Dispatches International
volve children or adolescents. But it is all too common to find underage prostitutes in the streets. “Many times the police will bring child prostitutes to the ProPaz office. Sometimes the children have been forced into prostitution by their own parents,” says Fonseca. “Usu- ally when those kids arrive, they are afraid of telling us anything. They do not say who put them in that condition or where they are lo- cated.”
Fonseca reveals that many
children involved in prostitution are threatened and thus they be- come afraid of ending their work as prostitutes or denouncing their abusers. “I’ve witnessed a case of a mother that slept every night in front of a night club downtown. She said to me that she did that because she knew her 13-year-old daughter was in there, prostituting and using drugs.” Psychologists say that the
victims of sexual abuse in child- hood don’t normally reproduce such behavior in adulthood. “It’s a myth. A child victim of sexual abuse will not necessarily become an abuser, because victims usually become militant in the cause to bring pedophiles to justice,” says Oliveira, whose experience shows in fact that shame-derived silence has been the most common reac- tion amongst sexually abused indi- viduals. “One of my students at the university told me one day she had been victim of sexual abuse by her father when she was a child, but she had never told anyone about it.
22
I was so shocked I didn’t know how to react.” But there are cases that in-
dicate that traumatic experiences when a child is young can provoke at least unusual behavior and lead, in some cases, to sexual and psy- chological disorders. “When [my brother-in-law] was just a 10-year- old, he found his mother dead, by a river, with a palm stem stuck in her genitals,” says the mother of M. – the five-year-old abused by her uncle – about the man that abused her daughters. Back in the offices of ProPaz,
Eugenia Fonseca seems more sad than tired, since memories bring back all the suffering of her pa- tients, which she has had to calmly grapple with in each of the cases she is responsible for. “We always think as if the abuse were happen- ing to ourselves. Many times we ac- tually are very paranoid, because it is a very stressful and emotionally charged environment we face every single day,” she says, trying not to let her emotions show. “You know, I have kids and
grandchildren, and I am always afraid that a monstrosity like sexu- al abuse can happen to them,” Fon- seca says. “That’s why my whole family is always keeping an eye on them.”
As soon as she stops speak-
ing, she holds her breath slightly, not letting tears stream from her eyes.
Email Paulo Alves
paulo.aba@dispatchesinternational.org
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104