Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.
Prisoners are not slaves, because they are not the property of the prison or any other entity. It's called involuntary servitude. I'm sure the people affected do not care about the distinction, but words matter.
It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
I was repeatedly told in school that Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, only to find out recently that places like UAE had not abolished slavery until 1967.
I was shocked to read how late even several prominent European countries abolished it. Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did.
Serfdom wasn't legally abolished in Russia until 1861. Slavery was technically abolished in the late 1700s, but in some areas serfs were still bought and sold like chattel until the end of serfdom.
The Ottoman Empire legally abolished slavery in the 1880s, but there was still illicit yet tolerated slavery in Turkey into the 1930s.
I think in some areas of the Sahel chattel slavery may still exist as a practical matter. Mauritania didn't legally abolish chattel slavery until 1981, for example, but as in other areas it can take decades for reality to match the law, given the laws were often changed under international pressure rather than reflecting any change to the domestic social order.
You'd be shocked how much of our "friends" in MENA still have legal slavery for non citizens. When an employer can legally confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
I have no idea why we in the west consider that normal and look the other way... What am I saying, I know, oil & VC money...
Some of them also bring their Filipino, India, Nepali, or African slave maids in Europe and everybody looks the other way, they have too much money to be criticized...
They are so brazen about slavery they routinely sell their slaves on Instagram or Facebook ads, with copies such as "doesn't need much food","will sleep on the floor", "will work 20 hours a day"...
> "African worker, clean and smiley," said one listing. Another: "Nepalese who dares to ask for a day off."
> When speaking to the sellers, the undercover team frequently heard racist language. "Indians are the dirtiest," said one, describing a woman being advertised.
They are dehumanized at first place, but the level of racism in these places, on top of all that is shocking...
> When an employer can confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
This happens in Europe as well.
It is not legal, but it is the only way the Scandinavian berry market works at all. You don’t even need a huge market for this to be allowed to happen. You just need _a_ market and workers that are desperate enough to be tricked.
I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.
The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen. In Malaysia there's an odd situation, the reverse of the dynamic in the US, where Indonesian servant immigration is encouraged as a way to grow the Muslim population and help diminish the political power of Chinese-Malaysians and Indian-Malaysians.
It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.
The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere.
The hallmark of developing or underdeveloped countries is precisely the staggering levels of inequality.
Not everyone is poor in a developing/underdeveloped country. Quite a few people there live lives that would make upper middle classes in developed countries blush. Life "just" sucks for the majority of people there.
I grew up with servants (in SubSaharan Africa and Morocco).
However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.
If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).
Those of us that soldered wires, wrote custom drivers for esoteric hardware, and played with crazy things in the garage recognize that social systems are hackable too.
Welcome to HN! You’ll find that a lot of the readers and commenters here don’t view technology as an isolated field, that it interconnects with all sorts of other systems—sociology, politics, entertainment, manufacturing, business, and so on.
My wife's family were wealthy Chinese near Hong Kong. Her grandmother took in a poor girl as a servant. She was part of the family but also basically a slave. The grandmother arranged her marriage when the girl was older. We met the girls granddaughter when we visited china - she was a new college student. The two families still think of themselves as related.
Almost same story (except china), my grandmother lost her parents very young. A family took her in and she worked for them until 20 years old or something then she got married.
In cases like this, it’s likely the victim defended the family, and it made it impossible to classify the crime as slavery if she said she was free to leave but “was afraid of the violence outside”, which the article mentioned. It sounds ridiculous but in any court, if you can’t prove something beyond doubt, you cannot punish, which I think is why they ended up with that arrangement.
> “The signing of this agreement does not rule out the possibility that the worker may pursue individual claims through the courts,” the statement added.
Minimum wage is about US$300, which would make about US$220k total (you get about 13.3 salaries per year), plus fines and overtime. They'll have to pay social security too. It seems to me that the case doesn't include the labour part of the situation. That might be a separate case.
systemic racism is a thing, bet you there are judges, lawyers, etc that have the same thing going on. many in power do and thus are sympathetic to such causes. it's hard to viciously go after what you are guilt of.
Yup, my mom and her sisters were all sent off to work on family houses when they were about 10 - 12. They were born in the country side, and my grandpa didn't care for them at all.
> whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
"Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
At first I found interesting how you nitpick in irrelevant details while ignoring the bigger picture.
The point of the whole article is to use a single case to illustrate a bigger picture that you seem to deliberately oversee: abuse and exploitation of manual and unqualified workers.
But, then, I saw your Brazilian name and understood. Brazilian jingoism freaks out when Brazil "looks bad" to the world. It is a very common reaction among 3rd world countries. Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, etc are just like that too.
Hot take: As bad as this is, I wonder if it would be kinder to leave her with the family for the rest of her life.
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
> Although the family has agreed to compensate her, Maria, who lived in near-total isolation and without contact with her relatives, will remain with her employers
What the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
Just going on what it says in the article, it may be difficult to prove that anyone specifically forbade her to leave or made threats to prevent her from leaving.
I have some insight into this as my ex ended up in a similar situation in Malaysia. Rich family, no free days, 5-22 work hours.
It took me a year to convince her that it was not ok. They took away her passport, phone, she wasn't allowed to go out without them. I was ready to help her but she did not want my help.
In the end I'm sure she had to pay her "employer" for breach of contract since she left early. I think she had less than $1000 saved from these 18 months of work.
The thing that made me angry the most is that the family was incredibly well off, yet thought they deserve a slave (or more than one) at home.
We didn't get to the point of being disrespectful yet, except perhaps to slave owners, so this intervention seems a little early. Decorum doesn't add much meaning (it means don't swear, for instance?), and I get the impression that HN is irredeemably mature and nothing can change that.
To whatever degree this site isn't a cesspool, we owe it to Dang, not the bad word police. They didn't swear at you, so there's no reason to get bent out of shape about it.
It's ironic you're taking this stance on an article about a respectable family that literally kept a slave.
There's a difference between superficial trappings of respectability, and actually treating people with respect.
Dang (and the other dude) do great work, but still I disagree. The GP comment was extremely low-effort. and while "complaining that HN is turning into reddit" is against site guidelines, I still agree with the critical comment. It's not the profanity alone, but the reddit-ism of the OP using the site as a complaint board (that's a large portion of reddit, especially local subreddits), and then making a 0-effort comment that any reasonable person will automatically agree with. The whole equation taken together is the formula for Reddit's echo chamber. The only people who tolerate that here are the noobs that are stepping outside their reddit coccoon and bringing the stink with them.
I don't agree with the critical comment at all, particularly because the OP is incredibly guilty of making drive-by comments in their very recent post history that don't actually add anything to the conversation. People will complain about the site 'becoming reddit' while making inane posts that are clearly against the rules or don't actually bring anything to the conversation. People don't practice what they clearly preach.
In either case, this post and thread are entirely off topic. At least GPs comment was somewhat relevant as opposed to this entire set of pedantry.
Probably the entire adult population gets away with hundreds of offenses per annum on average (judging by the total amount on the books).
Even the most law abiding and most humble decile of Brazilian adults probably still get away with dozens of offenses per annum. That nobody cares to enforce at all.
> The concern is that Maria’s dependence on the exploiting family is so extreme that removing her abruptly, without a structured support network, could do more harm than good
Its a common occurrence for families to take in poor girls to do house work in exchange for food and lodging. And with the insidious nature of Brazilian racism, they will pretend that she is part of the family. They might even take her on vacations (to work, of course). If you grow up with this mentality it might even be hard for you to see the injustice. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last country in the Americas to do so, decades after its neighbours. The slaves never got compensation but their owners did.
Correction: The US still has not abolished slavery.
It is still legal in the case of prisoners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_Un...
yes! which is _the_ driving factor behind the US prison system with its private prison labor facilities.
there is zero financial motivation for the state for prevention or rehab or any other activities to reduce imprisonment rates
did I mention disenfranchisement of the imprisoned?
Prisoners are not slaves, because they are not the property of the prison or any other entity. It's called involuntary servitude. I'm sure the people affected do not care about the distinction, but words matter.
It's also trivially easy to not end up in involuntary servitude.
I was repeatedly told in school that Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, only to find out recently that places like UAE had not abolished slavery until 1967.
They likely had the qualifier, as does GP, that it was the last country "in the Americas."
