Brazil’s Statute of the Child and Adolescent turns 36 years old
On Monday (Jul. 13), Brazil celebrated the 36th anniversary of the law that established the Statute of the Child and Adolescent, popularly known as ECA. The date marks the beginning of a week dedicated to the piece of legislation and encourages debates on public policies aimed at children and adolescents.
The ECA was one of the first laws passed after the 1988 constitution and enshrined the principle of absolute priority for the protection of children and adolescents. In some situations, certain measures may extend until the age of 21.
“Thanks to the ECA, we are able to view children and adolescents as rights-holders,” said social worker Andressa Ferreira Cândido, who works at the Paraná State Secretariat of Justice and Citizenship, where she organizes reading clubs for adolescents who are being held in the state’s socio-educational system.
According to the expert, the 36th anniversary of the ECA is cause for celebration. Since its creation, Brazil has reduced infant mortality, made access to elementary school universal, improved adoption regulations, and established a national network of child protection councils elected by the public.
Achievements and gaps
However, the journey toward ensuring that all the rights of children and adolescents are guaranteed remains incomplete, notes Maurício Cunha, executive president of ChildFund Brasil, a US-based NGO whose mission is to support kids in socially vulnerable situations.
“There have been major advances, but when we look at the challenges, we see they have also grown significantly,” he pointed out.
“We’re not making as much progress as we should. For example, take the issue of the budget for children and adolescents – the budget allocated to children is not being monitored. We are unable to measure how much is actually being invested in children and adolescents, because these funds are spread across various categories – health care, social work, and education,” noted Cunha, who specializes in public policy and advocates for expanding access to daycare centers. “One-third of children still do not have access to daycare.”
Setbacks and risks on the digital realm
According to the president of ChildFund Brasil, in addition to the fact that some steps toward implementing the rights enshrined in the ECA have not yet been taken, there have been setbacks and serious new risks, such as exposure to violence, sexual abuse, and bullying.
“There is one area where I believe we have taken a step backward: violence – physical, psychological, or sexual. I say it because the internet emerged during this period. You have hundreds of thousands of criminals browsing the web, creating pedophile networks, accessing websites, exchanging images, and posing as children.”
In his view, “the recently enacted Digital ECA points the way toward improvement. It holds great potential for improvement by holding big tech companies accountable, by imposing mechanisms like age verification. So it’s a significant step forward.”
“The Digital ECA,” he goes on to say, “needs to be better regulated. For example, we still don’t know how these age-verification mechanisms should work.”
Age of criminal responsibility
In addition to the challenges of the online world, Brazil still faces historical problems, such as the involvement of adolescents in criminal acts and their subsequent placement in the socio-educational system – as well as the debate over lowering the age of criminal responsibility from the current 18 to 16, as proposed in one of the bills currently before Congress. “The system is costly. For a boy to end up in that situation, to reach that point, is a failure of society,” he said.
Murício Cunha states that “it would be more important to implement effective public policies, strengthen families’ protective capacities, and focus on prevention so that a boy does not have to face any form of incarceration.”
Social worker Andressa Ferreira Cândido argues that the socio-educational system, under the state’s responsibility, “has a structure of deprivation of liberty not unlike the prison system.”
She finds it strange that anyone would advocate for the imprisonment of adolescents and the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility. These 16- and 17-year-olds, she says, run the risk of being recruited by criminal gangs within the general prison system itself.
