“Crias de família”: escravização contemporânea nos casos de trabalho infantil doméstico, um estudo no estado do Pará

Abstract

Contemporary slavery and child labor are forms of prohibited work that violate the dignity of their survivors on an existential level. However, in the Brazilian context, the historical continuities of slavery reproduced by social practices and socioeconomic inequalities condition situations of vulnerability that lead to the labor exploitation of people driven by the need for survival. To understand social injustices, it is necessary to consider all the crossings that intersect in an intersectional understanding, which is why in this research we turn our gaze to the regional reality in the Amazon, and we focus the analysis on revealing the social injustices behind the custom of informal migration of children for the purposes of domestic servitude, in a “family child” relationship, referencing the term coined by anthropologist Maria Angélica Motta-Maués. This is a social phenomenon that affects the lives of girls – females under 18 years of age – from the lowest social classes, racialized and from traditional communities, a situation that from a local perspective assumes cultural traits that lead to naturalization and social tolerance. But, from a legal perspective, we hypothesize that the situation of “children of families” conditions girls to the condition of contemporary slavery in Domestic Child Labor, through exhausting working hours, debt bondage and degrading conditions. The problem raises the question of whether cases of “family children” are legally and judicially recognized as a form of contemporary slavery that affects girls in Domestic Child Labor. The objective of this research is to analyze the judicial treatment given to cases that constitute work relationships in the conditions of “family children” within the scope of the decisions handed down by the Regional Labor Court of the 8th Region (Pará and Amapá). The study is exploratory, carried out through bibliographic and documentary research, and adopts as procedures the survey of bibliographies, the analysis of legal cases, and the collection of secondary data. The jurisprudential research was carried out by consulting the TRT 8th public decision bank, and resulted in the analysis of 04 cases, one of collective protection, and three of individual protection. Observation allowed us to realize that the argument of affection was repeatedly raised with the aim of deconstituting the employment relationship, and that the illicit acts of Domestic Child Labor and Contemporary Slave Labor combined were not adequately addressed, and reinforce the institutional invisibility of the problem due to interference from aspects of cultural tolerance. Therefore, it is necessary for this social phenomenon to be seen as a problem arising from combined inequalities, which needs to be named as a way to adequately confront it. Always with the understanding that we talk about real lives and that their voices need to be heard.