The naturalization ofviolencebegins when the destruction of the other is confused with force, identity, and victory.
A nine-year-old child, wearing the yellow jersey of the Brazilian national team, raises an object resembling a firearm over a car, while adults celebrate around, the advance of the candidateFlávio BolsonaroDuring the second round of the presidential elections. The scene was recorded in Parnamirim, Rio Grande do Norte.
According to information released by the local Child Protection Council, the object was a replica. The material distinction is essential, but does not resolve the issue. Although a toy gun is not a firearm, when wielded by a child as a symbol of celebration, in the presence of adults gathered around a political event, it obliges us to ask what meanings are being produced and what forms of belonging become desirable.
Violence is not only naturalized when it no longer provokes fear. It is also naturalized when its symbols become familiar, no longer causing surprise and begin to function as signs of strength, victory or identity. In this process, violence does not disappear, but changes meaning.
This is not about attributing the power to explain an entire society to a single image, nor is it about deducing the convictions of each person present from it. It is about recognizing that symbols participate in the production of social life. They teach ways of perceiving the world, distinguishing allies and enemies, imagining power and defining what deserves to be celebrated. An image does not explain everything, but can make visible something that a society has already learned to tolerate.
Before learning to use violence, we learn its symbols. The symbol precedes the technique, offering vocabularies and repertoires by which violence can become imaginable, familiar, and, in certain circumstances, legitimate. The problem, therefore, is not only what a child sees or holds, but the universe of meanings in which they learn to interpret the gesture. When weapons become trophies, aggression becomes courage, and force over others becomes a demonstration of superiority, violence ceases to be only a threat and becomes integrated into the cultural repertoire of belonging.
In the political sphere, the issue takes on a particular gravity when the difference ceases to be recognized as a legitimate part of democratic life and is instead constructed as a threat to the very existence of the group. The opponent is no longer someone whose ideas need to be confronted, but someone whose presence is perceived as intolerable. The divergence turns into animosity, and the animosity, into a moral justification for exclusion, humiliation, or destruction.
The annihilation of the other often begins before the physical aggression. It begins when the other's complexity, dignity, and right to exist are withdrawn. Dehumanizing is reducing people to expendable categories, converting differences into defects, and transforming violence against certain groups into something that appears to be justified. When this happens, the destruction no longer needs to be presented as cruelty. It can be celebrated as courage, defense, or the restoration of order.
Ademocracydoes not stand solely on the holding of elections, the existence of institutions, or the formal recognition of rights. It also depends on the ability to admit that the other, even when thinking radically differently, does not lose its status as a subject. When politics operates through the devaluation of others' existence, the public sphere ceases to be a space for competition between projects and approaches a field of authorization of violence.
There is an undeniable contradiction when discourses in defense of the family coexist with practices that expose children to political instrumentalization. The comprehensive protection ofchildhoodcannot depend on the ideological position of those who claim it. The principle must apply regardless of the shirt, flag, or demonstration. The child is not responsible for the symbols that adults place around them, nor can they be turned into a tool for their disputes.
Indigital cultureThe event does not end when the celebration ends. The image gains its own circulation, is shared, commented on, and turned into an argument. A child exposed in public space can be exposed again before a much larger audience, becoming evidence, provocation, or rhetorical ammunition. We can protect them from the object and still subject them to the violence of exposure. The criticism of the naturalization of violence cannot reproduce, in the name of denunciation, another form of instrumentalization of childhood.
Therefore, responsibility does not only lie with the family or individuals directly involved. It extends to political institutions, digital platforms, schools, and the State, each with distinct responsibilities in building a culture of protection and responsibility. It is not enough to ask whether a child can hold a certain object. It is necessary to ask what adults teach when this gesture is accepted as part of a celebration and what ethical limits disappear when violence becomes a sign of collective affirmation.
The decisive point is not to assert that that scene, in itself, will produce violent adults. It is to understand that no culture becomes violent only when someone acts. Before, there are processes of signification that distribute humanity and inhumanity, suffering worthy of compassion and suffering considered deserved, lives that should be protected and lives whose destruction can be tolerated. Physical violence may be the visible event, but its symbolic preparation can be long, everyday, and socially shared.
A society begins to naturalize violence when its symbols no longer seem violent. When the weapon becomes a trophy, hostility becomes a sign of strength, and the elimination of the different appears as a promise of order, the problem is no longer just the object being wielded. It is in the moral horizon that makes this object intelligible and in the type of community that recognizes itself in it.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of that image is not just what a child is holding, but the world that adults make possible around them. Because violence does not need to be consummated to begin to be legitimized. Sometimes, it is enough for it to stop causing strangeness. And when the destruction of the other is celebrated as a victory, it is not only childhood that is at risk. It is the very possibility of living democratically with those who are not.
**This is an opinion piece and does not necessarily represent the editorial line ofBrasil do Fato.