University of São Paulo: Prevention is a remedy to combat child violence within the family
Ohe data on child violence in Brazil is frightening and is not new. In the first half of 2021, at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, violence against children and adolescents reached the number of 50,098 complaints on Dial 100 of the National Human Rights Ombudsman, with 81% of this total occurring in the victim’s family environment and predominantly practiced by the mother, followed by the father, stepfather or stepmother and other family members in the child’s life. Working with prevention is the best answer to combat violence against children and adolescents. This is what defends the specialist professor in Child Development, Maria Beatriz Martins Linhares, from the Faculty of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto (FMRP) at USP.
She explains that, in the context of the pandemic, with isolation and social distancing, closing of schools and many health services, there was an aggravation of violence in the family environment, making children more vulnerable and unprotected. “A study carried out during the pandemic with caregivers of children up to 3 years old, from the five regions of Brazil, showed that 67% of parents reported using some type of negative parenting practice with the child, such as yelling, shaking or spanking. , grab her by the arm or call her stupid or boring”, she says.
Professor Maria Beatriz introduced the American Psychological Association program (ACT – To Educate Children in a Safe Environment) in Brazil ten years ago, recommended by the World Health Organization. “It was the first randomized controlled study carried out in Brazil, with the support of Fapesp, by a doctoral student at USP, Elisa Rachel Pisani Altafim, who to this day works with me, in partnership, developing several studies on ACT. It is a universal violence prevention program against children, strengthening parenting with positive discipline to improve parents’ communication with children, as well as help with emotional and behavioral regulation.”
Currently, as an important development, the ACT is applied on a large scale in 24 cities in the State of Ceará, with the coordination of teachers Maria Beatriz and Elisa Altafim and the support of the Maria Cecília Souto Vidigal, Bernard Van Leer and Porticus Foundations and the partnership of the State of Ceará and the municipal governments. “The project is very important for the prevention of violence in the family environment, for the control of anger, which has a direct relationship with aggression and punishment, and its application is scientifically based on several studies that we have developed over ten years”, he explains. .
Maria Beatriz says that ACT is a social technology that is effective and that it is necessary to establish a bridge between researchers and public managers. “This approach can help break the vicious intergenerational cycle of violence in families to a greater extent.” The project is a call to action in order to work with qualified training, nucleation of local teams and implementation with fidelity and quality in a public system for child care, with the aim of preventing violence through positive parenting ” , she says. In this way, scientific evidence can be transferred to practice on a large scale with sustainability. The implementation of the ACT in Ceará intends to be a model to be deployed to other states in the country. For that,
Violence against children
The teacher says that violence against children is a serious risk factor for their child development and can occur both in public or private environments and in the family environment and that, in this context, it is quite worrying, because it involves various forms such as: sexual violence, physical abuse, psychological violence, screaming threats, neglect and abandonment. A series of conditions that violate the psychological integrity of the child. “In addition to these factors, the child is both a victim and a witness when there is intimate partner violence in the environment. These multiple risk factors threaten their behavior, with a negative impact on their development in the short, medium and long term.”
Maria Beatriz recalls that the Brazilian Public Security Forum warns that violence against children can lead to the main crimes provided for in laws, such as: intentional violent deaths, abuse, abandonment, bodily harm and willful mischief, pornography, sexual exploitation, rape . “Which shows us that we have to pay attention to the issue of violence in order to prevent it to avoid more serious outcomes.”
According to a survey by Unicef, the UN arm that works to guarantee the rights of children and adolescents in the world, about 19 children die victims of violence every day in Brazil alone. Between 2016 and 2020, 35,000 children were killed in the country, an average of 7,000 per year. According to Professor Maria Beatriz, “between 2017 and 2020, according to Unicef, 180,000 children suffered some type of sexual violence in the country, an average of 45,000 per year”.
The teacher recalls that there are several laws that protect children, such as the Federal Constitution, the Statute of Children and Adolescents (ECA), the Legal Framework for Early Childhood (Law No. Spanking (Law No. 13,010), Henry Borel’s Law (No. 14,344), among others. “But laws need to be transformed into effective actions that allow dealing with the issue of violence head-on, creating prevention systems focused on early childhood in an intersectoral network in health, education, social protection and the legal area. Violence is preventable against children, especially with regard to strengthening positive, non-violent parenting.”