Between 2018 and 2023, Lehtonen created the ethnographic data of the dissertation in collaboration with two civil society organisations and one governmental institution in the cities of Recife and Salvador. Lehtonen participated in these organisations’ work, such as outreach street education, family and community visits, countryside trips, football, dance, capoeira, across three separate fieldwork periods. The participants include 16 young people, aged between 10 and 17, who had current or former street connections, 3 family members and 6 professionals working with them.
The study illustrates how despite challenges and ambivalence, families were important for these young people. Their family relations persisted even when they were on the street. Youth contributed to their families’ well-being in living conditions shaped by social vulnerability.
–These young people have been described as a mobile population for a reason. They navigate between the street, family home, support systems, and ‘the world of crime’, as they called it. The young people create means of survival and form and maintain important relationships amidst limited livelihood choices, Lehtonen describes.
As a response to the street phenomenon, many governmental and civil society organisations in Brazil aim to protect these children’s and young people’s rights to family and community life, safety, education and play.
–What puzzled me since the beginning was that despite all this effort, achieving sustainable change remains challenging. I wanted to understand what can be done to help these young people and their families. Weakening their street connection and reintegrating them with their family and community was the desired outcome in most situations.
The findings address how violent governmental interventions, such as war on drugs policies, and passivating aid, such as food aid and other donations, can even strengthen the street phenomenon. Rather, practice and policy that enable relationship-building, awareness-raising and enhancing strengths with these youth and their families can contribute successfully and sustainably to change in their situations. There is a need to reinforce rights-based practice and policy to strengthen young people’s connections with their families, communities and society.
–Instead of stigmatising portrayals of street-connected young people being abandoned by their families, we should reframe the concept of abandonment in relation to people living in social vulnerability – in Brazil and beyond. The concept of abandonment should also encompass their families and communities, as they are abandoned because of insufficient practice and policy. These families, too, deserve to be cared for, Lehtonen addresses.
The doctoral dissertation of Annika Lehtonen in the field of Social Work titled No One Is Born from the Asphalt: Social worlds of street-connected youth in Northeast Brazil was publicly examined in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University on Friday 28th of August 2026. The Opponent was Professor Marit Ursin from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The Custos was Professor Riikka Korkiamäki from the Faculty of Social Sciences.
The doctoral dissertation is available online: No One Is Born from the Asphalt : Social worlds of street-connected youth in Northeast Brazil – Trepo