A violência negligenciada: significados sobre “denúncia” das mães de vítimas de abusos sexuais intrafamiliares

Abstract

The research investigated the issue of intrafamily sexual abuse, an issue that concerns law, public security, health and society in general. In the city of Manaus, cases of intra-family sexual abuse are mainly monitored by the Specialized Police in the Protection of Children and Adolescents - DEPCA, whose data indicate that most abusers are parents, stepparents or close relatives of the victim. The trajectory of mothers in relation to the decision to delay, omit or denounce the abuser was analyzed, and the specificities of the meanings of the "complaint" of the mothers who omitted, communicated or delayed the denunciation, whose genesis dates back to sociodemographic factors, were verified. , emotional experiences marked by similar situations of intrafamily sexual abuse, accompanied by feelings of abandonment, anger, guilt, shame, fear and in the development of strategies to deny these feelings. In this context, the following research problem emerged: why do mothers of victims of sexual abuse omit or delay in denouncing the aggressor, since he represents the most important figure in protecting their children? The methodology used was qualitative, from the perspective of socio-historical theory proposed by Vygotsky and González Rey. Semi-structured interviews of life stories were carried out to collect data, which were collected through the core meaning to understand the meanings of the “complaint”. The results indicate the inexistence of a coping network for mothers and relatives of abused children and adolescents that encourages them to report, that there are specificities between mothers who reported and mothers who omitted, with evidence of the existence of a cycle of multigenerational sexual violence, that mothers relived experiences of their own abuse due to the revelation of their children's abuse, which somehow interfered negatively in their decision-making.