and families involved.”   Qualified outlook   To achieve that and other goals, Souza says one of her most important experiences was Insper Advanced Public Management Program, which she took in 2018. She recounts she sought the training upon realizing she lacked a public management perspective in her knowledge that, so far, had been limited to the procedural phase and a legal view on the matter.   “I sought Insper’s course to gain a qualified outlook on public management, with the specificities and limitations reality poses on public policies,” she explains. “The post-graduate course allowed me to identify the operation of any public policy in Brazil in an interdisciplinary and broad way, something essential to me.” After all, she says, the socio-educational policy depends, in fact, on a series of other policies, such as education, health, sports, social and legal assistance.   Another highlight of Insper’s course, according to Souza, was the fact that the management of public policies could be approached from various perspectives. “You look not only at implementation, but also at budgeting, legislation, agenda setting, and the skillful management of resources, as well as understanding the limitations of reality itself,” she explains. “It’s a postgraduate course that is very committed to government accountability, while also considering the human aspect.”   One of her insights after the course, for instance, was realizing that while rights are guaranteed on one hand, it is access to public policy that enables those rights to be realized — especially in the case of more vulnerable populations, such as black youth. “We cannot forget that the socio-educational policy ultimately serves, disproportionately, many more black adolescents than non-black ones,” she says. In her opinion, the system ultimately functions as the ‘hidden face of the genocide of the black population.’ “There are many ways to kill a body, and one of them is by allowing violence to be perpetuated, by ignoring situations where rights are absent, and by limiting the creative potential and power of expansion of human beings.”   In Souza’s view, tackling questions such as this involves increasing diversity in all spaces, including within Insper itself. “When I was a student, I was the only black woman, and there were only two or three black classmates in a class with over 20 people,” she recalls. That was how she became involved in the Alumni Diversity Committee, which she initially joined as a member and later took over as General Coordinator, from which she recently had to step down due to scheduling conflicts. “The Alumni Diversity and Inclusion Committee, particularly the Race pillar, has been working to raise awareness, with a focus not only on institutional and social responsibility, which is very important,” she says. “We had the opportunity to collaborate with other committees, and I believe it is a space with significant potential, especially when Insper takes ownership of and strengthens it, enabling its growth.”   By the way, Souza has never stopped studying. Currently, she is pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Brasília regarding the juvenile justice system, which includes field research accompanying juvenile justice hearings with adolescents and youths charged with offenses, commonly referred to as “offenders,” a term she says is equivocal. “I do not see adolescents as offenders in any way, let alone as adolescents in conflict with the law,” she asserts. “I see them as adolescents with interrupted potentials due to the lack of rights, various forms of violence, and who are silently screaming for opportunities to shine, to exist and fulfill their dreams.”"}]