“You may spank him”: reflections on children, care and punishment in Praia, Cape Verde

Abstract

This article deals with a particular dynamic in the relationship between adults and children in Cape Verde, namely, physical punishments. I reflect from an ethnographic fieldwork carried out in two stages between 2019 and 2020 with children from zero to 12 years old in a peripheral neighborhood in the capital of Cape Verde. I bring data that allow to argue how the punishments (read here as mechanisms of discipline) to which children are submitted are part of the field of care, contrasting notions of international organizations about the violence to which the child is subjected. I also argue that care is conceived and elaborated collectively by the people of the community in a logic of multiplication throughout the children's daily circuits.