Sugar and Spice?

Sugar and spice

And everything nice,

That’s what little girls are made of.

19^th century English nursery rhyme.

Not in São Paulo, folks.

Our little girls are made of sterner stuff.

Since last October a gang of them has been terrorizing the Vila Mariana neighborhood.

Almost all of them are thought to be under twelve.

And some are as young as nine.

The girls have taken to sweeping through supermarkets where some of them distract the staff while others grab merchandise and run.

And holding scissors, or knives, to the throats of individual shopkeepers, while their little colleagues help themselves to the stock.

And hanging around schools, where they steal backpacks and cell phones from students.

And assaulting people on the street, relieving them of their purses and wallets by threatening them with weapons they purport to have hidden under their clothing.

So why don’t the cops arrest them?

Well, the fact of the matter is they have – dozens of times.

But Brazilian law prohibits charging children under the age of twelve with criminal acts, not one of them will admit to being any older, and they make it a point not to carry identity documents.

The girls claim to be abandoned, living on the streets, and when reporters show up, they hide under the hoodies they wear, so their images can’t be circulated.

And the cops are left with no other choice but to send them to a shelter.

From which they promptly escape – and, as one cop put it, “are back on the job within an hour.”

“We’ve tried, time after time, to get their true names and ages,” one social worker said, “but they either lie or refuse to talk.”

But she doesn’t buy their story that they’ve living on the streets.

Street kids in São Paulo, of which there are many, show different characteristics.

They’re denied an opportunity to bathe, so they’re dirtier – and often addicted to drugs.

These girls are clean, well-nourished, reasonably well-dressed and seldom addicted.

All sure signs they’ve got a home somewhere.

But finding it?

That’s the problem.

Every now and then the authorities get lucky.

And manage to track down a parent.

For all the good it does.

Witness this quote from one such parent, recorded by a reporter who stuck her microphone through the window of a toilet, where the mother thought she was having a confidential conversation with her daughter.

The girl, at the time, had just been busted for robbing the same boutique two times in succession.

“How dumb can you be, huh?” the mother said, “You should know you never go back to the same place twice?”

Leighton - Monday