Cuidando de crianças e investigando parentalidades: um estudo antropológico sobre o serviço de acolhimento em família acolhedora (SAFA) na cidade de Juiz de Fora - MG

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic research, this dissertation focuses on the foster care service (Serviço de Acolhimento em Família Acolhedora - SAFA) operating in the city of Juiz de Fora – Minas Gerais. This is a service that welcomes children and teenagers who, as a protective measure, have been taken away from their families of origin. The fostering is carried out by volunteer families that are part of the project, the aptly named fostering families. In this scenario, we start from the general to the particular, trying to analyze SAFA as a public policy of social intervention and the legislation that creates this new method of fostering. Then, due to the need to see public policy being put into practice, we seek to see how the service happens in the city of Juiz de Fora. From this, we delve deeper into the cases monitored in the field, with the intention of reflecting on the different subjects involved in the fostering, the structures that are created by this differentiated fostering process to take care of these children and teenagers and the impact of this on the kinship bonds of the subjects involved. Faced with this new and complex structure of fostering, we discuss the existence of a process called "parenting investigation", which is the way in which the techniques organize themselves and expand the demands of the service in order to deal with the effects generated by the fostering of the subjects involved, while at the same time producing decisions that define the future of the children, their families of origin and the foster families.