"last country to abolish slavery" vs. "last country to practice slavery"
Yeah, have you ever been to Dubai?
Slavery is "illegal".
I'm convinced that the absolute modernity is only a sideshow attraction for the ultra-wealthy to visit Dubai. The real show is the servants.
I was shocked to read how late even several prominent European countries abolished it. Most northern US states abolished slavery even before Britain, France, Portugal, and (especially) Spain did.
Serfdom wasn't legally abolished in Russia until 1861. Slavery was technically abolished in the late 1700s, but in some areas serfs were still bought and sold like chattel until the end of serfdom.
The Ottoman Empire legally abolished slavery in the 1880s, but there was still illicit yet tolerated slavery in Turkey into the 1930s.
I think in some areas of the Sahel chattel slavery may still exist as a practical matter. Mauritania didn't legally abolish chattel slavery until 1981, for example, but as in other areas it can take decades for reality to match the law, given the laws were often changed under international pressure rather than reflecting any change to the domestic social order.
You'd be shocked how much of our "friends" in MENA still have legal slavery for non citizens. When an employer can legally confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
I have no idea why we in the west consider that normal and look the other way... What am I saying, I know, oil & VC money...
Some of them also bring their Filipino, India, Nepali, or African slave maids in Europe and everybody looks the other way, they have too much money to be criticized...
They are so brazen about slavery they routinely sell their slaves on Instagram or Facebook ads, with copies such as "doesn't need much food","will sleep on the floor", "will work 20 hours a day"...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50228549
> "African worker, clean and smiley," said one listing. Another: "Nepalese who dares to ask for a day off."
> When speaking to the sellers, the undercover team frequently heard racist language. "Indians are the dirtiest," said one, describing a woman being advertised.
They are dehumanized at first place, but the level of racism in these places, on top of all that is shocking...
> When an employer can confiscate someone's passport and one can only leave the country with their authorization, it is slavery.
This happens in Europe as well.
It is not legal, but it is the only way the Scandinavian berry market works at all. You don’t even need a huge market for this to be allowed to happen. You just need _a_ market and workers that are desperate enough to be tricked.
This is completely a figment of your imagination.
I was talking to a doctor who went to medical school in Brazil and said it was normal for upper-middle class people to have a live-in domestic servant. Many of the floorplans for condos or houses include a servants quarters. They were telling me theirs cost around $12 USD a day which is not a bad deal.
The median income in brazil is 10X lower than USA. So $12 a day -> $120 a day. That's similar to what someone in the US at the bottom of the economic ladder might earn. We have the same thing, it's just that Americans want to have servants but don't want to see them, so there's an app barrier between you and the poor. Someone cooks your food, someone else delivers your food, someone cleans your hotel room, but Americans prefer not to have to ever learn their names or talk to them. Is that really better?
Unlike when you use an app, for the most part, because we're not psychopaths, living with someone every day for months or years causes us to feel a great affinity and care towards them.
I live in a developing country. Some people treat their live-in staff badly. But for many others, this is not the case.
Imagine you are a high-earner and hard worker and so you and your wife get a live-in nanny to assist with childrearing duties. Often, two or three decades later, the live-in nanny is ready to retire, but your children (whom you love) have come to see her as a member of the family, or even as a second mother. Surely you also do. How can you live with someone for 20-30 years and not care about them? You might thus often take care of her for the rest of her life, even though she has her own savings.
(No, I do not have live-in house staff. But I've had the same maid for 7 years and she knows she can come to me if she needs anything.)
How one treats someone else is probably mostly just a reflection of the individual. But it's harder to disregard someone's humanity when they live in your house and you've know them for years.
This is true in Singapore and Malaysia, as well, where Filipino or Indonesian cooks and housekeepers are extremely common, as are separate entrances--typically into the kitchen. In Malaysia there's an odd situation, the reverse of the dynamic in the US, where Indonesian servant immigration is encouraged as a way to grow the Muslim population and help diminish the political power of Chinese-Malaysians and Indian-Malaysians.
It's a symptom of inequality. It will start happening more and more even in the first world if inequality isn't tackled and wealth continues to concentrate.
Why do you see inequality as the problem, instead of poverty?
Because they go together.
The hallmark of developed countries is that they're even, mostly egalitarian and developed everywhere.
