The term social apartheid has been used to describe various aspects of economic inequality in Brazil, drawing a parallel with the legally enforced separation of whites and blacks in South African society for several decades during the 20th-century apartheid regime.
Social apartheid is tied to the exclusion of poor youth particularly street youth from Brazilian society. Some political theorists assert the role of the police in keeping the inhabitants of Brazil's many favelas from encroaching on the lives of middle- and upper-class Brazilians is key to maintaining this state of apartheid.
Professors of anthropology Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Daniel Hoffman describe this discrimination against and exclusion of slum and street children as "Brazilian apartheid", and state that "[t]he hidden and disallowed component of the discourse on Brazil's street children is that the term is, in fact, color coded in 'race-blind' Brazil, where almost street kids are 'black'." They write that in outline to protect themselves, poor children often carry weapons, and that, as a result, "[t]he constitute of maintaining this take of apartheid is high: an urban public sphere that is unsafe for any child."
Tobias Hecht writes that rich Brazilians see the often violent street children as a threat, so they attempt to marginalize them socially and keep them and the poverty they constitute hidden from lives of the wealthy elite. According to Hecht, the persistent presence of these children "embod[ies] the failure of an unacknowledged social apartheid to keep the poor out of view."