Little shocks us as much as hearing news of violence against children. We stop what we are doing, think of our own children, remember the young we have watched grow up, and attempt to come to terms with the cruelty involved in hurting those with little or no way to defend themselves. Outraged by the horror humanity is capable of inflicting on those it should protect, we ask ourselves the all too familiar questions: “how could this happen?”, “how could they?”, “how could anyone be so cruel?”. The answer is as troubling as the questions: humanity is perfectly capable of neglecting, hurting, violating and killing children. The politics of death – defined by the Cameroonian thinker and historian Achille Mbembe as necropolitics – makes no exception for children, choosing between those it grants the right to life and social protection, and those it considers os matáveis, or the “killable”. Mere consternation, however, helps no one. Instead, we must confront the ways in which today’s Brazil neglects and fails to protect its children, leaving them vulnerable. An analysis of President Jair Bolsonaro’s almost four years in power reveal the contempt with which the philosophies that guide his government treat the lives of many Brazilian children. Urgent action is required if such children are not to remain matáveis for another four years.
The well-being of children is established as a priority in Article 227 of the Brazilian Constitution, which states that “it is the duty of the family, society and the State to guarantee children, adolescents and young people, with absolute priority, the right to life, health, food, education, leisure, professional training, culture, dignity, respect, freedom and family and community life, in addition to protecting them from all forms of negligence, discrimination, exploitation, violence, cruelty and oppression.”
Violent acts against children are appalling. Representatives of national institutions have been responsible for murder, sexual violence, and abusive, violating forms of coercion, such as when a judge asked an 11-year-old girl, made pregnant by rape, if she could endure her condition a little longer so that the child could be born, avoiding an abortion.
A question we must ask ourselves, then, is what is being done in terms of effective policies against sexual violence, which, according to the Liberta Institute, is suffered by four girls an hour in Brazil.
When we consider that 76.5% of crimes of sexual violence take place within the victim’s family, it is important to consider the fundamental role schools play in this process. The sex education that can and must take place in schools is a powerful weapon in the fight against the sexual exploitation of girls and boys. Clouding this debate with the empty, counter-scientific argument known as “gender ideology”, or claiming that talking about sex with children makes them victims, simply perpetuates violence against young people. By refusing them information and a safe space in which to discuss such matters, they are denied the possibility of independence, ensuring they will continue to be subjected to abuse. The data suggests only 10% of cases of sexual violence against children and adolescents are reported.
Violence against children takes many forms, one of which is the deliberate negligence that prevents access to basic rights, as demonstrated by the tragic deaths of children from the indigenous Yanomami tribe. The children, who suffered from intestinal worms, could have been saved by simple medical treatment, but in the area where they live, illegally invaded by prospectors, the necessary medicine was lacking. As a result, the children were forced to vomit up the worms – and of the nine who died from common illnesses between July and early September, two died in such a manner.
The case, which was featured in the first edition of SUMAÚMA, reveals how deliberate acts of negligence, carried out by a government that chooses to protect only some of Brazil’s children while leaving others vulnerable, threaten specific populations. Such negligence, however, affects all Brazilian children – not only the victims of inequality determined by social markers of race, class, gender and disability, but those who could be considered protected by the privilege of access to rights. No one can live well in a country that neglects to care for its people.
In recent years, Brazil has suffered a sweeping dismantling of the protection and care policies that were being constructed through democratic debate and agreement. Recent reports, while they do not reveal the full extent of the harm done, depict the staggering scale of the effects of a reduction in public investment on children’s lives.
In the area of health, a survey on falling immunization levels in Brazil, carried out by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, shows how a lack of protection for some can affect everyone. This year, three out of five Brazilian children aged under five are unprotected against polio, a disease that can cause infantile paralysis. According to Bernardo Yoneshigue, a reporter for the Folha de São Paulo newspaper, “the data worries experts, who believe there is a real possibility of the virus returning to Brazil, as to keep polio under control, 95% of the target population must be immunized. In 2021, however, only 69.9% of people were protected.” According to the National Immunization Program Information System, the last time Brazil reached such a goal was in 2015, the year before the impeachment of the then president Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers’ Party. Additionally, in 2019 Brazil lost its measles eradication certificate, issued by the Pan American Health Organization.
In education, the UNICEF report “Brazilian Education in 2022 – the Voice of Adolescents”, states that 11 out of 100 Brazilians aged 11 to 19 are not in school in 2022, and that almost half of those who have left did so to work and support their families. The Brazil that put an ever-increasing number of its young people in the classroom is a fading memory. Just as troubling is the finding that access to school does not mean access to the fundamental right to education. This same report shows that, of those still in school, 21% have thought about dropping out in the last three months, and that half of such students cited difficulty in understanding explanations or activities in the classroom as the reason. In order to calculate the increase in the school dropout rate, it is also important to include children aged 4 to 10 years who are in school but are similarly unable to learn and who, therefore, are at genuine risk of having their school life interrupted.
