Childhood and public politics: The rights of the child in the Brazilian media

This study of doctoral thesis is linked with the Center of Studies of Gender, Race and Age (NEGRI) from the PUC/SP (Brazil), as part of the collective research project which focus in the understanding of the social construction of childhood in the scope of the public politics from the speech of the media. Considering the media as an important actor in the public arena of competition for definition of the social problems, this work approached of the treatment given for the brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo to legal landmark contemporaneous of Brazil that establishes rights for children: the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, the Statute of Children and Teenager, 1990; as well as the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989. The interpretation of Folha’s production is based on national and international academic literature about children rights and in 460 journalistic piece (1985-2006). The objective was to propose an interpretation of Folha’s treatment to legal landmark based on the concept of ideology proposed by John B. Thompson and the theoretical fields of Childhood Social Studies and about the construction of social problems. We conclude that the treatment given for the newspaper analyzed  to childhood’s legal landmark  helped to produce and sustain relationships of domination of adults over children and teenagers, creating, on this sense, an ideological production. Folha’s production about legal landmark, even though in significant quantity, was seldom focused on informing its readers, prevailing a dramatic narrative e approached, preferably, subjects related to violence, to crime, to “risky situation” and to “deviation”. Almost we do not find information and analyses between legal landmarks and the economic laws, social and cultural, as well as the rights of freedom, participation and expression of children and adolescents, exactly the rights that could make front to the structural vulnerability of childhood.