"Ela chora, eu choro": amor, dor e silêncio entrecruzando os sentidos das crianças e suas mães em contextos de violência intrafamiliar e persecução criminal

Abstract

This research aims to understand the meanings of intrafamily violence, from the perspective of children and their mothers who live in places where there is the practice of this violence. For this study, documentary research was carried out, initially with the purpose of surveying the occurrences registered in a police station in the countryside of Goiás (São Luís de Montes Belos-GO), during the first half of 2020. The city was chosen as this researcher has already worked as a police chief in that location, where it is known that there is a great demand for police work in cases involving intrafamily violence. Thus, an analysis of police records was carried out in order to investigate the contexts in which such criminal offenses happened, making it possible to know whether the children witnessed the crime. Two children and two mothers participated in this research. We had the help of professionals from the Specialized Reference Center for Social Assistance (Creas), as many of the families in vulnerable situations seek help from this body to get out of the situation of violence. Subjects who voluntarily agreed to participate in the research signed an assent and consent form. This research fits into the qualitative type and its construction process was based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Vygotsky's Socio-Historical Psychology, based on the perspective of Historical and Dialectical Materialism, and on some of the theoretical contributions by Marx, Adorno, Poster, among others. Therefore, taking the categories family and intrafamily violence, considered in their historicity, we sought to understand, using the children's reports, the senses and meanings of family violence observed by them. Regarding the methodology, documentary, bibliographic and empirical investigations were used. In general, the work was structured in the following chapters: the first chapter aims to discuss the details of procedures, methodologies and instruments for listening to children in the research; the second chapter provides information about the public institutions in which the data collection stage was carried out, also pointing out the profile of the participants; the third chapter presents the concept of gender and the place of the child from the perception of the police chief, in addition to providing information about the aggressions and the motivations for carrying out the notitia criminis; the fourth chapter seeks to understand the meanings of domestic violence from the perspective of children, based on their statements; the fifth chapter brings the meanings produced by children and their mothers from the violence-state-religion-education relationship. Thus, the participation of the subjects was fundamental for understanding the analyzed phenomenon, using their perspectives and points of view. The central problem of this research was to understand the place occupied by the child in the context of domestic violence between parents. The thesis defended in this work is that, despite the numerous existing protective legal tools, there is a process of invisibility and silencing the of the child in criminal prosecution, which omits them as indirect victims of this violence, in addition to the inexistence of public policies that address this subject in a situation of intrafamily violence