Triangulation and violence in the Caribbean: Crimes retold from a Curaçaoan juvenile detention centre

Abstract

In a special issue in Ethnography, the question was raised how to study violence ethnographically in Latin America and the Caribbean. The present article seeks to extend this special issue with reflections on how to study different forms of violence ‘after the fact’, based on fieldwork at a juvenile detention centre in Curaçao in 2019 and 2020. We present intersubjectively realistic accounts of violence in the family sphere. These accounts came into being by means of two acts of empirical triangulation: (1) looking at violent episodes through the eyes of different people involved and (2) contrasting the counterstories that emerged from this with the detention centre’s case files that construct particular images of the detained youth and their family members. We end the article with critical reflections on our own unwitting contribution to the production of silence, which frustrated the youth’s counterstories.

Introduction: Towards intersubjectively realistic accounts of violence ‘after the fact’

In the introduction to a special issue in this journal on ethnography and/or violence in Latin America and the Caribbean, Jones and Rodgers (2019: 308) write that “almost every country in the region has been the site for several major ethnographic studies of violence during the past two decades.” Notably absent from the rapidly expanding list of major ethnographies in the region (e.g. Hecht, 1998; Robben, 2005; Thomas, 2011; Willis, 2015) are the Caribbean countries and municipalities of the Kingdom of the Netherlands: Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, St. Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius. In fact, after Harry Hoetink’s celebrated work on Curaçao (1958, 1985), ethnographies on these tiny islands in general have been few and far between – but see, for example, Guadeloupe (2009) and Jaffe (2016) for important exceptions. In this article, we seek to extend Jones and Rodgers’s special issue by furthering some of its epistemological and methodological discussions, using ethnographic materials that we collected in a juvenile detention centre in Curaçao during several months in 2019 and 2020.

In addition to the question whether different forms of violence spur different kinds of ethnographic representation and writing (e.g. the testimonio, biography or quasi-novel), the special issue addresses an epistemological matter that is perhaps even more fundamental: how do we get to the ‘truth’ of violence in the first place? The contributions collected by Jones and Rodgers all provide sophisticated answers and raise new questions. Both Jaffe (2019, on Jamaica) and Penglase (2019, on Brazil), for instance, bring out into the open something which has been swept under the rug for far too long: the career- (Jaffe) or narrative-driven (Penglase) temptation to turn the ethnographic gaze to the most spectacular forms of inner-city violence. These drives and temptations may not only leave the impression of ethnographers as thrill-seekers; they can also “play into existing stereotypes of certain people or places as deviant and dangerous” (Jaffe, 2019: 387). To know violence, in other words, we need to be open to its different forms and absences rather than pre-selecting the more sensational and spectacular outbursts. In her work on Jamaican donmanship, Jaffe wonders if it is epistemologically sound (and ethically justifiable) to write about violent actors without dwelling on violence and concludes that it is because the violence she indirectly encountered in Kingston was often limited to nighttime seconds and did not affect all life in the city, as popular representations of Kingston may have one believe. Penglase chose another route. Moving beyond the narrative appeal of spectacular violence in the favela, he decided to restore the balance by paying equal attention to the banality of violence and asking how we can understand small acts of brutality that are rarely witnessed or spontaneously talked about.

Another salient issue that surfaces in all contributions is best captured by the question how to understand violence ‘after the fact’? Since all contributors present retrospective accounts of violence and thus do not rely on direct observations, readers find a wealth of reflection in the articles on how to faithfully reconstruct violence. Appreciating Fontes’s (2019, on Guatemala) refusal to parse fact from fantasy and truth from falsehood, we deliberately play with the notion of ‘faithful reconstruction’ because it values people’s beliefs (and make-believes) about the violence that occurred in their lives. In his portrait of a ‘real’ marero, Fontes makes it clear that oral histories are “inherently unstable, always floating in time between the present and an ever changing past, oscillating in the dialogue between the narrator and the interviewer…” (Fontes, 2019: 323). Memories, agendas, entanglements, imagined futures, regrets, and hopes of both narrator and interviewer all play a significant role in how violent pasts are reconstructed. In the end, it may be as important that reconstructions are ‘subjectively realistic’ as they are ‘objectively real’. We consider this statement by Jones and Rodgers (2019) to be the most important take-home message of the special issue.

Both matters – forms and reconstructions of violence – received our attention when planning, performing, and presenting our ethnography at the juvenile detention centre in Curaçao (the JJIC). Our title may be slightly misleading, since we were not primarily interested in the crimes that the juveniles themselves had committed – and which landed them into the centre where we met them. Rather, we took an interest in everything that happened before that watershed moment in their lives, that is, the childhood adversities and the drama in which they and their co-residents were tangled up. The five male and seven female minors – all of African Caribbean descent and very poor, like all their peers in the JJIC – who offered their regimented time to us had already lived very troubled lives at their young age. In the narrative interviews that we held with them, they told us about the full array of violent forms they had encountered in their lives; from what they considered to be banal forms of ‘mortal neglect’ (Scheper-Hughes, 1992) to high-impact cases of stabbing, rape, murder, narco-trafficking, and so on.