The hallmark of developing or underdeveloped countries is precisely the staggering levels of inequality.
Not everyone is poor in a developing/underdeveloped country. Quite a few people there live lives that would make upper middle classes in developed countries blush. Life "just" sucks for the majority of people there.
I grew up with servants (in SubSaharan Africa and Morocco).
However, they were paid (I have no idea whether it was a good wage, or not), and had pretty decent quarters (in Morocco). My parents were pretty kind, fairly liberal, people. I would be quite surprised (and shocked) if they took advantage of the servants. I know that my mother made damn sure that I had respect for poor folks.
>$12 USD a day which is not a bad deal
For the owner or the servant?
If you pay minimum wage (about US$300) it would be about that per working day. Increasingly, cleaners are working per diem because they earn a lot more (about US$40 a day, but this varies a lot by region).
The downside is that they get no benefits.
Not a bad deal for who?
I’m new to HN. How does this relate to the theme of Hacker News?
Those of us that soldered wires, wrote custom drivers for esoteric hardware, and played with crazy things in the garage recognize that social systems are hackable too.
Anything that is interesting. It’s not all just tech here.
Read this https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Welcome to HN! You’ll find that a lot of the readers and commenters here don’t view technology as an isolated field, that it interconnects with all sorts of other systems—sociology, politics, entertainment, manufacturing, business, and so on.
My wife's family were wealthy Chinese near Hong Kong. Her grandmother took in a poor girl as a servant. She was part of the family but also basically a slave. The grandmother arranged her marriage when the girl was older. We met the girls granddaughter when we visited china - she was a new college student. The two families still think of themselves as related.
Almost same story (except china), my grandmother lost her parents very young. A family took her in and she worked for them until 20 years old or something then she got married.
$40k compensation for 55 years of service...
In cases like this, it’s likely the victim defended the family, and it made it impossible to classify the crime as slavery if she said she was free to leave but “was afraid of the violence outside”, which the article mentioned. It sounds ridiculous but in any court, if you can’t prove something beyond doubt, you cannot punish, which I think is why they ended up with that arrangement.
> “The signing of this agreement does not rule out the possibility that the worker may pursue individual claims through the courts,” the statement added.
So not only but a start.
Minimum wage is about US$300, which would make about US$220k total (you get about 13.3 salaries per year), plus fines and overtime. They'll have to pay social security too. It seems to me that the case doesn't include the labour part of the situation. That might be a separate case.
systemic racism is a thing, bet you there are judges, lawyers, etc that have the same thing going on. many in power do and thus are sympathetic to such causes. it's hard to viciously go after what you are guilt of.
The crime done here is nearly death penalty levels. Nearly. Jail time for the entire family or stripped of all wealth.
Maybe public humiliation is better, release names and address.
Yup, my mom and her sisters were all sent off to work on family houses when they were about 10 - 12. They were born in the country side, and my grandpa didn't care for them at all.
Did they also eventually win their freedom like in the article?
I hoped the article would mention whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now.
> whether the woman desires to be "rescued" or wants changes in the way she lives now
Here’s the thing: you can’t keep someone isolated for 55 years, working them without pay—regardless of whether the victim thinks that they want it or not.
See also the late Alex Tizon's "My Family's Slave" https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s... , with a 2017 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14350059 .
A similar history, in the U.S.: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s...
"Statistics suggest that Maria was undoubtedly poor and, most likely, Black."
That is a new way of reporting news, that journalist Gortázar seems to have invented here. When you don't know anything about the victim, just make something up from "statistics".
Where else can we apply this technique?
"Maria entered their lives around 1971 — the year Henry Kissinger visited China, John Lennon wrote Imagine, and Mexico hosted the first Women’s World Cup."
Good to know.
"The traditional maid’s room is gradually disappearing in Brazil, but buildings with separate social and service elevators — for domestic workers, visiting technicians, neighbors with dogs, or residents carrying groceries — remain commonplace."
Those are for separating workers carrying broken dusty floor tiles or ladders or a bunch of fiber cables from the other people using the building.
Anyway, ignoring the lacking quality of the journalism, more countries should do like Brazil and call slavery for what it is in legislation, instead of using euphemisms like "human trafficking".
At first I found interesting how you nitpick in irrelevant details while ignoring the bigger picture.
