This field research used a mixed (qualitative and quantitative) approach and was conducted at legal institutions in a capital city of Northeast Brazil. The study included 31 male and female legal professionals: 12 magistrates (first- and second-instance judges) and 19 psychosocial professionals (psychologists and social workers). The study included only participants who were working or had worked on cases involving child and adolescent SA and who worked or had worked at a legal institution.

A sociodemographic questionnaire was used to characterize the sample, and free word association was applied using the stimulus “child and adolescent SA.” The demographic data were summarized as descriptive statistics (frequencies and percentages) calculated using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 21.0, and the free word association data were analyzed via prototypical and similarity analyses (Camargo & Justo, 2013) using the R Interface for Multidimensional Analyses of Texts and Questionnaires (IRAMUTEQ).

This research met the provisions of Resolution No. 510 of April 7, 2016 of the National Health Council, which outlines the guidelines and regulatory standards for human-subjects research. It was also submitted to the ethics committee of the Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB, Federal University of Paraíba) and approved under CAAE: 49371915.1.0000.5188. Scheduled interviews were conducted in the participants’ working environments; these interviews adhered to all ethical standards. Data were collected using a portable voice recorder. The participants’ authorization was obtained using a Terms of Free and Informed Consent document to ensure their confidentiality and anonymity.

A total of 64.5% of the sample were women. This predominance of females was caused by the imbalance of psychology and social care professionals, given that only three of the 12 judges who participated in the study were women. These data show that men remain predominant in the Paraíba Court of Justice.

Those aged 47 to 57 years old constituted the largest age group, representing 35.6% of the sample. The sample was also composed of middle-aged adults with professional experience: 48.4% of the participants had worked in their field for over 11 years. Importantly, the age range of the sample was 25 to 68 years old (Mean = 46, SD = 12.47), which explains the high standard deviation. Furthermore, the sample was composed of psychologists (41.9%), social workers (19.4%), and first- and second-instance judges (38.7%).

To identify the structure of the social representations of child and adolescent SA, free word association was used with the stimulus phrase “child and adolescent SA” (“abuso sexual infantojuvenil”) to describe the core and peripheral constituents of these representations. First, a database was created using Excel. These data were analyzed using IRAMUTEQ to produce a figure with four quadrants for the given stimulus (Tabela 1) containing the words evoked, their Frequency (F), and the Mean Rank of Evocation (MRE).

Tabela 1 was generated using IRAMUTEQ and produced based on evocations with a frequency equal to, greater than, or less than 13, with an MRE of approximately 2.88. Importantly, there were no omissions, resulting in 155 evocations. These evocations were grouped based on lemmatization and semantic procedures. The cutoff for the inclusion of words was 3.

Table 1
Quadrant of evocations in response to the stimulus of child and adolescent Sexual Abuse

As Tabela 1 shows, the occurrence data are divided into four quadrants that display the central core, the near peripheral systems, contrast elements, and distant peripheral systems of a representation. The left upper quadrant of Tabela 1 (i.e., the central core) contains the evocations with the highest frequencies and lowest MREs (i.e., those that were mentioned most often among the first three words evoked). This quadrant contains the words “violence”, “vulnerability”, “trauma”, and “sorrow”; these terms are unifying and stabilizing elements of the social representation of child and adolescent SA because according to Abric (2001), the central core has a normative essence and is determined by the historical and ideological conditions responsible for the continuity, consistency, and permanence of the representation.

The object of interest in this study is represented in society by the concept of the victim as a vulnerable individual, marked by trauma and wrapped in feelings of sadness. This finding corroborates the work of Santos (2011) and Florentino (2015). Furthermore, it emphasizes the latter article, which noted that trauma is the core of child and adolescent SA.

