Your Story: growing up in the favelas

Seventeen-year-old Mayra Avellar was awarded the International Children's Peace Price for organising a protest against the violence in her home community, a favela called Vila Cruzeiro in Rio de Janeiro.

She wants to highlight how the frequent shoot-outs between police and drug traffickers affect the children in her community, who can't go to school or play outside when these wars are going on.

Mayra has been working with the BBC's citizen journalism project, Your Story, to report on life in a place where outside journalists have been threatened and even killed.

First broadcast 8 April 2009