Opinion – Juliano Spyer: How maids are born

The case presented below seems like an exotic story from the interior of “deep Brazil”. Anonymous denunciation leads to the release of a woman who for 32 years has been doing domestic services in exchange for housing and food in Mossoró (RN). She never had a salary, didn’t take vacations, did her chores even on weekends, and reports that, over ten years, the husband of the house, an Assembly of God pastor, harassed and sexually abused her.

This kind of case, however, is closer to our lives than the news suggests. The experience of childhood servitude is part of the history of many Brazilian women for whom the best job option is still to work as cleaning women, cooks and nannies.

As a researcher, I learned about two ways for women to learn to work as a domestic worker. One happens within the family: the girl, from the age of 5, takes care of her younger siblings. She cooks, feeds, changes clothes, washes and cleans the house while her mother works. The other way is when the child is offered to another family — also from the age of 5 onwards — to act as a nanny and help the housewife with household chores.

After many months of living and establishing relationships of trust with the residents of a poor neighborhood in Bahia, I realized – with amazement – that many of the adult women I lived with went through this experience of being handed over to another family at some point in their childhood or adolescence. . It is a traumatic topic that is not usually talked about.

Before proceeding, a bit of context to understand the circumstances in which the practice of “bearing children” takes place. Anthropologist Gilberto Velho classified the displacement of thousands of illiterate Northeasterners mainly to cities in the South and Southeast as the most important social event in Brazil in the 20th century. In just 50 years this phenomenon turned a country whose population was 70 % rural in 1950 and became 80% urban in 2000.

According to reports I have recorded, “giving a child” is the culturally accepted solution for some families who, in this whirlwind of transformations and adaptation difficulties caused by migration, find themselves unable to feed their children. It is in this situation that parents begin to ask neighbors and acquaintances about the existence of families in (relative to them) better conditions, as they have their own house and steady job, therefore, able to receive their daughter.

The argument that justifies this practice considers the “advantages” for the child in the short and long term: the girl will have a home. food and clothing and will learn from the housewife how to do household chores, which will later be used for her to work and support herself.

For women who go through this experience, the trauma is not about lack of pay or freedom, but about being away from home in childhood and being treated as a second-rate human being; being a child and babysitting children of the same age, and being exposed in the private space of homes to situations of moral, physical and sexual violence.

The “foster families” live in distant places, possibly to discourage the child or adolescent from running away. But these leaks do happen. Some girls are reunited with their relatives, others stay on the streets.

Only one person I knew, delivered in these conditions, had an outcome that can be classified as a happy ending. Despite the family separation, her “guardians” were middle class and her job consisted of keeping company for an elderly woman who lived alone and who treated her well. She was able to attend school and later became a businesswoman — a rise that none of her many biological siblings had.

But for most “survivors” of childhood servitude experience, the next stage as a professional for affluent families who can pay for housework will include pay, more autonomy, and also at some point abusive treatment and humiliation.