Eloy (2012) indicated that the representation of child SA is often anchored by medical references such as the physical and psychological symptoms presented based on physical evidence of violence to the body and mind; therefore, legal professionals seek medical exams and psychological reports. However, this evidence is not always present because sexual approaches can be diverse. Freitas and Soares (2013) discuss child SA in modern society in the context of a violent nature: “... as the child takes the role of a citizen in development..., it is understood that his [or her] physical and mental development should be protected from any violence that might interfere in this process and that can have serious consequences” (p. 1). The findings of the current study suggest that the participants’ social representations also include the idea that child and adolescent SA is always a physically violent act, even though the literature often notes that it does not always involve physical violence. For example, the presence of psychological violence via threat and coercion is possible (Florentino, 2015; Justino et al., 2015; Santos & Yakuwa, 2015).

The word “vulnerability” likely emerged because we are addressing children and adolescents who (according to the literature) are considered vulnerable and immature individuals and likely to be easily tricked by adults (Arpini, Siqueira, & Savegnago, 2012). Child and adolescent SA is classified as a hideous crime given its great social disapproval. The law provides for significant punishment as well as difficulty in obtaining prison benefits, given the representation of vulnerability anchored by Brazilian law, in particular in the structure of the standards observed in the Penal Code and the Statute of Children and Adolescents.

The near peripheral system is indispensable to the central core because it is responsible for the protection, upgrading, and contextualization of its regulatory mandates and the configuration of social representations (Chaves & Silva, 2013; Machado & Aniceto, 2010). The following evocations were found in the proximal peripheral system: “disease”, “crime”, “disgust”, and “treatment”. We believe that the term “disease” is directly related to the abuser, who is considered a person with a disorder. This association was also found in Santos (2011) study. The terms “crime” and “disgust” were evoked because SA is an illegal act that generates negative feelings among professionals, reinforcing the idea that it is a crime, an act of rule breaking, and therefore punishable. These data corroborate those found by Santos (2011).

The term “treatment” took two forms: that of the victim and that of the offender. In this regard, although we know about the importance of treatment given the literature, it is difficult to act appropriately in these cases both for structural reasons and due to limitations in the professional training of those working in the healthcare system (Ávila, Oliveira, & Silva, 2015). Santos (2011) noted that the punishment of the offender does not imply an impediment to the treatment of this individual. Moreover, treatment does not negate the victim’s rights; rather, it is done to minimize future attempts to reoffend.

In the contrast elements and distal peripheral system, which act as a link between the central system and concrete reality according to Abric (1996), the words evoked for the former were “fear”, “intrafamily”, “child”, and “adolescent”; the words for the latter were “family”, “animalistic”, “punishment”, “impunity”, and “anxiety”. We emphasize the words “fear”, “intrafamily”, and “family” because child and adolescent SA perpetrated by family members is traumatic and harmful to the psychological and social development of the victim; its complex dynamics breach trust and break emotional ties (Said, Junqueira, & Costa, 2016).

Several authors have noted that intrafamily child and adolescent SA is the most frequent form (Baía, Veloso, Magalhães, & Dell’Aglio, 2013; Gava, Silva, & Dell’Aglio, 2013; Justino et al., 2015; Oliveira, 2013; Soares et al., 2016), which might be counterintuitive because the family should act as a safe haven for its members, not as an unsafe environment, full of suspicion, fear, and uncertainty. A role reversal takes place when the aggressor places a child or adolescent in the position of a sexual partner, thereby changing the roles of family members and decharacterizing the family group as a safe environment, causing fear of the abuser and damage to these victims’ development (Florentino, 2015). We performed a similarity analysis to more deeply explore how the “profession” variable affected the studied sample’s representations.

The similarity analysis was based on graph theory, a branch of mathematics that examines the relationships among the objects of a given set (Marchand & Ratinaud, 2012). This analysis enables the identification of co-occurrences among words, and the results express the connectivity among words. Co-occurrences are represented by the numbers that appear above the connecting lines; higher line values represent stronger connections between words (Figure 1). These words are presented in the discussion, along with the words evoked within parentheses.

Figure 1
Chart analyzing the similarity of the child and adolescent SA stimulus by profession.

For this analysis, the profession variable was used, dividing the corpus into two groups: “psycholsocials” (i.e., social workers and psychologists) and “judges” (i.e., first- and second-instance magistrates). This type of analysis enables a deeper consideration of the evoked words previously analyzed in the prototypical analysis and allows for observations of between-group differences. The approximations and differences related to the studied groups can then be discussed, how each group represents child and adolescent SA can be analyzed, and which social representations are associated with which professions can be considered.

