Educomunicación, una respuesta a la violencia contra niñas y niños. Situación vulnerable de la infancia en áreas rurales de Bolivia

Abstract

Faced with the exponential increase in all forms of violence, physical, psychological and sexual, against children (6 out of 10 infants suffer violence daily in Bolivia, according to the Attorney General's Office, 2022) and the absence of activating educommunication processes in preventive proposals, as a multidisciplinary field that can promote transformative actions in their lives, the present Doctoral Thesis seeks to identify how educommunication generates processes that promote social transformations in children, to prevent physical, psychological and sexual violence, during May 2017 to June 2018, in rural municipalities of Bolivia: Achacachi and Jesús de Machaca de La Paz; Padcaya and San Lorenzo de Tarija; Buena Vista and El Torno de Santa Cruz; and Tarabuco and Zudáñez de Chuquisaca, within the Protection and Gender Project promoted by the Non-Governmental Organization Plan International Inc. Violence against children grew in Bolivia by 500%, from 2014 to September 2022. The Special Prosecutor for Gender and Juvenile Crimes registered 33,453 cases of violence this year. The most recurrent cases are those that go against these populations due to their high vulnerability. On the other hand, remote rural regions are the places that lack registration and control actions of these events; for this reason, initiatives are important, with the aim of reducing them. The Theoretical Framework addresses educommunication, from the relationship between education and communication to educational communication. It exposes how the term educommunication evolved historically and, at the same time, how the theoretical foundation that was built and sustained around this heterogeneous and plural field changes; it is linked to development and social transformation. Subsequently, the right to protection of girls and boys in Bolivia and violence, its types: physical, psychological and sexual, and the importance of prevention are detailed. Finally, international and national regulations are specified, which ensure the right to protection of childr that protect the right to protection of children are specified. The type of research is descriptive, because it measures the way in which educommunication generates prevention processes against violence towards girls and boys from 10 to 14 years old, based on the identification of these situations, their typology and the promotion of self-protection. with the desire to transform their lives. To that end, the methodological approach of the study is mixed; qualitatively, participant observation was applied to 40 communities, 37 in-depth interviews with project managers (5), mothers (8), fathers (8) and traditional (8) and municipal (8) authorities, and 16 groups of discussion with 128 girls and boys from 10 to 14 years old; in the quantitative aspect, a survey was applied to 800 children in the 8 municipalities studied. The study proves that educommunication generates processes of expression, construction of meanings and prevention of violence. It also shows that 76% of children in the rural areas considered by the research justify violence as a form of discipline, an aspect that naturalizes these actions. On the other hand, they affirmed that they know and distinguish between physical and psychological violence: "They hit us" (Juan, 11 years old), "they want to teach you with a hot brick" (Rosmery, 10 years old), "they seem to tell us everything just by shouting" (Julia, 13 years old); however, 81% do not identify sexual violence as an aggression. Finally, when understanding the meaning of violence, 63% of the children do not verbalize a definition, but 87% identify it through different expressive forms such as drawings, role-playing, writing, representations and also silences and changes in behavior.