The War on Girls and the Girls at War: Young Women's Survival Strategies in Violent Drug Markets in Southern Brazil


Natalia Otto, University of Toronto

This paper investigates how global economic and social transformations (e.g., neoliberal policies and the transnational cocaine economy) and local changes (in drug markets dynamics and crime policy) in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre inform how young women suffer, practice, and make sense of violence, as well how state agencies grapple with, frame, and ultimately punish their survival strategies. I analyze biographical interviews with young women incarcerated in 2016 and 2023 and court files of young women convicted of violent crimes. In her presentation, she demonstrates how criminalized young women develop three different survival strategies – economic, associational, and emotional – in response to economic precarity, violent drug markets, and family violence. These same strategies, however, also increase their exposure to violence and criminalization.

This paper will be presented at the following session: