Dr Antônio Márcio da Silva, Language Coordinator in Portuguese in the Department of Modern Languages has had an article entitled ‘Little Adults: Child and Teenage Commercial Sexual Exploitation in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema’ published in Hispania volume 99.2.
Hispania is the official journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese and publishes scholarly articles that are judged to be of interest to specialists in the discipline(s) as well as to a diverse readership of teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.
Antonio’s article explores three contemporary Brazilian films’ depiction commercial sexual exploitation of young girls and teenagers (Anjos do sol [2006], Baixio das bestas [2007] and Deserto Felix [2007]). It points out how the young female characters cope with the abuses they suffer and proposes that these filmic representations of the characters’ experiences expose a significant social problem of contemporary Brazilian society: violence against women, teenage girls, and female children, particularly, regarding sex tourism, people trafficking, and domestic sexual abuse. It argues that by engaging with the problem of sexual violence against young females these three films show the consequences this has on their gender and sexual identities. Furthermore, it demonstrates that these are shaped according to their social experience within their patriarchal society, for example, by the latter’s failure to lawfully protect these youngsters against such a crime. The study concludes by pointing out that because commercial sexual exploitation has a huge impact on the victims’ lives, society needs to tackle the crime so that these youngsters develop appropriate gender and sexual identities for their age.
This is a problem that continues to plague Brazilian contemporary society and has been highlighted in a number of recent articles in the media, including The Guardian, the blog Concern Universal and the Brazilian newspaper G1.
Antonio’s full article can be downloaded at: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/33556