Early Childhood at Risk: A journalistic portrait of the violence and challenges to the ECA

Abstract

Violence against children in early childhood, a major risk factor for their overall development, underpins the objective of this work, which proposes an overview of the typology of violence addressed in digital media outlets in the Northern Region of Brazil, highlighting challenges to the implementation of the Statute of Children and Adolescents. To this end, 307 quantitative and qualitative news reports collected from 2023 were analyzed and subjected to Thematic Analysis using Atlas.ti software to produce categories. As a result, the categorized types of violence were: Sexual, Physical, Institutional, Psychological, Neglect, and Structural. It is concluded that, in early childhood, from an intersectional perspective, violence acts in multiple ways through oppressive mechanisms, with harmful effects, representing a public health issue in the northern region, where a specific profile is predominantly affected: Black children, mostly mixed-race, and especially Indigenous children, living in vulnerable communities and locations.