The main contribution of our article does not so much relate to the different forms of violence, however, as to the ways in which these can be more optimally reconstructed and analyzed. To use Jones and Rodgers’s language, we wish to upscale from subjectively realistic to intersubjectively realistic accounts of violence. In doing so, we focus on an anthropological keyword that is still featuring prominently in our discipline’s methodological textbooks: triangulation. The way in which we do so takes inspiration from Oscar Lewis’s seminal work (1959) on Mexico’s urban poor in the mid-twentieth century. Although Five Families and the ensuing culture-of-poverty debates have been rightfully criticized – also in the special issue (Jaffe, 2019) – for legitimizing blame-the-victim poverty policies free of politico-economic analysis, Lewis’ remarkable skills in family triangulation should not be forgotten. In our ethnography, we made use of the so-called “Rashomon-like technique of seeing the family through the eyes of each of its members” (Lewis, 1959: 4) and combined it with Lewis’ ‘third approach’: “to select for intensive study a problem or special event or crisis to which the family reacts” (Jaffe, 2019). In other work, we have focussed on the political economy and other contexts of the juveniles’ biographies (Mutsaers, 2023), but here we concentrate on the epistemological question how to develop intersubjectively realistic accounts of various sorts of violence ‘after the fact’.

Violence, crime, and juvenile delinquency in Curaçao

In 2018, we made exploratory site visits to the JJIC in the hope to translate our institutions’ long-term working relationship on the subject of forensic youth care into a research agenda. Both of us worked at another university back then, which had made it common practice to send mostly white Dutch female interns to the JJIC on an annual basis. In conversations with JJIC officials, we quickly noticed that the uneasiness we felt about this was shared. It turned out that it represented a wider problem in the (forensic) youth care sector on the island: Dutch people, programs, and prediction tools had flooded it for years on end and were often embraced as the scientific avant garde by the higher levels of government. Exemplary is a policy document written by the Curaçaoan Law Enforcement Council (Raad voor de Rechtshandhaving, 2016), which is full of references to the Netherlands and consistently puts the former metropole on a pedestal. The document addresses various youth risk and intervention programs implemented on the island following Dutch ‘best practices’. Plans are made “conform Dutch methods” (pp. 58 and 79), programs “derive from Dutch assistance programs” (p. 32), formats for treatment plans are “made by employees from the Dutch Custodial Institutions Agency” (p. 58), and the Curaçaoan youth probation works with a scientific evidence-based method, “written down in a handbook made in the Netherlands, commissioned by the Ministry of Justice” (p. 60). Reading this document, one gets the impression that everything made in Holland must be good.

Our conversations in 2018 with the JJIC director made it clear to us that she had become increasingly frustrated about the globalization of juvenile crime control (e.g. Muncie, 2005), which she rejected for its culturalizing tendencies. In the juvenile justice and child protection sectors, intervention programs such as the Positive Parenting Program (Triple-P) or risk tools such as the Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY) are often produced in Western contexts but eventually land in postcolonial places such as Curaçao. As we have argued elsewhere (Mutsaers, 2023), such prediction and intervention instruments do not only render parenting and family factors the main cause of juvenile delinquency and all kinds of other ‘social ills’ – something we dubbed parentism – but they also come with “too exclusive ways of regulating and defining what childhood and safety ought to be” (Fay, 2019: 321). They carry with them very specific ideas about parenthood, childhood, kinship structures, attachment mechanisms, authority, socialization, and so on, that are grounded in what family scholars have called intensive parenting. Such a form of parenting is construed as “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive, and financially expensive” (Hays, 1996: 8) and requires the joint effort of both parents working together on the ‘concerted cultivation’ of their child (Lareau, 2011). Such parenting ideologies, although peculiarly Western, are increasingly presented as the standard for a ‘global childhood’ (Liebel, 2020) that every child on the planet deserves. Despite the enormously rich diversity of parenting cultures across the globe (Lancy, 2015), we see a steady global advance of these ideologies (Faircloth et al., 2013) and the concomitant rise of the ‘parent-citizen’ (Schenkels et al., 2021) as the central and self-responsible figure in keeping youth on a law-abiding track.

What irritated the director most was the prevailing ‘risk factorology’ (Kemshall, 2008) that failed to take the complexity, unpredictability, context-dependency, and multidimensionality of juvenile delinquency seriously (cf. Case and Haines, 2014). She argued that SAVRY-like items such as exposure to violence in the home, childhood history of maltreatment, parental criminality, early caregiver disruption, and poor parental management cut up people’s lives into measurable and analyzable factors. Such a fragmentation makes it impossible to adopt a whole-life approach and to recognize the ‘deviant’ family roles, serial companionships, and collective caretaking that are often seen on the island for what they are: historically rooted responses to the structural violence that Caribbean families have been facing for so long. This violence is intricately connected to a capitalist world system that has always left places like Curaçao to the whims of global industry, first in slavery, then in oil and other extractive businesses, and now in a neocolonial tourist sector that has semantically replaced servitude with service (Mutsaers, 2023). Shared childcare was and still is a way to cushion the blow of ‘absent’ parents usurped by a capitalist world system that brutally centralized the Caribbean in early modernity and pushed it to the periphery in late modernity.

As we were reading postcolonial and anthropological literature on the (violent) history of the Caribbean (e.g. Sidney Mintz, Raymond Smith, Harry Hoetink, Paul Gilroy, Franz Fanon, Deborah Thomas, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Melville Herskovits, Sally and Richard Price), we also turned to the latest studies on juvenile delinquency. Whereas the former looked at how the past “continue[s] to impose a crushing weight upon the present,” to borrow Mintz’s (2010: 1) words, we noticed that the latter use the present to predict the future. Stripping the present of its past, predictive studies in the field of juvenile delinquency tend to prioritize risk and protective factors in the here and now to forecast juvenile crime that is yet to happen. As said, they often use factors that are family-focussed and tend to advocate interventions that put the family centre stage. One example that we already mentioned is the Triple-P program, which is applauded as a promising solution to juvenile crime throughout the Caribbean:

[T]he Caribbean could benefit from evidence-based programs to support parents or guardians in their role of supervising and monitoring their children, as well as building strong relationships with them. Fortunately, there is no shortage of parenting program models—such as the Positive Parenting Program (‘Triple P’)—which have been credited with reducing problem adolescent behaviors in a number of different countries and could be adapted for the Caribbean (Ruprah et al., 2017: 54).

