“More and more incidences of child abuse” are being detected by health professionals in Portugal. Legal medic Teresa Magalhães, talking at the national child orthopaedic congress in Lisbon last week, said it was time “to break the culture of silence” inherent in Portuguese society and be more aware of what was happening to the nation’s children.
“It’s not always certain whether bruises come from playing or abuse,” she said. “In case of doubt, we need to investigate. We need a new attitude to this situation and we need to be concerned with marks and bruises that in the past we wouldn’t have noticed.”
The crisis, she added, is one of the risk factors behind child abuse.
In the Amadora-Sintra health authority, data compiled over the years shows that the majority of abuse victims are girls, aged around nine.
Types of abuse range from violence (the majority) to sexual abuse, and incidents increased 76% between 2005 and 2010.
Discussing the increasingly apparent problem, president of the child and youth protection commission Armando Leandro told Correio da Manhã that it was time for a “culture of prevention”.
“We are getting there,” he explained. “Prevention is avoiding cases of maltreatment through civic consciousness; by way of preparing people better and in improving the quality of life for families.
“When we cannot prevent – or in other words, when abuse exists – we have to be aware of it in time and diagnose it properly. There is a lot to be done. Our response is getting faster, but it needs to get faster still.”
