The Saint Monica’s Home of the Augustinian Recollects in Fortaleza (Ceará, Brazil) is a project that fights against exploitation, abuse, abandonment, school drop-out or any type of violence against underage girls and adolescents from neighborhoods, families and more vulnerable.
It would not make sense to create a social Project without clear and concrete objectives. Therefore, the success or failure depends upon choosing some possible objectives having at our disposal a group of people and sufficient resources.
The Saint Monica’s Home has as a general objective to reduce the grave situation of social and family risk of young girls and adolescents, principally the residents of Ceara Cove, who are victims of abuse and/or sexual exploitation as well as other situations of social risk.
The fulfillment of this objective counts upon a complete program of specific objectives and goals which must be completed at different times and with different means.
A. Family intervention and formation of young girls and adolescents in Saint Monica’s Home
The Saint Monica’s Home is a center of formation with its own integral program. It looks after the order, hygiene, feeding and the living together of the residents. With measures of supervision we guarantee to cover material and affective needs. Also, we try to involve them in their formative process, through responsibility, obligations, and the acceptance of values and norms fundamental in living together.
The Home offers medical and pharmaceutical attention, as well as preventive assessment (dentistry, paediatrics, ophthalmology, gynaecology). We help the creation of healthy lives through workshops on nutrition, mouth and dental care, self-care, drug-dependency, the environment, sexually transmitted diseases, family planning…We also want to guarantee to cover the psychological and social necessities through individual and group therapies referring to the consumption of drugs, bad treatment, sexual exploitation, family disintegration…In order to remedy the aggression they have suffered, they will be educated in the promotion of social abilities: self-esteem, assertiveness, anger management, decision-management, frustration tolerance, positive conflict resolution, the delay of immediate gratification and efforts in responsibility.
The Home is also a space of social assistance that links residents and their families with private and public organisations. The process will be more rigorous with young girls that have suffered exploitation or sexual abuse, in order to fulfil all the legal stipulations. We hope to involve the families with frequent mutual visits and the creation of positive and affective links and interactions. Moreover, we will try to get to know the family problems of the resident and offer suggestions and links with social and pastoral services in Ceara Cove. The families of residents receive information about social resources in Ceara Cove and in the rest of the city. With an integral program we will try to eliminate school truancy, unsociability, violence, the lack of free and personal judgement, economic dependence and labor disorientation.
As a Catholic center with an ideology that comes from the Augustinian Recollect charisma, the Home will not neglect their pastoral attention. They will discover Jesus as a friend, God and life and the Church as a community of brothers and faith. This is in order to create attitudes of respect of the person and the promotion of the values of community, interiority and the search for truth. Lastly, leisure and games as places of healthy growth through sport, nature walks, traditional games, theatre, dance, painting, capoeira (popular folk dance), manual crafts, music… Beauty and the arts are always educative.
B. Family intervention and formation in the context of Ceara Cove
Saint Monica’s Home is a grand scale Project born of the concrete needs of a district. Although in the Home we admit young girls from all over the city, in Ceara Cove, where the Project was born, we realise a series of concrete and specific programs. In this way there is a key role for the social educators from the street, those that are present in the contexts which surround these minors: family, friends, school, etc. With a semi-open plan of formation, the social educators use the street as a teaching resource.
It is a network program, creating a bridge between social assistance services and the different centers of attention for minors. For this reason it is essential to involve the inhabitants of Ceara Cove in the transformation of their social framework, with a sensibility program about the problems that affect young girls and adolescents in the district. In some cases, we will give advice to minors with the greatest situations of risk to participate and take advantage of these resources. The minors who we see surrounded by an aggressive society will also count upon a positive adult figure for reference: a social educator, who listens, assesses and looks after the minor from the place of risk; the street.
C. Formation and prevention for close communities at CEU
We want to take advantage of the infrastructure of Saint Monica’s Home with the young residents in the outskirts of CEU. This is to be conceived as a place of meeting, structured and controlled.
The integration of these “adjusted” minors will help propose to the inhabitants of the Home some ways of living which are healthy and to strengthen values like solidarity, respect and living together. In this way, children and adolescents are active agents in their own life projects.
They create growth spaces of critical thinking, in connection with the social reality. They take decisions, they resolve problems and they create attitudes of justice, peace and the defence of human rights. Lastly, we favour the integration of adolescents in society and the working world, once they have acquired in the Home certain abilities in professional categories which do not require a high level of studies.
D. Madres y/o embarazadas adolescentes
Saint Monica’s Home does not have as its main objective to work with pregnant minors or with adolescent mothers. But, it is highly possible that the boarders will be pregnant when they leave their houses, or in possible relapses with sexual exploitation. In these cases they will be sent to other centers where they would receive specific and special attention. There are agreements with two of these centers; one the Association of Mary Mother of Life, of the Camlilianas Sisters, and the other of the Redemption Sisters.
In this video you can see some of the projects that in the areas of Ceara Cove the Saint Monica’s Home realizes. It was broadcast by the television channel TV Cidade, de la Rede Record (Brazil), in its program on the 27th of August:
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- 1. One dollar and a half: a Passport to immunity
- 2. The origin of Saint Monica’s Home
- 3. A project with principles
- 4. A Project in communion
- 5. The dynamics of injustice
- 6. Sexual tourism and the under-age
- 7. Who has access to Saint Monica’s Home?
- 8. A project with objectives
- 9. Methodology, Evaluation, Planning
