Ruthless Rhetoric

Abstract

The article describes and discusses representations of street children and child and youth prostitution disseminated through literature and by the international and Brazilian media during the 1980s and 1990s. The analysis of the images of child and youth prostitution is centred in particular on the journalistic use of a photo from 1992 that represents a Brazilian adolescent put up for sale. The article shows how the dissemination of images that stigmatize the poor is caused by, among other factors, the need of the media and of modern philanthropy to make an impact on the public.

Organizações multilaterais, estado e políticas de educação infantil: history repeats

“…A Unesco orientava sua ação mais para a África (Unesco, 1996); o Unicef dava visibilidade a novos temas, como "meninos de rua" e prostituição infanto-juvenil (Black, 1987;Rosemberg, Andrade, 1999) e, no campo da EI latino-americana, sua atenção voltou-se para Cuba; a educação ainda não se constituíra em prioridade para o BM (Torres, 1996;Fonseca, 1998).…”

Multilateral Organizations And Early Child Care And Education Policies For Developing Countries

“…The end of the Brazilian dictatorship in 1985 was followed by an intense period of social mobilization in the context of designing a new constitution. The women's movement and the "pro-Constitution children's movement" participated in this mobilization (Campos, Rosemberg, and Ferreira 1992;Rosemberg 1999). These social movements developed a proposal for the constitution to recognize ECCE, which was approved in 1988.…”

“…During this period, multilateral organizations had little interest or activity in the area of Brazilian ECCE. UNESCO was directing its activities more toward Africa (Rosemberg 1998), UNICEF was giving visibility to new themes such as "street children" and "child prostitution" (Black 1996;Rosemberg and Andrade 1999), and education had not yet become a priority for the World Bank (Torres 1996). 6 After the constitution was adopted, a new team with a proposal for a new national ECCE policy occupied the ECCE office in the Ministry of Education.…”

“…Both institutions are intended to educate and care for small children. The introduction of the term "care" into the Brazilian ECCE vocabulary is recent, dating from the beginning of the 1990s, replacing the term "custody," a concept coming from a social assistance tradition that strongly marked the history of day care in Brazil (Montenegro 2001;Rosemberg 1999). This older concept of child care referred to a shelter to keep children of working mothers off the streets, to care for orphaned children, and to keep other children away from servile work in expanding industries (Montenegro 2001).…”

“…Politically, the demand for child care was a priority on the agenda in the reorganization of the new Brazilian feminist movement in the 1970s, as a condition for exercising women's right to work. The demand for day care was as mobilizing to the Brazilian feminist movement of the 1970s as the struggle for liberalization (or decriminalization) of abortion was for the feminist movement in Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s (Rosemberg 1999). On the level of concrete implementation, during the 1970s and 1980s, women's organizations from the worker classes created community day care centers that contracted with city government and used public resources to survive.…”