The JJIC director’s resistance seemed to be in vain, as she could not withstand the power of the scientific avant garde. At the time of our ethnography, instruments such as Triple-P and SAVRY were at full swing and categorically found their way into the juveniles’ case files. These institutional documents were filled with entries regarding what was considered to be poor parenting, weak family structures, absent caregivers, domestic problems, etc. For instance, one of the social workers who often joined us during interviews in the centre or in people’s homes had written down her condemnation of parental absence:

I have to check why mother went to Jamaica and left the children with the father and grandmother. The idea was that they would take care of the children but according to grandmother, the father didn’t do so. Grandmother had to take care of everything but she had a job, working all day, so the children were home alone all day, without supervision, and just loitered in the streets…

This checking of parents’ reasons to leave the island and ‘abandon’ their children almost never happened. Most of the time it was flatly dismissed as a lack of interest or inadequate parenting competencies. In another youth’s case file, a rich description of all his alleged shortcomings – emotionally, behaviourally, developmentally – was preceded by a long list of patronizing remarks on his upbringing and family situation: “Mother does not control the youth, who is therefore loitering in the streets without supervision.” “Mother adopts a permissive parenting style.” “Mother is not a role model to [the boy] and doesn’t teach him norms and values.” “Mother has no authority over the minor.” That mother was the only one with an income in the extended family – all living under the same roof – and thus had to support seven people with her job as a cleaner of rich folk’s swimming pools, was indeed acknowledged in the file, albeit with the condescending footnote that one “does not understand where mother gets the money from to rent a car… Or does she set the wrong priorities?”

Ethnography in a juvenile prison: From bureaucratic paperwork to triangulated counterstories

In Conjuring Criminals, Drybread (2022) discusses how bureaucratic paperwork constructs images of young detainees in a Brazilian juvenile prison and how such images become a binding picture of reality, fixed in documents that the juveniles are structurally powerless to refute. She describes how juvenile justice professionals, social workers, attorneys, and psychologists compile case files – often without consulting the youth in question – that tend to take on social lives of their own. Such compilations can profoundly alter the lives of the juveniles they seek to represent, as they are made into “particular ‘types’ of subjects best suited to preestablished institutional interventions” (2022: 104). Drybread draws on anthropological theories of magic to understand this process, and it is worthwhile to quote her at some length:

[T]here are many ways that bureaucratic writing and practice can contribute to constructing portraits of incarcerated adolescents that both emphasize and affirm their criminality. To be clear: in making this claim, I am not only suggesting that the contents of case files can make incarcerated youth appear less law abiding and more fearsome than they really are. I am also arguing that institutional documents and documentary practices work as a form of sympathetic magic in which the representations of inmates contained in their case files come to seem more real and more truthful than the individuals they are intended to represent, and as those representations gain force, incarcerated teens begin to equate their own identities with the contents of their files (2022: 114).

The magic that happened in the JJIC bureaucracy had to do less with conjuring aggressive predators than with invoking images of weak family structures and failing parents bound to reproduce a next generation on the same downward slope. Although JJIC personnel occasionally broke the frame of parentism in casual conversations with us and recognized social conditions of poverty and crime beyond the family, it immediately returned when small talk made way to professional activities. Triple-P and SAVRY-like discourses dominated the case files as a result.

Unlike Drybread, who refused to begin with reading the youth’s files before getting to know them, we were already on high alert and made sure to read the files straight away if the youth gave us permission. The contradiction between the director’s scepticism and the pervasiveness of parentism in the JJIC bureaucracy made us eager to know what truths the youth themselves would tell about the histories of violence and crime in their lives, and how these would compare to their files and other bureaucratic sedimentations and encounters. This comparison was our first act of triangulation, and it was made possible by our reading of the case files and our observations of the youth in various correctional, educational, therapeutic, and leisurely activities within the detention centre. When possible, we also joined them on parole. Each of the dozen juveniles who participated was ‘shadowed’ for at least several days, before narrative interviews took place in which the biography of the young detainee stood central.

Similar to Drybread’s, our interviews would always open in a flexible way. We invited the youth to share stories that were meaningful to them and allowed them to guide our exchanges, triggered by open questions such as “tell me about your childhood,” “what do you want to share about the house or neighborhood you grew up in,” “what would you like to tell me about your family or other relevant persons in your life,” or “what opportunities, challenges or difficulties do youth have while growing up in Curaçao?” Sooner or later, all conversations turned to the childhood adversities in the youth’s lives, but in contrast to the bureaucracy and its representatives, the youngsters did a much better job describing the political economy and other contexts of their biographies. They explained to us in detail why employment opportunities often had to be sought overseas, forcing parents to leave their children behind; how Curaçao’s deficient health care system forced people to send their children abroad for medical treatment; or that small island states offered no opportunities to walk away from troubled relationships. These are the ‘factors’ that are too complex to capture with risk instruments and that add up to what Olwig (2012) calls the ‘care chain’, which has become typical for Caribbean societies.

