Violence towards children in Norway- what to learn from Brazil

The current discussion about violence against children in Norway is an issue all too familiar to Brazilian society and politics. But the image of the unattended child, visible in the streets of the big cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo that has figured as the ultimate symbol of social suffering and negligence in Brazil, is really not so unique.

If we go beyond the immediate symbolic image that the abandoned child represents in terms of a future in jeopardy, we find that the processes of marginalization and exclusion of some of the citizens, in this case children and adolescents, are not limited to the geographical area of Brazil and Latin-America. They are relevant to understand processes of exclusion found in Norway as well, something which in it’s ultimate expressions leads to violence towards children and death by the hands of adults.

In Norway, there seems to be a dominant focus on violence against children and adolescents as individualized criminal acts that are morally distasteful and condemned, which is a reasonable approach. But in Brazil, where the most severe cases have demonstrated that children living in the streets have been executed presumably by police officers, the question of equality and human rights has been central topics of discussion. This approach opens up a perspective where violence itself is a consequence of other processes in addition to being a deviant criminal act. Could this perspective be useful in a Norwegian context? I believe so.

If we treat violence as an extreme expression of marginalization and abuse of power, as the ultimate expression on a continuum of marginalization and exclusion, I believe that the questions we need to ask in Norway is in what circumstances are children and adolescents being neglected and marginalized, whom are these children, and when where their human rights being violated for the first time? I fear that we will find that in many (no, not all) cases we could see that those suffering from violence had their legal and moral rights infringed long time before the actual incidence of violence. And for some reason we let it happen.

I am not advocating a paradigmatic shift in the effort to reduce violence towards children and adolescents. What I am trying to say, is that when working with violence we should also add the perspective of structural marginalization and exclusion in society. This will help us to perceive violence as an expression of other concerns in society, like poverty as marginalizing processes and other forms of inequality where rights of the individual are being infringed. I am not in favor of adopting the concept of violence in all kinds of violation of legal and human rights, but I do see that it is a part of a continuum.

So, the conclusion is that even though Norwegain and Brazilian academics may seem to approach the concept of violence somewhat differently, valuable perspectives could be developed by collaboration between our academic traditions. Because we are both dealing with real life experiences involving acts that are experienced by individuals who live in societies that, through law, are entitled to protect all their citizens.