Medicalization and violation of rights: a cartography about differences in children

Abstract

In this article, we share reflections arising from the previous exercise of cartography of theoretical and methodological experiences that understood the child as a subject of rights, and, in contrast, the mapping of the production of a territory that has violated rights through the medicalizing practices of childhood. To this end, we conducted a cartographic study - guided by Educational and School Psychology in a critical perspective - based on the survey of academic bibliography published in the Scientific Electronic Library Online - SciELO Brazil, with the descriptors medicalization and education, in the period between 2010 and 2020; and the reading of three dossiers on medicalization in Brazil, published in the magazines Entreideias, Nuances and Práxis Educacional. Through readings and records, far from weaving a state of the art, we limit ourselves to build tracks to compose lines of connection and intelligibility of the phenomenon studied. In this process, as mapping tracks, we delineate Track 1: Medicalization denies social inequalities; Track 2: Medicalization violates rights and restricts the freedom of the child; Track 3: Medicalization produces suffering and exclusion of the child; Track 4: In defense of life and for non-medicalizing rationality. We hope, with the proposed analysis, to contribute to the critical understanding of the medicalization of education, adding to the struggles to guarantee the rights of childhood.

KEYWORDS: Medicalization, childhood, human rights