When these stories had been told, in all their complexity and multidimensionality, we deliberately moved on to the more structured part of the interview to see how they resonated with the risk and need factors scientifically established by the Western avant garde on this terrain. We would ask them about authority issues in the family, household structures, attachment problems, family time, pedagogical styles, home atmosphere, parental involvement, emotion-management, and so on and so forth. Interestingly, the structured questions we asked were hardly picked up. The global childhood and parentist framings of our queries simply made no sense to them and contrasted starkly with their own life histories. Furthermore, referring to observed moments in which positive parenting and thinking discourses surfaced in interaction with professionals, was a sure way to stifle conversation.

By drawing out these contrasts, we wanted to help the juveniles become a bit less defenceless in the face of the ‘archival power’ (Trouillot, 1995) that JJIC professionals held over them. Increasingly, we realized that the case files in the JJIC archives were also bundles of silences, ignoring the counterstories that the youth themselves were telling about their violent pasts. To further discover these counterstories, we invited the youth to forward us to two important people in their lives for follow-up interviews – our second act of triangulation. To avoid the parentism pitfall, we consciously asked for the contact details of ‘relevant others’. In response, the participating youth forwarded us to all kinds of kin and non-kin relations: mothers, stepmothers, fathers, legal guardians, brothers, sisters, boyfriends, nieces, related and unrelated foster parents, aunts, and second cousins. These secondary interviews helped to cross-check certain life events, certainly, but they served higher goals than simply fact-checking, counting witnesses or adding up stories. Sometimes, the stories that didn’t add up or were initially kept away from us were most revealing.

Combined, these efforts allowed us to develop ‘narrative blocs’ (Fontes, 2019) from different empirical angles, taking into account how various people remember, recount, and refract the violent events that had occurred in the lives of the young detainees. In trying to get to grip with the ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ of violence, it helps, we argue, to grasp how different people relate to the same episodes of violence. Intersubjective reconstruction through family-based narrative blocs is a way forward to understand violence in its different manifestations. Questions such as “[h]ow do we provide accounts of ourselves to others? What do we expose, and what do we keep hidden? And how do the stories we tell about ourselves entangle what we have done with how we imagine ourselves to be?” argues Fontes (2019: 334), “hinge on the complex relationship between agency, event, and act of narration that materialize the event in the moment of its (re)telling.” The concept of narrative blocs helps us to understand that events are not locked in time and that in (re)telling them, people reinvent themselves and their own place in the world. We considered it our task to collect these retellings in an organized way as a counterweight to the bureaucratic power and associated risk factorology.

This was not an easy task. In the 4 months that we stayed on the island (the second field trip in 2020 was cut short by the pandemic and only lasted several weeks), we shadowed the dozen participating juveniles from 6.30 am until 7.00 pm, throughout their day program. We were able to do 36 interviews – 12 with the youth and 24 with relevant others – in which the biography of the detainee always stood central. This centrality aligned with our attempts to go ‘deeper’ with our ‘child participatory research methods’, to borrow from Horgan’s title (2017), but we must confess that adult gatekeeping was a serious issue in our project in various ways. Firstly, we were reliant on JJIC management to select the young participants in our study. We were not free to invite youngsters ourselves and thus depended on the JJIC’s pre-selection. Although we communicated our wish to work with a representative group (e.g. when it comes to gender), ultimately we had little control over the selection process. Secondly, all interviews were joined by a social worker from the JJIC. While her presence came in handy in linguistically complex situations – interviews took place in Dutch, Papiamentu, Spanish or a combination of these languages, all mastered by the social worker – it is obvious that it put constraints on the youth’s feeling to speak freely.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, carceral interviewing in juvenile detention is a highly particular speech event. Inevitably, the experiences and expectations of the youth were colored by the various interviews – or other recorded conversations – that they had with a wide range of adults in authority positions: police officers, lawyers, social workers, therapists, councillors, probation officers, court officials, pedagogues, etc. As Briggs (1986) wrote long ago, interviews invariably impose communicative norms, conventions, and routines on the setting in which they take place. It is to be expected that these also worked through in the conversations we had with the youth, despite our best efforts to explain that we operated independently and were not part of the penal system, and that we would never coerce them into telling us things they did not want to tell. Obviously, such forms of adult gatekeeping are highly problematic and have become a topic of concern in Childhood Studies for good reasons (e.g. Canosa et al., 2018; Horgan, 2017; Spyrou, 2016), but in the parts below we approach them as important influences on the narrative blocs presented.

Boxing Day: Mirella, Michael, Michaella, and the other side of the story

“Here she finally is, the twisted mother of Michael and Michaella!”, said Mirella. It was 2020 when we arrived at Mirella’s house in one of the most impoverished neighbourhoods in Curaçao – Seru Fortuna – where she lived without electricity and with hardly any furniture. The way Mirella greeted us may have had to do with her knowing that we had spoken already with two of her eight children – Michael and Michaella, both detained in the JJIC – and with Michaella’s informal foster mother (Mirella’s niece) and Michael’s unrelated foster parents. Mirella must have known that she was the central protagonist in their narratives and that the picture these foster parents had painted of her was rather bleak.

