The world of poverty is a complex world with similarities found in every society. In Brazil, poverty has created a particularly dark situation in which society's most vulnerable children are forced to live or work on the streets and make a daily living for themselves. In many societies, poor children are exposed to street life, but Brazil is interesting in that many of its citizens have changed their mindset, seeing street children as creative brats? to see them as parasites who need to be discarded, often through murder, all while blaming the victim. In the world of poverty, there is extreme competition for few resources, and it is other low-income people who often support taking children off the streets, rather than sympathizing with them. It is a huge paradox that Brazil, with some of the most progressive laws in the world regarding children, included in the 1990 Statute of Children and Adolescents, also has some of the most horrendous human rights violations against this group. A combination of market forces, state and international organizations must combat poverty and the social structures that leave children exposed to violence if they, and therefore Brazil's future, are to survive. The main cause of street children is poverty. “Rural poverty, abandonment and forced displacement from lands? forced large numbers of peasants to leave the countryside for urban areas, hoping for industrial jobs, especially in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Jubilee Action 1998). The process of urbanization increased in the 1970s and 1980s, with 56% of the Brazilian population living in urban areas in 1970, a percentage that increased to over 75% in 1990 (Moulin and Pereira 2000, 44). While in rural areas they were... half of paper... Risk in Rio de Janeiro.? In Children on the Streets of the Americas, ed. Roslyn Arlin Mickelson. New York: Routledge.Petit, Juan Miguel. 2004. ?Children's Rights: Mission in Brazil.? The Special Rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. www.andi.org.br/_pdfs/JuanMiguelPetitreport.pdf. December 2, 2004.Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Daniel Hoffman. 1998. “Brazilian Apartheid: Street Kids and the Struggle for Urban Space.” In Little Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargent. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Vianna, Solon Magalhaes, and Iara Marques. 1994. Decentralization and policies for the protection of children and adolescents in Brazil. UNICEF International Center for Child Development. Innocenti Occasional Papers Series Decentralization and local governance, Issue 14.