Volume I Issue 2
which is something that shouldn’t be happening at all.” Numbers are not the issue
considered by the CPI and ProPaz. Taken too seriously, numbers hide an even more dire reality, being the psychological state of victims. Asked about the behavior of mo- lested youth when they arrive at ProPaz, Fonseca offers a disturb- ing description: “Sometimes the victims talk to us, sometimes they don’t. Usually, it takes a while be- fore we can find out something, and it often happens when we ana- lyze the victim playing with toys. They show what happened to them through dolls and puppets.” Iracema Oliveira is a psy-
chologist who works directly with young victims of sexual abuse at ProPaz. She has seen children re- act to abuse in a hundred different ways, making treatment difficult. “It’s impossible to predict what psycho-pathology the victim is go- ing to develop,” Oliveira says. “But it’s widely known that the abuse interferes in some way with be- havior, being anxiety dysfunction, hyper-sexuality, sexual retraction, or something else completely dif- ferent.” Oliveira and Fonseca agree
that pedophilia not only victimizes the child enduring the abuse, but everyone involved in the situation, including, for example, a mother who suddenly finds out that her husband is abusing their kids. “I’ve seen some horrible
scenes here at ProPaz. When the peer review process at ProPaz de-
tects the abuser is, for example, the mother’s companion – say, the child’s step-father – it generates a great impact on the whole family,” says Fonseca. “The flagrant abuse is horrible. The family walks in the room bringing the victim com- pletely naked, yelling and fighting amongst themselves.” Worst of all, says Fonseca,
is when the mother stands against her own child, in favor of the abus- er. “I have heard mothers say that due to the love of their husbands, they would never leave them, so the child has had to leave the home. In many cases, the mother is not only emotionally dependent on her companion, but also financially dependent.” This balance of pow- er means that the abuser is more important to the mother than the child.
Iracema Oliveria is accus-
tomed to dealing everyday day with victims of sexual abuse, and she often uses real-life cases in her classes, as she is also a university teacher. But there have been cases so heinous that she refuses to ex- plain them to her students. Oliv- eria tells Dispatches International about one of these cases, in the hopes of raising awareness about the issue. “There was a boy that was
abused by his father for as long as he could remember. He had tried for all his life to tell everyone about it, but nobody believed in him,” Oli- veria tells me. As she speaks, tears begin to fall from her eyes. “His family used to say he was a ‘nasty
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