In line with the JJIC’s case file on this family, Michael’s foster parents spoke very critically of Mirella, whom they considered to be an absent mother. The fact that Mirella occasionally left some of her children alone, unsupervised, was condemned by them. Echoing discourses of intensive parenting, Michael’s foster mother, a school teacher, claimed more generally that in Seru Fortuna “parents don’t see children as the central and most important thing in their lives.” “Children like Michael,” she specified, “have to take care of themselves,” unlike the children in the school she presently works for and which she calls an elite school. Supporting his wife, Michael’s foster father – a carpenter – talked disapprovingly about the child neglect in this family: “He [Michael] was already used to taking care of his younger sisters.” “He even had to sleep with one eye open,” continued the foster mother, “because of all the things they had gone through: police raids, domestic violence, arrests, murder.”

Similarly, the case file was filled with entries about Mirella’s shortcomings. We read that “mother has a troublesome life with little stability when it comes to housing, income and partners, lots of relational violence and conflict with the law,” or that “she wants to protect her children but does it all wrong.” In the chronologically ordered part of the file, we read: “2017: The violence, the neglect, the problems in the upbringing continue. Mother regularly fights with her partner in her children’s presence.” The point is not that these entries are ungrounded. In all interviews, even with mother, confirmations were given of the family’s troubles – relationally, financially, pedagogically. The issue, however, is that consistent with the ideology of parentism, parents (especially mothers) are singled out as the foremost pedagogical agents whose decisions and actions have decisive impact on the children, while downplaying the importance of others or events that fall outside a parent’s sphere of influence.

In this case, the number one key event that pulled this family down is hardly mentioned in the case file: the murder of one of Michael and Michaella’s brothers on Boxing Day (December 26) 2009. At the age of 14, he was shot dead at Berg Altena, only a mile away from the family’s previous house in Parera. Only two sentences of the voluminous file mention this event, one of them being: “26 December, 2009: [name] is murdered in a violent way in the Parera neighborhood.” Nothing is said whatsoever about the impact of this event on the mother of the child. In the interview, Mirella tells the other side of the story. It was no small feat, we thought, that she was still willing to speak to us in the company of a JJIC representative. That she had to muster all her courage was evident from the fact that she began to tell us about the most intimate details of her life before we even sat down. Replaying the recording of our conversation, one can hear Mirella going on and on, nervous and defensive, even when her voice becomes inaudible due to the squawking parrots in the background.

“… And then my little boy died, they shot him. That’s when all the trouble started. I couldn’t move on. I was in the psychiatric ward for a while, for three months, sleeping, taking meds, and so on.” She said this within the first minute of the interview and kept coming back to this lingering trauma, unprocessed due to all the accusations made against her. “It was especially hard to Michael. The three brothers were always together and then I had to wake him, telling him his brother was shot… He can’t cry. But he made drawings, with blood and weapons, uhhm, always so…[silence and emotion].”

In the second on-topic sentence in the case file, mother is accused of instigating her children to take revenge: “Mother begins to push her remaining children to avenge their brother’s murder. She still does this.” In our interview with her, Mirella defends a different position, claiming that she’s glad that the offender now lives far away, in the Netherlands: “and I want the children to know it’s over, let it go. It’s ten years ago.” Whether Mirella never wanted to burden her children with the idea of revenge, changed her mind or fabricated a different story due to the presence of the JJIC in our conversation, we do not know, but the truth is that Michael had been thinking about it a lot. At first he hedged, doubting if it’d be wise to speak his mind in the presence of the social worker: “the entire family is still angry; me too… when my brother ended up in prison he ran into that guy [the offender] and I said ‘no, stay calm, pretend you didn’t see him’.” When asked if they wanted to harm him, Michael said: “he killed my brother and he has to pay for that…we’re not going to kill him, but he needs to…” [unfinished sentence]. But eventually he decides to tell us the way he feels: “I’ve seen weapons, I’ve held them in my hand… I come from a crazy family, you don’t want to mess with us.” Then he confessed that he said to his imprisoned brother: “Wait until you’re out and then we’ll take care of it.”

Of course, the authenticity of Michael’s thirst for revenge cannot be verified and his aunt, for one, labelled it as ‘boasting’. Later in the interview, Michael backed down and said that, like his mother, he wanted to move to the Netherlands the moment he is released from detention: “When I stay here, in the streets, it will only get worse. Do you know how many bad things I’ve done when I was little? It can only get worse when I grow older.” As if he was a character in multiple and concurrent scripts, Michael swung from someone who was proud of the violence in his life to someone who feared his own complicity most. There is also the possibility that Michael’s fear of deterioration is an example of what Drybread called the magic of bureaucratic paperwork. In his file, it was written, for instance, that “without cooperation of the mother and without behavioral change in the children, the situation is likely to get even worse over time.” Perhaps this was repeated so often that Michael started to believe in his own incorrigibility and longed for radical change.

The same sort of protective behaviour dominated Michaella’s narrative and it had landed her in the JJIC. She had bitten a detained classmate in the cheek for speaking badly about Mirella. Whenever the two girls crossed each other in the courtyard, one could feel that this was an armed peace situation. Michaella’s worries were not unrealistic: several months after the biting incident, Mirella was stabbed by her partner. In an interview with us, Michaella also spoke about the endless regression in her family’s life and said that she expected “her mother to be dead one of these days, because things are getting worse and worse.” Only months before we met her, Mirella was stabbed by this man with a knife and was rushed to the hospital. This happened again on Boxing Day, now in 2019, precisely ten years after her son was killed – the day that “she is always crying a lot,” said Michael.