The similarity analysis revealed that the word “trauma” was common to both professional groups and was a central element and organizer of the representation. In addition, the terms more closely related to criminality and the pathologization of the abuser such as “disease” (6), “crime” (5), “disgust” (4), and “animalistic” (4) were linked to morality issues.

Importantly, the belief that the abuser is a person who differs from those considered normal comes from the participants’ descriptions of these people as “sick and animalistic” who engage in acts that go beyond what is considered socially normal. Likewise, Freitas and Soares (2013) noted that this pathologizing focus represented by the indication of a disorder or unusual characteristic does not question society with regard to the production of these people; rather, reflections are reduced to issues that are purely subjective, generalizing, and moralist. The authors further assert that a crucial factor for an analysis of sexual violence is omitted but present in their concrete manifestation “...in a power imbalance exerted by an adult over a child or adolescent during a process of appropriation and domination of the other” (Freitas & Soares, 2013, p.3). They also emphasized the pressing need for the demystification of perpetrators of sexual violence because they are found across all social, ethnic, and age groups. A critical view is needed regarding the relationships among domination, discrimination, and exploitation that continue to exist in society. Esber (2010) confirmed the need to demystify aggressors, emphasizing that they are not “weird” or “crazy”, nor can they be identified by aspects of physiognomy. They include individuals who originate from all social classes, ethnic groups, and ages.

For the judges, the evocation of the word “crime” was linked to the objective of their professional category (where the aggressor is criminally responsible, thereby meeting the objective definitions of criminal law) because these professionals are responsible for interpreting social behavior and framing it within the abstract provisions of the law, establishing punishments, and revealing the inappropriateness of the individual and his or her relationship with society. The judges associated the abuser with the words “sick”, “disgust”, and “animalistic.” However, Fazenda (2016), citing Leyens (1985), noted that it is a “fundamental error” to attribute SA to the abuser’s characteristics. Relations to a character trait originated from implicit personality theory.

Conversely, psychosocial professionals more often evoked the term “vulnerability” (8), which was linked to the term “family” (3). Rather than connecting the family to the treatment and care of child victims of abuse, this association considers family a vulnerability factor. These professionals also used the terms “intrafamily” and “insensitivity”, which further indicates their concern with the family as the place where abuse occurs.

The term “violence” (8) was significant among the psychosocial professionals, signifying these professionals’ concerns with the consequences of abuse for the victim. This concern introduces associated terms such as “loss of childhood” (2), “sadness” (7), “anxiety” (2), “fear”, and “mayhem”. The psychosocial professionals anchored their representations of abuse by psychosocial issues; however, their explanations were based more on a microsocial perspective linked to the family and victim than on a deep social analysis of SA. Psychosocial professionals also used the word “treatment” (4) to emphasize the importance of psychotherapeutic treatment to monitor abuse victims, given the focus on their suffering. Importantly, the evocation of the terms “protection” and “punishment” should be highlighted because they demonstrate the concern and care that these professionals have for SA and the victim; furthermore, they demonstrate a concern for the legal area when evoking the word “impunity”.

In general, the social representations of child and adolescent SA remain individualized and based on the pathologization and culpability of the offender. They are revealed by excluding the practices of punishment (criminality) or treatment. The participants also had a fragmented view (i.e., without shared representations). This finding suggests that each professional has a limited notion of the phenomenon, rooted in their original training, without a link to knowledge and the inability to create wider explanations that address macrosocial issues. Therefore, a more structured action is lacking, with wider interventions involving the state, society as a whole, the victim, the family, and the professionals involved to understand that SA is a phenomenon multidetermined by the confluence of individual, social, and cultural factors. Such representations tend to undermine work on SA because a need exists for interventions in terms of both primary and tertiary prevention. This way of representing the phenomenon is insufficient when trying to understand its complexity, which should encompass the family, institutions, and broader social networks.

Correspondência para/Correspondence to: C.A. PEREIRA. E-mail: camila_alencarpereira@hotmail.com.