ABSTRACT
Brazilian society is filled with all kinds of prejudices and hierarchies that engender aculture of exclusion, which underlies social practices at all levels. The result is a stratification of social positions and social rights. There is also an absence of critical public opinion capable of mobilizing society to address the country’s age-old poverty in its varied dimensions (Carvalho 1995). It is true that, with the redemocratization of Brazil that began in the 1980s, these problems have become the center of a broad social movement on behalf of marginalized children and youth. That movement achieved some highly significant changes and legal advances-chiefly the passage in 1990 of the Child and Adolescent Statute-Law 8069/90.
