Maria dos Anjos Children and Adolescents Defense Center – CDCA (Rondônia)

Objectives and target population:

The Center aims to increase the theoretical and methodological understanding of leaders, militants and professionals from social movements and organizations that make up the State Board for the Defense of Children’s and Adolescents’ Rights – the DCA Board, by encouraging reflection on their practices and the objectives on which they are based.

The proposal is to create conditions for practitioners in the System of Rights Guarantees (SGD in Portuguese) to take more critical and qualified actions and strengthen the political presence of organized civil society in its networking and actions to transform society.

According to the Center, though they identify with the struggle to protect human rights, these figures have graduated from conventional schools and often lacked opportunities to deepen their understanding of the political issues they deal with.

Main activities:

– Provide human rights and politics courses for members of the DCA Forum;

– Hold a statewide meeting with organizations and social movements, independently of their particular area of activism (children, black movement, women’s movement, peoples dislocated by hydroelectric projects, indigenous rights organizations, pastoralist movements and human rights). The participants will discuss strategies to get youth involved in their struggles.

Context:

The Amazon, and especially the state of Rondônia, have been suffering strong environmental impacts due to the neo-developmentalist agenda of the Brazilian government, which undertakes large infrastructure projects as part of the Economic Growth and Acceleration Plan (PAC).

The construction of power plants on the Rio Madeira River provoked a large migration of people, especially young males, aggravating the precarious condition of the infrastructure in Porto Velho (the capital) and the already existing violence there. The phenomenon directly affected the most oppressed sectors of society: women and children. According to the Center, it appears to have led to a significant increase in sexual crime against children and adolescents, exploitation of child labor, increase in drug addiction and high homicide rates.

Rondônia also has one of the highest rates of adolescent homicide inside governmental institutions. Nine adolescents were killed inside socio-educational units from 2007-2010, according to research by Anced – the National Association of Centers of Defense of Children and Adolescents- carried out through the Absolute Priority Project, developed in partnership with the Secretary of Human Rights of the Presidency of the Republic.

span style=”font-size: 12px;”> 

span style=”font-size: 12px;”>About the organization:

The Maria dos Anjos Children and Adolescents Defense Center’s (CDCA) work is based on three distinct strategies concerning the promotion and defense of children’s and adolescents’ human rights: legal-social protection, social mobilization and the propagation of rights. The CDCA-RO judicially accompanies, in exemplary fashion, cases of sexual or intra-familial violence against kids and adolescents; it undertakes preventative actions to promote rights, through educational workshops and sensitivity campaigns in society; and it effects social control of public policies by participating in the coordination of the DCA Board and having a seat on the Municipal Rights Council of Porto Velho.

Partnerships:

Affiliated with Anced, the group is part also of the Municipal Network to Confront Sexual Violence and of the Municipal Council of Children’s and Adolescents’ Rights of Porto Velho; besides representing Anced in the collegial coordination of the National Committee to Confront Sexual Violence against Children and Adolescents.