BRAZIL: History of Neglect Is Key Factor in Child Abandonment

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 20 2006 (IPS) - Women who abandon their own babies tend to have suffered a complete lack of nurturing, and were often abused themselves as children, according to a study on a tragic phenomenon that has been catapulted into the headlines in Brazil over the past few weeks.

Lidia Dobrianskij Weber, a psychology professor who coordinated a study on the issue in the Federal University of Paraná, told IPS that poverty is not the direct cause or even the key factor in such cases. She explained that the main common denominator among women who abandon their own children is that they “have developed different values, in a past marked by negligence and neglect in their family.”

The issue began to receive national attention on Jan. 28, when a two-month-old baby girl was rescued from Lake Pampulha in Belo Horizonte, the capital of the southwestern state of Minas Gerais.

The baby had been placed in a plastic bag attached to a floating piece of wood, and was saved when a park worker heard what he thought was the sound of “a cat crying” and pulled the bag out of the lake.

The amateur video footage of the rescue that was shot by a passerby was aired on television, and triggered a wave of indignation and hundreds of offers to adopt the child. The mother was arrested and charged with attempted murder.

The sense of outrage continued over the next several weeks, as other cases of babies who were abandoned or even killed were reported by the press. A newborn baby girl was left on the doorstep of a middle-class home, also in Belo Horizonte, and another was found dead in a swamp on the outskirts of the southern city of Porto Alegre.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, 67 abandoned children were taken in by shelters run by the municipal secretariat of social assistance between November and January.

But the babies abandoned in maternity wards, churches or on the streets are much more numerous than the press reports show, because media attention is only captured by “the most dramatic cases” like the infant floating in a bag on Lake Pampulha, said Weber, who for years has dedicated herself to the matter of abandoned children and adoption in this country of 184 million people.

As an example, she pointed to an orphanage in Curitiba, the capital of the southern state of Paraná, where she herself lives. Of the total of 28 children taken in by the orphanage last year, 24 of them had been abandoned.

In addition, many cases of child abandonment are hidden by illegal adoptions, in which the babies are usually registered as the biological children of the adoptive parents.

The research study conducted by Carolina dos Santos for her master’s thesis, under Weber’s guidance, was based on interviews and lengthy surveys with 70 different questions administered to 21 women who had abandoned their children and another 21 who were raising children.

The women in both groups were poor residents of the “favelas” or shantytowns of Curitiba. “Their socioeconomic conditions were identical,” stressed Weber.

The primary difference between the two groups of women that emerged from the study was the way they themselves were treated by their families during their childhood and adolescence.

The women who abandoned their children were typically deprived of care and attention from their parents, and were “never praised,” but rather treated with contempt and quite often subjected to physical abuse.

On the other hand, the women who had kept their children, despite the severe economic difficulties they faced in raising them, did not suffer this kind of upbringing.

“We learn to treat our children the way we were treated, and we love others if we ourselves have been given love in our lives,” noted Weber, who underlined that child-rearing is primarily a cultural trait passed down from generation to generation, and that the cycle of abuse will continue to repeat itself unless it is broken by some sort of intervention and support.

The women who have abandoned their children generally appeared to live by different values than those espoused by society at large. They were fully willing to answer the questions put to them and openly admitted that they had given their children up, indicating no sense of guilt. Some justified their decision by explaining that they wanted the freedom to “go to parties,” while others did not want to deal with the “bother” of raising children, said Weber.

In two cases, the women involved had abandoned a total of five children each, while one mother reported that she had simply “forgotten” her baby on a billiard table.

Nevertheless, said Weber, “we cannot judge them by our own values, our own reference points,” but must rather strive to understand the situation and take action to try to keep the cycle from being repeated.

The large number of abandoned children is one of the reasons why Brazil’s orphanages and similar institutions are overflowing. But paradoxically, while hundreds of thousands of children are deprived of a home and parental care, there are long waiting lists of people hoping to adopt a child.

The majority of the children in these institutions cannot be adopted because their biological parents still have custody over them, even though they are totally absent from their lives and in many cases do not even visit them for years on end.

Legislation is being studied to establish a clearer definition of abandonment, under which parents who do not assume responsibility for their children within a given period of time would lose their right to custody, and the children would then be free to be adopted.

Those who are pushing for this kind of legislation stress that with only a few noble exceptions, the institutions that house children without families do not provide the kind of care needed to ensure that the consequences of a childhood deprived of affection are not reproduced.

But what is most urgently needed, according to Weber, is information. Women who give birth to unwanted children need to know the options that are available to them.

Instead of ditching their babies on the street, or providing maternity hospitals with false names and addresses and then fleeing after giving birth, they can hand these children over to the child welfare authorities, and thus make adoption possible, she said.