In the case file, such dangerous conflicts are described as if they were Mirella’s own fault – “mother does it all wrong,” “there is serious relational violence,” and “mother regularly fights with her partner in front of her children” – as if these events were of her own choosing. In conversation with us, however, Mirella was actively reinventing her biography by painting the larger canvas that was the misery of Curaçao. This small island with its limited possibilities, she argued, worked like a prison that makes it very hard to walk away from the ‘darker side of kinship’ (Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak, 2020):

You know, if I really want to get out of it [her relationship], I have to leave this island. If I stay here, I cannot… If I move to Bandabou, he’ll look for me. If I go all the way to Westpunt, we would still be together. It’s been like this for 13 years. We fight, make it up again, and fight. If I really want it to stop, I just have to leave, just have to… My big dream is to move to the Netherlands with all my children, but I’m a little bit afraid now, because of that disease that is there right now.

Tragically, her first attempt to escape led to a series of events that now make it impossible to travel to the Netherlands as a family, regardless of the pandemic that was beginning to cause travel restrictions at the time we talked. Several years ago, Mirella had travelled to Schiphol Airport with a small amount of contraband in her luggage. While she tried to make some cash to support her family and build a new life across the ocean, her arrest and incarceration ushered in a difficult time in which Mirella lost custody of her children, who were eventually placed in foster and institutional care upon mother’s return. Strikingly, Mirella and the other mothers we spoke with who had been involved in small-scale drug transport, talked about it in a language reminiscent of the alternative history of contraband in the Caribbean written by Linda Rupert in her Creolization and Contraband: “while officials saw smuggling as a crime…participants saw it as an opportunity, even a ‘form of self-help’” (2012: 5). To the mothers, smuggling was an act of desperation, a small opportunity to improve an impoverished life; something they considered legitimate “given the context in which they live” (Roitman, 2006: 249). Roitman’s notion of the ethics of illegality seems to aptly describe these women’s defenses of smuggling as an act out of bare necessity. Like the road bandit in Roitman’s work who had said that “anything that can move a poor man from hunger and begging is licit” (2006: 262), Mirella was etching out a space of ethics in an ever hardening world system of unevenly distributed wealth and opportunities.

While Mirella was incarcerated in the Netherlands, Michaella became the primary caretaker in the family and had to provide for her younger siblings. She said “I had to take care of my younger sisters,” and when asked if she felt entitled to be a child herself, she replied that she “had to do adult things from a young age onwards.” She also told us that for the first time in her life, she felt what it is like to be a child due to the stability she experienced in detention: “for the first time I know what it is to be cared for rather than taking care of others.” “Mi no sa,” she replied, when we asked her who had raised her: “I don’t know.”

Interestingly, Mirella herself held on to a very different interpretation, one that is reminiscent of Sahlins’ concept of mutuality of being and the idea that kin are “intrinsic to one another’s existence” (2011: 2). When we asked about her confinement and what it meant to be a parent behind bars, she proudly told us that

We’re always together and the big ones take care of the little ones and the little ones must also be there for the big ones. And I am strongly connected to them, we are like a chain. A strong chain. The strongest is my youngest girl. She was with me in prison and she is stronger than the others… She can cry, she can talk. When I could no longer handle the situation, I sent her to my mother in the Netherlands and later, when I was set free, I took her with me to Curaçao.

Here we have yet another version of Olwig’s (2012) care chain; not a system of child exchange or what Hecht (1998) called ‘child shifting’, although this is exactly what happened with the youngest child, but mutual care within the family as the province of children themselves. Such a chain tends to lead to parentification, an extreme role reversal within the family, which gave Michael, Michaella, and their siblings responsibilities that are hard to shoulder at that age. Mirella confessed that the children were pivotal in the family’s survival and sometimes had to go out on the street to search for food.

By ignoring the hardships that Mirella had to endure and by focussing squarely on her alleged shortcomings and failures – a striking act of parentism – the JJIC had conjured a failing mother in its paperwork. Her resistance against state intervention (“mother strongly resists our interference”) and her aggression against legal guardians (“who were threatened in such a way that charges had to be pressed”) are not explained relationally or contextually but as her fault alone. No wonder that Mirella kept things deliberately vague; something the JJIC labelled ‘untrustworthy’ but that we conceived of as a survival strategy. An example: even today it remains unclear to us what had happened to the eighth child Mirella had recently given birth to. Michael wondered aloud if he has a baby brother or sister; his foster mother said she had seen a picture of the baby and thought that it was taken away by the state the moment it was born in the hospital; and Mirella stonewalled all queries about the baby as if she wanted to keep the newborn a secret to the outside world. Was the child already taken away or did the obfuscation help Mirella to prevent exactly that from happening? Either way, this narrative bloc tells us something about the predicament of this family as one that is falling apart.

Complicity: Dwain, Michael, Jackson, and the production of silence

Although we had committed ourselves to helping the young detainees become a bit less defenceless against the JJIC’s archival power and to assist in the formulation of counterstories, there were times in which we unwillingly failed to keep our own promise. While we knew full well that the case files could be bundles of silences, ignoring the counterstories that the youth themselves and their kin were telling about their pasts, we occasionally contributed to such silences as well. We only discovered this after fieldwork, after taking to heart Spyrou’s advice to study interviews and fieldnotes as wholes rather than as a series of “dissected and coded fragments,” in order to understand both the production of silences as well as their wavering (2016: 17). Far from thinking of them as absences or lack of data, such an approach takes “children’s silences [as] pregnant with meaning and a constitutive feature of their voice” (2016: 8). Here, we have different silences in mind than the gendered silences of violence that Mo Hume writes about in her work on El Salvador (e.g. Hume, 2008, 2009). Mirella’s case makes it crystal clear that such mechanisms were at play in our ethnographic sample as well, but below we wish to reflect on our own complicity in muting particular childhood stories to illustrate our role in the narrative blocs.