The point of the whole article is to use a single case to illustrate a bigger picture that you seem to deliberately oversee: abuse and exploitation of manual and unqualified workers.
But, then, I saw your Brazilian name and understood. Brazilian jingoism freaks out when Brazil "looks bad" to the world. It is a very common reaction among 3rd world countries. Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, etc are just like that too.
Hot take: As bad as this is, I wonder if it would be kinder to leave her with the family for the rest of her life.
This lady is in her 60s, does she even know any other way to even live? Life with that family may be better than whatever Brazil's equivalent of welfare shelters are.
Seems like that may have been why the case workers left her with that family for now.
If they pay her what she’s owed and the damages. She can get her place, hire people and pay them to care of her or help her.
If she hires people doesn't that just perpetuate the problem?
If I had a guess, the family got rid off her the easy way when she was old, they saved themselves a lot of money.
No, if they wanted to get rid of her there were a lot of easier solutions. As you may be aware, slaves can be sold.
> Although the family has agreed to compensate her, Maria, who lived in near-total isolation and without contact with her relatives, will remain with her employers
What the fuck?
Why did the law need the family's "agreement"??
Why is nobody going to jail for imprisoning someone for 55 years??
Just going on what it says in the article, it may be difficult to prove that anyone specifically forbade her to leave or made threats to prevent her from leaving.
I have some insight into this as my ex ended up in a similar situation in Malaysia. Rich family, no free days, 5-22 work hours.
It took me a year to convince her that it was not ok. They took away her passport, phone, she wasn't allowed to go out without them. I was ready to help her but she did not want my help.
In the end I'm sure she had to pay her "employer" for breach of contract since she left early. I think she had less than $1000 saved from these 18 months of work.
The thing that made me angry the most is that the family was incredibly well off, yet thought they deserve a slave (or more than one) at home.
HN is not a trash dump like Reddit. Please watch your language.
You reckon swearing is what makes the difference?
I'm saying maturity, respect and a modicum of decorum makes a difference.
We didn't get to the point of being disrespectful yet, except perhaps to slave owners, so this intervention seems a little early. Decorum doesn't add much meaning (it means don't swear, for instance?), and I get the impression that HN is irredeemably mature and nothing can change that.
Oh no, someone used a poopy word when talking about slave owners. You poor thing.
To whatever degree this site isn't a cesspool, we owe it to Dang, not the bad word police. They didn't swear at you, so there's no reason to get bent out of shape about it.
It's ironic you're taking this stance on an article about a respectable family that literally kept a slave.
There's a difference between superficial trappings of respectability, and actually treating people with respect.
Dang (and the other dude) do great work, but still I disagree. The GP comment was extremely low-effort. and while "complaining that HN is turning into reddit" is against site guidelines, I still agree with the critical comment. It's not the profanity alone, but the reddit-ism of the OP using the site as a complaint board (that's a large portion of reddit, especially local subreddits), and then making a 0-effort comment that any reasonable person will automatically agree with. The whole equation taken together is the formula for Reddit's echo chamber. The only people who tolerate that here are the noobs that are stepping outside their reddit coccoon and bringing the stink with them.
I don't agree with the critical comment at all, particularly because the OP is incredibly guilty of making drive-by comments in their very recent post history that don't actually add anything to the conversation. People will complain about the site 'becoming reddit' while making inane posts that are clearly against the rules or don't actually bring anything to the conversation. People don't practice what they clearly preach.
In either case, this post and thread are entirely off topic. At least GPs comment was somewhat relevant as opposed to this entire set of pedantry.
Which part is objectionable to you?
poopie
In Brazil there are so many laws, I heard that nearly 100% of the population treats laws like strongly worded suggestions, at best.
Idk how the prosecution system even functions without credibility.
If it operates like most corrupt systems, it binds the have-nots, but not the haves.
How can this be true?
Probably the entire adult population gets away with hundreds of offenses per annum on average (judging by the total amount on the books).
Even the most law abiding and most humble decile of Brazilian adults probably still get away with dozens of offenses per annum. That nobody cares to enforce at all.
> The concern is that Maria’s dependence on the exploiting family is so extreme that removing her abruptly, without a structured support network, could do more harm than good
From the article.