In public security, the sense of segregation is clear. According to the Brazilian Public Security Forum, in 2021, the murder rate of children and adolescents living in the Amazon region was 34.3% higher than the already alarming national average of 8.7 violent deaths per 100,000 people aged 0 to 19 years. There is also a clearly visible racial inequality: 66.3% of such murder victims are black, compared to 31.3% who are white. Among teenagers, the proportion of black victims jumps to a staggering 83.6%.
Child abuse caused by deliberate negligence is further evidenced by the fact that the federal budget for the purchase of school lunches has not increased since 2017, while accumulated inflation in a similar period (from September 2017 to September 2022) was 31.26%. It has long been the case that many Brazilian children depend on school meals to meet their daily food needs. In August this year, however, a proposed increase for 2023 was again vetoed by the government.
The policy decisions of the Bolsonaro government show that inaction, rather than action, is all that is needed to neglect Brazil’s children. Eliana Sousa Silva, director of Redes da Maré, a social support network based in some of Rio de Janeiro’s biggest favelas, explained to me how state neglect makes certain populations vulnerable. A government that protects its children does not let them starve to death. Yet according to data from the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutrition Sovereignty and Security (widely known as the Penssan Network, after its acronym in Portuguese), more than 65 million Brazilians are currently going hungry. A survey by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, meanwhile, shows that, between 2019 and 2021, the number of people unable to eat in Brazil was higher than the global average. The Nexo newspaper, when analyzing public policies, showed “the percentage of households with children under 10 years of age experiencing severe food insecurity practically doubled from 2020 to 2022, from 9.4% to 18.1%. In houses with three or more people up to 18 years old, the number rises to 25.7%.”
The gravity of the situation is clear even before mentioning cuts in leisure, access to culture, or mental health promotion. Many in the field of social care and, especially, in party politics, believe – or, at least, try to make us believe they believe – that they are dedicated to the protection of children. But committing to care for each Brazilian child requires much more than charitable speeches. It is like the African proverb that was repeated endlessly during the social and health crisis that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic: “it takes a whole village to raise a child”. But the proverb can also be read the other way around: without caring for the village, the child will be neglected.
An example of this can be seen in the case of Ilza Maria Assunção and her nineteen-year-old son, Breno dos Reis Gomes de Assunção, found dead in their home in Uberlândia, on October 13, 2021. According to press reports, Ilza had a heart condition and had likely taken ill. Breno, who was quadriplegic, could neither help his mother nor survive without her care. They both died, alone and in pain, because there was no village around them, or in other words, no social safety net. Tragic cases such as these show that action, rather than mere words, is required if we are to bring an end to violence against children. We cannot take care of a child without offering them a world that encourages life – their own, the lives of those close to them, and the lives of others.
The harsh reality, however, is that in a country where almost half the heads of families are female, the economic crisis aggravated by the pandemic disproportionately affected women. Data from the previously mentioned survey from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation indicate that, in addition to causing 4.6 million more Brazilians to fall below the poverty line, the pandemic increased the number of women living in a state of food insecurity by 14%. “As a result, the gender gap in food insecurity in 2021 is six times greater in Brazil than the global average,” states the report, pointing out that as women are more likely to care for children, the situation has consequences for the future of Brazil: child malnutrition leaves permanent physical and mental marks.
The Bolsonaro government’s demonstrably deliberate negligence in managing the COVID-19 pandemic has so far left more than 680,000 dead in Brazil, resulting in a great many sons and daughters and thousands of grandsons and granddaughters without those that care for them and protect them, exposing them to early loss and grief. According to The Lancet, between March 2020 and April 2021, at least 130,363 Brazilian children and adolescents up to the age of 17 were orphaned. Between March 2020 and September 2021, more than 12,000 children aged six or younger were registered as orphans in Brazil. Among these, 25.6% had not yet turned one by the time they lost their father and/or mother. These numbers make us question the oft-repeated theory that children were the population group least affected by COVID-19. Orphaned children are victims of the so-called “hidden” pandemic, which in reality is in plain sight.
There is more to come. On June 6, 2021, Brazil became the country with the second most COVID-19 deaths among children in the world. On October 14, however, President Jair Bolsonaro, in his reelection campaign, said “the kids” couldn’t die from the disease, denying his own government’s official data, which states that 2,500 children and adolescents under 17 died from the virus. Brazil’s far right president states that such data, provided by his own Ministry of Health, was falsified. As usual, there is no evidence to back this up. Back in the real world, however, caring for bereaved families and protecting orphaned children demands effective government policies and a functioning social protection network. It is for this reason that Maria Thereza Marcílio, president of AVANTE, a social support NGO based in the city of Salvador, sums it up neatly when she says that “a child’s place is in the national budget”.
