Child punishment, a wall of silence

According to a recent study by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, children in Latin America are often subject to maltreatment, and the majority of parents think it is normal to use physical punishment or demoralizing psychological punishment for disciplining children.

The Unicef research was carried out in 16 countries across Latin America, but did not include Brazil. The NGO Promundo, based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has however, released a study on that very topic: a consultation of children in a community in Rio de Janeiro that shows that punishment is also part of Brazilian culture.

“The problem is that this type of punishment is not efficient in setting limits. It has very different results. Physical punishment – from slaps and pinches to the use of objects in an escalating rate of aggression - or psychological reprimands used to demoralize children – from shouting, to depreciative comments, to locking a child in a bathroom or outside the home- none of this works to change behavior,” said Isadora Garcia, one of the three authors of the paper "Consulta com crianças sobre castigo físico e humilhante: relato de uma experiência" (or Consulting children on physical and humiliating punishment: a case report) along with Marianna Olinger and Simone Gomes.

“The fact is that punishment creates trauma, it can lead children to become withdrawn, or, in the case of extroverted children, may lead them to direct violence at others. The most damaging effect is to create a connection between violence and affection, it becomes a negative legacy that will remain for the rest of one’s life,” said Garcia.

The Promundo study focused specifically on the point of view of children. The authors interviewed children who live at the Cancela Preta community, a working class neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro’s western area. The study’s goal was to deconstruct beliefs about child development related to to what is often seen as a lesser form of violence.

Children and adolescents are under the protection of the Convention on the Rights of the Child enacted by the UN in 1989 and Brazil’s own progressive Statute of the Rights of the Child and Adolescent enacted the following year.  But daily life is still somewhat distant from the guarantees promised to this new legal subject of rights. An important step taken to recognize the issue was the United Nations landmark global study on Violence Against Children, lead by Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, UN Special Rapporteur, and a researcher of São Paulo University’s Center for the Study of Violence (NEV-USP), issued in 2006.

To make violence against children visible

“There is a wall of silence on the issue of domestic violence against children, what we saw in the study is that it is hidden, unreported and under-recorded” Pinheiro told Comunidad Segura at when the report was released. “The report is here to help break down these barriers and make the violence visible,” said Pinheiro.

The UN report was the first step in calling on governments and civil society around the world to break down this wall of silence, and make the violence visible. One important part in the process, according the UN study, is to consult the children themselves.

The study of the Cancela Preta community heard 65 children age five to 12, split into two age brackets – 36 five to eight year olds (23 boys and 13 girls) and 29 children age nine to 12 (16 boys and 13 girls).

The families of the children interviewed earned na average of one to five minimum salaries (from approximately 250 US dollars to 1250 US dollars). Researchers contacted members of the community through the Resident’s Association and the federal government’s Family Health Program.

“The fact the children’s parents accepted us was very important, and in itself an accomplishment of the study. In general it is easier to establish contact with worker’s communities than in middle class settings,” said Isadora Garcia (photo). “Whenever we approach mothers and fathers on this topic we are prepared to encounter some resistance. Either parents think that the kind of violence we are discussing is normal and of no great consequence, or they find it hard to examine their own practices from this angle, as to how they effectively discipline their children,” Garcia said.

Non-verbal expression

According to the Convention on the Rights of the Child children, cited in the study, children have the “right to express their views in all matters affecting them and requires that those views be heard and given due weight in accordance with the child's age and maturity.”

“Children are not incomplete adults, they make up their minds and are agents in their social world. Every child brings about change in their families when they are born, for example. We need to take into consideration the different ways in which they express themselves. They use elements of non verbal language to communicate with others,” said Garcia.

The study adopted a methodology developed by Cláudia Leão, an art teacher at Rio de Janeiro's Tear Institute, children's were encouraged to express themselves through included games, drawings, art work and puppets that would talk to the kids. Puppets would ask them about human families, for example. All meetings with children were held in groups and always in the presence of an adult they knew.

Children don't like physical punishment, but accept it

“From what the children said, we noted that they feel offended by physical punishment and psychological punishment that is humiliating. Children feel impotent and unable to return it in kind, and it builds up resentment. We were surprized nevertheless to find that children do however, accept such punishments , and more, that they can see themselves using the same violence on other children, on siblings, and in the future, even on imaginary children,” said Garcia.

The fact that children accept and even reproduce physical punishment does not mean that children cannot interpret the experience to their own ends. “I think being grounded is worst. Say you get a beating, but then you are back outside. But when you are grounded it is not like that. You are stuck without doing anything. I myself once was punished made to stay inside for a month, I could not even be seen by the entrance,” said one of the girls interviewed for the study.

Isadora also believes that physical and humiliating punishment's effect on memory is selective. When stretching over a long period of time, the punishment is recalled for much longer than the behaviour that prompted it. “What children remember, what they effectively learn is that violence and affection are connected,” said Garcia.

Still according to the study, such disciplinary practices are passed down from one generation to the next. In the majority of the cases, the study found, it is the children's mothers who use physical or humiliating punishment, since they are the ones who spend most time with the children.
“My parents don't listen to me”

When asked about how they participate in the family, children had a common complaint: that their parents rarely listened to them. What children reported as dialogue in the family, as it quickly became apparent to the researchers, consisted of an asymetric conversation in which the parents' speech consisted mainly of requests, orders and instructions, in an authoritarian posture, and one that was unsatisfactory for the children interviewed.

A five year-old boy cited in the study explains: “my mother tells me off sitting down. Every day I come in and she does not listen to me. Then my mother goes off to the kitchen whenever I talk to her. She listens to me more or less.”

The complaints become more pointed when children are sad: the majority do not go to their mothers in an attempt to be heard, and “when asked, all the children consulted said they were very sad and angry that their parents did not listen to them,” said the study.

Girls would have liked to be boys...

Although it was not the goal of the study, children brought up their concerns with restrictions on gender behaviour spontaneously. Boys reported that although they knew for example, that boys are allowed to cry, they should not it “because I am macho (male)”.

Girls were uncomfortable with the restrictions to their freedom to come and go, and way of dressing. “Unlike the boys, who can shave their heads and play outside in the streets, I cannot wear just any skirt and do whatever I like to my hair” was one complaint heard often. Many said that they would like to be “men”, but no boy said he would like to be a “woman”.

Children unanymously agreed that they would all like to spend more time with their parents, and that the worst punishments were those that make them stop playing. “Our consultations with children will not end here, of course, the next step is to make techniques of positive discipline known among parents, techniques that do not involve violence against defenseless children,” said Isadora. The unequal balance of power between children and adults is eventually grown out of, but what remains is the kind of relationship that has been built

Read Further:

Exclusive interview with Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, on launching the UN Study on Violence against Children.

 The United Nations landmark 2006 report on Violence Against Children is available here: www.violencestudy.org