Speaking to the Lusa agency, the director of the Office of Institutional Communication and Press of the Ministry of the Interior, intendant Hermenegildo de Brito, gave a positive assessment of the Campaign to Combat Sexual Abuse against Minors, which began in November 2021, with a balance of more of 300 complaints, “waking up those who had been in the closet for a long time”.
About the campaign, Hermenegildo de Brito said that the denunciations are daily and the campaign cannot just be about raising awareness.
The official defended the need to create quick support for victims at police stations, namely psychological and social, which should happen from January, as well as for a multisectoral intervention.
“We saw that the bodies of the Minint [Ministry of the Interior] alone are not capable, an intervention is needed at the highest level, because many people are being raped”, he said.
The police officer stressed that sexual crimes have mostly taken place in a family environment, “and this characteristic makes the action of the Minint bodies small, it is not possible to place a police officer in each residence”.
According to Hermenegildo de Brito, awareness-raising is the only way of prevention, alerting people to the need to report the abuser, even if it is family support.
The delay in justice is still one of the challenges in this fight against sexual crimes, noted Hermenegildo de Brito, advocating celerity in the processing of these cases.
“The campaign itself is no longer sustainable, it needs multisectoral support, but the primary objective we feel we have achieved, which is to raise people's awareness. We didn't just have reports of crimes that happened now, but five, six years ago”, he stressed, praising the role of the media.
Asked about the causes of the high number of cases, Hermenegildo de Brito stressed that it is impossible “to point out an isolated factor that is at the origin of sexual crimes”, ranging from psychological, sociological and anthropological.
“The belief in occult issues, the issue of easy profit, of sorcery, the one who goes to a kimbanda [healer], who promises you that to have this you have to rape a child and you have to be under five years old”, were some of the mentioned factors.