Nor can the issue of race be ignored when discussing Brazil’s orphaned children. Research carried out by the Solidarity Research Network and the Institute for Studies, Education and Assistance in Political Sciences (known as the Pólis Institute, after its acronym in Portuguese) report that the COVID-19 death rate was higher among black people in Brazil than among their white counterparts. Therefore, the pandemic was not democratic, as was initially claimed. In fact, the Bolsonaro government’s deliberate negligence in managing the crisis has reproduced and amplified social and racial inequalities. At the base of the labor pyramid, a category which includes domestic workers, the numbers reveal what we already know: “Not only do black women have a greater chance of dying from COVID-19 than white men in practically all unskilled occupations, but they are also more likely to die than white women”.
The violence revealed by such data also demonstrates the children the Bolsonaro government chooses not to protect: most often, those of black women such as Cleonice Gonçalves, who worked as a maid in the wealthy Rio de Janeiro neighborhood of Leblon and who was one of the first victims of COVID in Brazil. Cleonice died because she was denied the possibility of social isolation and continued to serve her boss, who failed to tell her she had COVID-19. How many other women were prevented from taking care of their own children and home, just so their bosses could dedicate themselves to “home-office”, an English term adopted in Brazil and which, through its imported status, indicates the social class and ethnic grouping which it serves? With schools closed, these women’s children were either left helpless or protected only by the informal care practices of what many consider the peripheral regions of Brazilian society, which, abandoned by their government, seek their own ways to survive.
Some hope has emerged in the form of a bill proposed by Alexandre Padilha, a member of congress for the Worker’s Party, which proposes a comprehensive care policy for victims and families of victims of the COVID-19 pandemic, incorporating the entire social protection network (health, education and social care). Yet although it was approved by the Congressional Education Committee in June 2022, the proposed bill has made sluggish progress, and requires approval by two more committees before reaching the Senate. Questions must be asked as to why the bill has not yet been approved, leaving Brazil’s orphaned children and adolescents still unprotected.
Perhaps the answers are related to the reasons that led Brazil’s government to cut 90% of funding allocated to the Ministry of Women, Children and Human Rights to combat violence against women, 80% of the investment earmarked for the construction of daycare centers and preschools (from 2018 to today) and 45% of the budget allocated to the treatment of cancer, the second most deadly disease in Brazil, which kills both children and those who take care of them.
How children are treated by government policy is an indicator of how the State provides care and promotes social justice. In this respect, the Brazil of recent years has failed. As a researcher in the field of childhood, I have supported Bruna Silva, whose son Marcos Vinícius was shot and killed in a police operation in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, in her battle against the effects of necropolitics, the policies that choose which children are worthy of protection and which will be left to die. The last words of her son, who was just fourteen when he died, were “Mom, didn’t they see I was wearing school uniform?” Not even the most obvious and universal marks of childhood, such as a school uniform, were able to save him from the bullets of the state security forces. According to the Fogo Cruzado Institute the police killed 47 children in the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area between 2016 to 2022, while another 87 were hit by stray bullets, which always seem to find the same black bodies. On September 26, a few days before the first round of the Brazilian elections, 53-year-old José Henrique da Silva, known as Careca, was one of seven people killed in another police operation carried out in the favelas of Maré. Careca had been a witness to Marcos Vinícius’s death, and his murder meant a key part of the boy’s story vanished forever, violating the right of Marcos Vinícius and his family to both memory and justice. These two deaths, in their reproduction of injustice among both children and adults, also make a victim of Brazil, weakening any sense of citizenship.
When I received news of Careca’s death, it was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. On this occasion, we Jews wish each other shanah tovah u’metukah, Hebrew for “a good and sweet year”. It is unlikely, however, that many Brazilians who dream and fight for social justice will experience a “good and sweet” start to the year.
Marcos Vinícius, Careca and the hunger that disproportionately affects women expose different dimensions of the horror to which we are all subjected. It is especially difficult, under such conditions, to justify the discourse of Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters, who claim to stand up for the family, when so many children have become os matáveis, leaving every childhood unprotected. Their mothers, already condemned to sadness and injustice, will once more feel a terrible emptiness.
The first round of the presidential elections revealed that 51 million Brazilians, when choosing Bolsonaro at the polls, also voted for the policy of death. Another 5.4 million, by casting null or blank votes, withdrew themselves from the lives of their country’s children. The same could be said of the almost 33 million who did not vote at all. It is, however, worth remembering the case of Ana Mirtes, who was unable to vote as she had to choose between paying the bus fare that would take her to the polling station in São Paulo, or feeding her 10-year-old son. Ana Mirtes, who said she would have voted for Lula, opted for her son and, thus, had her right to choose who will take care of her children in the future taken away, a snapshot of what Brazil’s matáveis have undergone in recent years. The results of the second-round run-off, on October 30, will define the destiny of Brazilian children. And it will define us, the adults who choose what type of government will take care of them.
