Visibilidades de crianças da infância

Abstract

This article discusses the different meanings of ‘child’, ‘children’ or ‘childhood’ within different contexts, in order to analyze the relevance of what may be called visibility – or invisibility – of childhood. For the discussion, auxiliary concepts, such as private/public, and dichotomies, such as protection/participation, are used. The analysis shows that the idea of visibility or invisibility of children and childhood is ambiguous and its imports vary historically. The paper also presents an assesment of the production of statistics on children and childhood, and, in the same line, examines children’s place in social policy