The Pastoral da Criança is an NGO that cares for one million families with children from 0 to 6 in approximately 3,000 low-income communities all over Brazil, since 1983. It offers training and support for 140,000 volunteers who visit the families and promote meetings centered around:

· nutrition orientation since pregnancy;

· promotion of breastfeeding and essential stimulation for young
children towards an integral healthy development;

· prevention and treatment of common diseases of early childhood;

· accident prevention.

In the communities where the Pastoral da Criança implements these programs, there is a reduction in the mortality rate up to 50% and a significant decrease in the rate of antisocial behavior in children and teenagers.

This presentation will focus on the program of violence prevention. The main purpose is to improve life quality for families and communities. The author worked as a consultant in the making of the manual for the training of volunteers (“Peace Begins at Home” – How to deal with human relationships to prevent domestic violence against children). It was
written in a very simple language, with drawings to illustrate practical situations in daily family life. The main topics of this training are:

· helping community leaders identify the main expressions of domestic violence: physical (battering), emotional (humiliating,
threatening and frightening, ignoring and rejecting the child), abandonment or negligence, sexual abuse, and exploitation of children;

· helping the leaders recognize the main symptoms in children victims of abuse or in groups at risk of being abused;

· enlarging alternatives of action to prevent domestic violence (what to do instead of hitting or being verbally abusive);

Volunteers are prepared to work with the families in their communities emphasizing the following topics:

· helping parents enlarge their communication tools to include non-violent methods for disciplining and setting appropriate limits to children;

· to build a positive self-esteem in children through praising, recognizing abilities, stimulating creativity, and showing appreciation for positive behavior;

· violent family members are helped in learning new pathways in anger management;

· families are encouraged to think about the difference between expressing anger in a way that does not hurt or humiliate others and being physically or verbally abusive;

· family members are stimulated to devise practical ways of peace building in their daily lives, learning to tolerate differences and developing non-violent methods of conflict resolution ( “Attacking the problem, not the person”).

The improvement in the quality of family relationships has its counterpart in other programs, such as income-generation projects with the help of low-interest loans, and the “conversation circles” where collective problems are discussed and solutions are searched for. The association of all these social projects has the aim of working towards a culture of peace seen as a search for inner, interpersonal and environmental harmony in a context of social justice and solidarity, as formulated in UNESCO’s Culture of Peace Program.

* This paper was presented at the 7th Congress of the World Association for Infant Mental Health, Montreal, July 2000.