Founded in 1991 by 31 social organizations in Salvador and at the same time as the Statute for Children and Adolescents (1990), the Center was created to guarantee complete legal-social protection for young people and with the main aim of combating violence against life.

At that time, an outline began for a movement to make the population, as well as specific social segments such as the media, aware of the question of violence against the infant-juvenile population . Before communicating with and motivating civil society at the end of the 1980s, deaths of children and adolescents by extermination groups went unnoticed or were inserted into police logic, which justified murders by criminalizing the victims.

Bahia was in third place with the number of exterminations, behind only Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. 110 boys were killed in the Bahian capital in 1990 and this number increased to 117 the following year. Facing negligence by the community and total impunity for these crimes, organized civil society started to play a central role in the search for solutions to the problem.

Therefore, CEDECA-BA’s first mission was to break impunity for assassinations of children and adolescents by offering a public criminal legal service for families of children murdered by extermination groups. The observation that while boys were murdered in the Bahian capital’s streets, girls were sexually violated, motivated research entitled “Girls of Salvador” in 1994. The study revealed the dreams, fears and expectations of 74 sexually exploited adolescents. (...)

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