This article integrates a longitudinal study, exploring links between a life story determined by daily confrontation of domestic and urban violence and the personal culture of a 14-year-old boy, the second of three children of a matrifocal family. The study was based on semi-structured interviews, made in different periods of the boy’s life. In the analysis, a process of social construction of the involvement with violence (in the condition of victim or agent) is characterized, emphasizing the immediate social context structured by adverse situations such as poverty, intra-family and social conflicts and, specifically, violence; this would, finally, create what we could call an 'ecology that propitiates violent acts'.
development; adolescence in cultural context; violence