The story begins with 14-year-old Dwain, whose life was on a fast-track. He had “experienced it all: murder, shootings, you name it.” Born in Koraalspecht, one of the poorest and most crime-ridden neighbourhoods on the island, Dwain asked us what it was we wanted to know, because he had seen everything. When we articulated the assumption that this must have been difficult to process, Dwain replied: “No, not at all. I am used to these things.” Sadly enough, this was true. When we joined him on parole, Dwain showed us the bullet hole in the front door of the ramshackle building where he lived with his mother, grandmother, uncle, sister, niece, and nephew. Already at a very young age he was recruited as an errand boy by one of the most violent gangs on the island. Much more can be told about Dwain – about how his mother, like Mirella, was arrested at Schiphol Airport in his presence and how he was placed in foster care far away from home, about how he had threatened one teacher with a fire arm and another with a knife, about his drug addiction, or his abusive uncle – but let us return to the pivotal moment when we wrote down in our notebook that

Dwain shows the others how to survive in prison, eating without a spoon or turning other objects into a spoon. He tries to impress the others, bragging about the neighborhood he comes from… But in personal interactions with [the social worker] he is actually very shy and uncertain… Then you see the 14-year old boy he actually is.

Weeks after the pandemic had sent us away from the island, we suddenly grasped the magnitude of the problem laid bare by the final sentence. Despite all our best efforts to resist parentism and counter global childhood ideologies, we too could apparently only see ‘real children’ in innocent, vulnerable, and cared-for beings. Unwillingly and unknowingly, we had contributed to childhood as ‘exclusionary social practice’, defined by Garlen as “patterns of human activity through which ideologies of childhood are materialized” (2019: 56). Although we had heard Michaella and others talk about the care they had given – to siblings and occasionally to adult relatives as well – rather than received, we failed to recognize patterns of care-giving by the youth as parts of their childhoods as well. This reminded us of Liebel’s remarks about the postcolonial constellation in childhood studies, which he described as “an unequal material and ideological or epistemic power relationship that leaves little space for childhoods that do not correspond to the pattern of childhood that dominates the Global North” (2020: 2). He warned that in such a constellation, children in the Global South are easily labelled as children without childhood, who are said to lack the intimate care, dependency, stability, and the boundaries that keep them away from adult roles.

Our stubborn framing of them as passive, innocent, and dependent beings, we now understand, resulted from our inability to understand the shifting “boundaries that differentiate children from adults [and] that shape the subjectivities of both” (Farley and Garlen, 2016: 221). Our poor frame of mind had us ask questions to the young detainees about the care they had received, rather than given, and to the adults in their lives about the care they had given, rather than received. Take, for example, Michael, once again, and our elicitations to tell us more about the care he had received from his biological father:

Interviewer:       Can you tell us about your father and how he took care of you?

Michael:         No…(long silence)

           The street is my father. I hope my father gets shot.

Interviewer:       Oh… You don’t ever want to see him again?

Michael:     I don’t want to have anything to do with him. Don’t even want to see a photo.

His narrative becomes much richer, however, the moment he finds an opportunity to talk about his responsibilities in the family:

My stepfather was involved in a traffic accident. He broke his neck, couldn’t turn his head. I was the oldest in the house, all my older brothers had already left, and I saw that my mother had problems… uhm, financial problems. She had to do a lot of things to scrape together some money. So I had to help my mother and at some point, I quit school to work and earn some money.

Communicating about the harm they had been done or the care they had not been given was sometimes easier in written than in spoken form. Take, for instance, Jackson su bida, the life story that 17-year-old Jackson had written with remarkable care and detail in the detention centre’s therapy sessions and which he had shared with us for research purposes:

Jackson his life. When I was little, I grew up in a very poor house, not here in Curaçao but in Santo Domingo. My mother lived in Curaçao and I only got to know her when I was six years. I had contact with my mother on the phone. My grandmother never allowed me to go outside. I didn’t go to school in Santo Domingo and I began to steal and to kill and do other bad things when I was five. Once upon a time my uncle came to the house with blood on his clothes. He changed his clothes and left. I said I wanted to come. He said “no.” Then I began to stamp my feet and became angry because I wanted to come and he said “ok, come along, but make sure you don’t tell grandma what I have done.” Then we went out to kill people. I have learned to do things you can’t believe. I did not know what I was doing. And one time, a couple of big guys had me, I had to suck their penis. I did not know what I was doing. Five big guys. I went to Curaçao when I was seven. When I came here I started school…When I was fooling around with another boy, I cut his hand with scissors, deep into his vein. When I was 9, in 2010, my mother and father began to fight. Later things got better and when I was eleven, I began to steal on Curaçao. In the morning I went out to steal, bikes and money. My mother’s money. My father [his stepfather] forced me on my knees for an hour, every day. Until one day, when I became very angry and started to do worse things. I began stealing from my father. First to buy marbles, to play with marbles… When I was twelve, I stole to buy marijuana. One day, my mother woke up in the night and, I didn’t know what I was doing, she found me having sex with my sister, without me knowing it. When my father found out, he almost killed me. One time I told my brothers “let me play the Nintendo and I’ll give you money,” but they ran to my father telling him I threatened them. My father pushed me in the room and began to bang my head against the wall. He kept doing it until my eyes started bleeding… I stayed home from school for three months because my father had beaten me. Man. My head. My memory was bad… When I was thirteen, my mother and father began to fight again. It got worse, because I was the only one who got up to check what was going on. Once I saw my father hitting my mother with a jar on her head. My mother began to bleed and my father sat down in a chair. My mother took a knife and threw it towards my father and it cut his mouth. My father went outside and grabbed a car mirror to hit my mother. He beat my mother and there was nothing I could do. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t cry… When I was fourteen I started to come home late. In those days my mother and I went out to steal electricity, because my mother couldn’t afford to pay the house, the water and electricity. We lived without water and electricity and I didn’t go to school. I couldn’t go to school all dirty. I couldn’t wash my clothes. We could eat, but there was little food… When my mother left me behind in the house, I left. A friend said “show me how you deal with this guy” and well, I began to fight and joined a gang [this is an abbreviated and translated version of the story that was written in Papiamentu, the local creole language].

