Many street children bear the burden of supporting their families.
Photo by Leonardo Duarte, a former street child, now age 20. At this time in Brazil 's history, businesses and shop owners were also organizing around the problem of street children. They saw children and youth as delinquents without families, perceiving the older ones as a physical threat. They believed that the presence of these young people on the streets outside their shops deterred middle-class people from shopping and thus threatened their businesses. As a consequence, some of them arranged for death squads, made up of hired mercenaries, to go out into the streets at night and kill the children.