Why are certain deaths deemed unworthy of grief?

After decades of enduring pervasive urban violence, violence has become normalised in poor neighbourhoods in Brazil’s metropolitan cities.

In analysing how residents try to protect themselves from violence in practical and moral terms, Marie Kolling elucidates how victims of violent crime and their mothers are not deemed worthy of grief. Instead, a common communal response is to socially exclude the dead and their grieving kin in an effort to detach oneself, and one’s reputation, from the violence and immoral behaviour.

Young people’s bad conduct is attributed to the way in which they were raised, to a mother’s failure to fulfil the responsibilities of caring. The mothers of victims of homicide therefore often find themselves alone in their struggles and subject to gossip, which intensify their experience of blame for their loss.