Violência sexual contra as crianças e os adolescentes : tessitura de repercussões sociais e judiciais

Abstract

The focus of this research was the issue of violence against children and adolescents. Violence is a historical and social concept that is deeply marked by culture, leading to divergences in its definition and also in its treatment. The theme circulates in a plurality of spaces - private places, circles of friends, TV programs, social networks, institutions, and courts - where attempts and appeals for the prevention and punishment of violent acts also circulate. One of these paths is the Special Testimony, a practice sanctioned in Brazil in 2017, for hearing children and adolescents who are victims or witnesses of violence. In the approval of that law, a case at the time was used as a justification for the urgency of its approval. As a methodological approach, we sought to achieve the central objective to understand how the arguments and understandings about sexual violence against children and adolescents appear in two environments of social interaction: cyberspace and the judicial sphere. To this end, two articles were prepared, using Juridical Social Psychology as theoretical support articulated with authors from the field of literature that deal with trauma in the judiciary. The first article sought to capture the impact of sexual violence against children and adolescents in the manifestations of internet users, understanding that this expression denotes sociocultural ways of dealing with this type of violence. Thus, 469 publications of personal profiles of the social network Twitter that spoke about a case of sexual violence against children with national repercussions in Brazil were collected. The second article apprehend how sexual violence against children and adolescents and the testimony about trauma are approached in the processes that use the technique of special testimony, focusing on the documentary analysis of 21 jurisprudences of the Tribunal de Justiça de Minas Gerais. In both articles, content analysis was chosen as a strategy for processing the data obtained. Similarities were found in the two environments researched: the persistent seek for a culprit; the appeal for the judicialization of the protection of children and adolescents culminating in social pressure; sentenced for guilt and incarceration; predilection for objectivity and agility in solving the issue and responsibility of children and adolescents. Psychology professionals should pay attention to the clamor of guilt and punitivism before creating and entering into practices that endorse these speeches. In both analyzes, it is considered that it will not be through a court decision or the creation of new legislation that we will be able to respond to these subjective demands that appear on social media. It is understood that these spaces make up the same social reality in different facets and, therefore, what happens in the judicial court and the virtual court is not just an isolated case but reflects a society affected by violence and its social and legal paths.