Some may question the accuracy of the memory of a 6- or 7-year old, but even if certain things Jackson said are untrue or their authenticity impossible to verify, the important thing is that they belong to the realm of human possibilities in that particular time and place. Jackson’s years in Santo Domingo were confirmed in separate interviews with his mother and with his younger brother and sister, and his descriptions of those years are awfully similar to Wolseth’s (2019), who describes physical and sexual abuse as commonplace in Santo Domingo’s streets. Even if Jackson had projected disturbing street events that involved others onto his own experiences, as if he had gone through things first-hand, they are still part of his biography. No matter what happened, it is clear that Jackson had been caught up in an ugly web of human relations that left him traumatized and confused. “I did not know what I was doing,” he repeated in both life story and interview.

The richness of Jackson su bida contrasted sharply, however, with the difficult interview we had with him. When we had installed ourselves for the interview, we knew that our conversation was not going to be smooth. In the days before the interview, Jackson had tried to dodge us and during the interview he was facing the wall, flatly ignoring our presence. Most of his answers were monosyllabic and the conversation initially resembled the Q&A structure we so desperately tried to avoid. To no avail, we explained that we operated independently and were not part of the penal system. As mentioned above, adult gatekeeping certainly found its way into the narrative blocs via mediated recruitment, JJIC presence during interviews, and communicative routines in the criminal justice system. But the surest way to stifle the conversation was by asking about the positive parenting and thinking programs that the JJIC offered. When this topic entered our conversation, this exchange followed:

interviewer:        If you are getting a child, what…?

Jackson:           I’m going to point him in the right direction. Helping to choose goodfriends.

interviewer:        Que mas?

Jackson:           I don’t want to say.

            I know what to do, to raise a kid in a proper way.

interviewer:        And what stops you from telling me?

Jackson:     Because if I tell you now…and later, when I have a kid and it doesn’t happen that way, I have done it all wrong.

interviewer:       But it’s not a promise.

When he began to fantasize about his own future role as a parent, Jackson simply did not dare to be optimistic. Considering the conditions of his childhood, positive parenting and thinking simply didn’t cross his mind. Moreover, in all its delicacy, this conversational fragment does not only reveal Jackson’s awareness of the weight that society gives to parenting (which we coined parentism); it also shows that a young teenager like him knows full well that the conditions of a childhood are often not of the parents’ own choosing. In the end, he did not blame his mother for a thing in the world: “What I really want now is to live on my own and help my mother. I want to help my mother, because I can’t stand to see what is happening to her. I want a job to help her… and my little brother.”

More generally, when we referred to positive thinking and parenting programs within the JJIC such as Triple P, and asked what sense they made to them, the youth either said nothing or waved them aside as irrelevant. Dwain, for instance, simply said “normal,” speaking indifferently, when we asked him what he thought about all the talk in class regarding being positive in Curaçao.

Conclusions

With this article, we wanted to contribute to a special issue in Ethnography on the ethnographic study of violence in Latin America and the Caribbean (Jones and Rodgers, 2019), centred on the question how to understand different forms of violence retrospectively, that is, ‘after the fact’. We have argued that we consider it a way forward to upscale from subjectively realistic accounts to the intersubjective reconstruction of violent events through family-based narrative blocs. Such blocs (cf. Fontes, 2019) show the complex relationship between event, agency, and the act of narration, and are shaped by people who personally experienced an event as well as those reflecting or reporting on it afterwards. Banking on one of the first urban anthropological studies in the region (Lewis, 1959), our work in Curaçao’s juvenile prison was rooted in the ethnographic tradition of family triangulation to understand how different kin members remember, recount, and refract various forms of violence, and we applied this ‘Rashomon-like technique’ to specific family events or incidents.

We moved beyond Lewis, however, through a second act of triangulation in which we compared the families’ triangulated stories with the bureaucratic case files compiled by the detention centre. In the latter, we saw the same sort of culture-of-poverty theories at work that Lewis was accused of developing; ideas of weak family structures and failing parents deemed incapable of stopping the transmission of intergenerational misery. The counterstories of the families contrasted sharply with the JJIC’s bureaucratic portraits, which reflected the notions of ‘parentism’ and ‘global childhood’ that we critically discussed in the article. Despite our critical stance, though, we somehow allowed these notions to enter our conversations with the youth as well. Whenever they did, silence was the result. Consequently, we became part of the narrative blocs in a way we had neither intended nor wanted: by muting rather than (re)telling Curaçaoan childhood stories. It is clear that intersubjectively realistic accounts of violence demand from ethnographers that they reflect on their own frames of mind.