Cases such as Valentina and Jessica, among others, highlight the need for improvements in monitoring children at risk. Committees warn of a possible deterioration of the situation due to lack of human resources, with more than 13,000 children to need protection measures in the last year.
Over the past few years, children have been signaled by the protection committees of minors who have been killed or severely injured. Valentina and Jessica are only two of the last victims of abuse where the system did not work preventively.
Among many lives of children saved from violence and rehabilitated by the state, there are always some that are lost by the inability of the institutions they should protect them.
A case is too much. And those of Valentina and Jessica, both daughters of aggression and abuse, left the protection committees of children and young people under fire three years ago.
Two signposted children but without accompaniment
The two girls were signaled, but without the accompaniment they needed, and they never ceased to be exposed to the risk of family insecurity in which they lived, until they died.
At three years old and unable to defend himself, Jessica was the victim of 78 injuries, including strokes, scratches and burns.
The girl’s mother and three other people were sentenced to the maximum penalty: 25 years in prison.
The media case had similarities to that of Valentina in 2020. He had marks of aggression throughout the body, internal lesions and burns. The father was sentenced to 24 years in jail; The stepmother, nine.
A long history
But in recent decades, other children signaled by the protection committees have been killed without the monitoring of the state being sufficient to avoid a tragic outcome.
Joana, then eight, Maria Isabel and Lara, both with two, and Fatima Leticia, with only 50 days of life, are only four more victims of violence, in a list that is already long. And the situation, according to the commissions themselves, can get worse.
They warn that some institutions are in break, after the government has called back to schools more than three hundred teachers placed in the various protection committees in the country, thus leaving hundreds of processes of children at risk without manager.
Last year, more than 13,000 children and young people needed promotion and protection measures because they are endangered, mostly for neglect and domestic violence.
