Introduction

In this chapter, we acknowledge how structural racism and discrimination against poor youth is a big challenge to the design and implementation of policies and practices in peripheral urban territories. We believe it is necessary to establish alternative parameters to deal with urban violence that not only rethink the role and response of public security forces with respect to human rights, but also practitioner approaches to these contexts. There is a need to consider the role of community development and participatory methodologies to create a bridge to a humanised practice which includes prevention of violence, creation of alternatives and health promotion with marginalised groups. One of the key elements of that is the recognition of peripheral territories and their young residents not as ‘objects’ of intervention, but as agents (or ‘facilitators’) of their own future. Principles of community development in Paulo Freire's formulation have been at the heart of the core values underpinning the work developed by the Escape Routes project in Brazil. The project was created to produce a better understanding of the involvement of young people in the drug trade, and new methodologies of work to support these young people when making their way out of criminal networks. We conducted participant observation, a series of interviews and focus groups with former project participants (both young people and the project team) to create a retrospective view on the project's achievements, challenges and legacies. The analysis in this chapter focuses specifically on the voices of young people.

During the 1980s and 1990s the city and wider metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro experienced the expansion of criminal groups that gained control of some territories located in urban peripheral communities (such as favelas and informal settlements). Armed criminal groups became a ‘parallel power’ (Leeds, 1998) by imposing their own norms and regulations on the social life of these communities. Their power and control were enabled by a historical lack of state investment and regulation, which left the door open to illicit groups who took advantage of that (Silva et al, 2008). Controversially, armed criminal groups also became a source of opportunity and attraction for those young people surrounded by structural racism, institutional violence, lack of work opportunities and recognition in society (Rodriguez, 2013).