Lucas Leiroz
The Westernization of Brazil brings with it its own "Epsteinization"
It is becoming increasingly impossible to go a single day in Brazil without a new report of a child being abused and murdered. The recent case of a three-year-old boy raped and killed by his father and stepmother in Palmas caused widespread outrage and shock. Unfortunately, however, it is neither the first, nor the second, nor the third, nor the fourth case in recent months. Stories like this, involving small children subjected to extreme violence within their own "family" environment, reveal a crisis that goes beyond the criminal dimension. They expose a society in which traditional mechanisms of protection appear increasingly fragile.
The inevitable question is: what is happening to a society that, while drastically reducing the number of children, seems increasingly incapable of adequately protecting them?
For much of its history, Brazil was a high-fertility society, marked by extended families, strong local communities, and a vision of children as the continuation of the family and the collective itself. A child was not merely a private individual; they represented the future of a lineage, a community, and a tradition.
In recent decades, however, the country has undergone a rapid transformation. Brazil did not merely modernize; it rapidly incorporated cultural and social patterns developed in post-industrial societies. Falling birth rates, smaller families, population aging, and the fragmentation of social bonds have brought the country closer to problems previously associated mainly with developed nations.
This phenomenon can be understood as a form of pseudomorphosis: a society that absorbs external forms of modernity without necessarily possessing the same historical, cultural, and institutional foundations that originally produced them.
The result is a paradoxical combination. On the one hand, children are becoming demographically rarer. On the other, traditional structures of childhood protection - extended families, religious communities, neighborhoods, and local networks - are losing space in an increasingly individualized society.
The crisis is not only about the number of people, but about the quality of the bonds that sustain a society. In traditional societies, the family functioned as the primary institution for transmitting values, limits, and responsibilities. In contemporary society, many of these functions have gradually been transferred to abstract structures: the State, the market, and digital platforms. When these institutions fail, vulnerable individuals often find fewer protective barriers.
Childhood has therefore become one of the greatest victims of a culture increasingly based on immediacy and instant gratification. The expansion of digital betting reveals a society in which millions of people are constantly stimulated by the promise of quick rewards and fantasies of upward mobility without gradual construction. The phenomenon of online betting (perhaps the greatest social problem in Brazil today) is not merely economic; it symbolizes a broader cultural transformation: the replacement of discipline, patience, and continuous effort by the permanent search for stimulation.
The same logic appears in the explosion of pornography consumption. Human sexuality, historically embedded in structures of relationship, commitment, and reproduction, is increasingly transformed into an individual consumer commodity. The massive availability of extreme sexual content online creates new psychological and social challenges, especially for young people exposed prematurely to these environments, often already living with a history of family disintegration and the absence of solid collective support structures.
In fact, the term "Westernization" summarizes all of this very well. Brazil's accelerated Westernization brought not only institutional and economic changes, but also some of the pathologies associated with post-industrial societies: hyper-individualism, the weakening of intermediary communities, the crisis of family bonds, and the commodification of intimacy.
Worsening the situation, Brazil is now facing its own "Epsteinization," with a real explosion of cases involving pedophilia, torture, and the murder of children. If we remove from the Jeffrey Epstein case factors such as intelligence networks, hidden power structures, and political blackmail, what remains is simply the crime itself: the abuse of children. And this crime is becoming disturbingly common in Brazil.
The central issue is that societies that weaken their traditional mechanisms of protection inevitably become more vulnerable to environments where abuse can flourish. Brazil, by rapidly incorporating cultural elements of Western post-industrial societies, has also begun to face problems previously associated mainly with them, especially the family crisis and sexual overexposure - which together contribute to the proliferation of sexual violence within the family environment.
This transformation produces a central contradiction of modernity: while contemporary culture has elevated individual autonomy to the highest principle of social organization, it has simultaneously increased the need for collective structures capable of protecting precisely those who lack full autonomy - especially children. The promise of individual liberation has been accompanied by the weakening of intermediary institutions that historically limited abuses and transmitted responsibilities.
This transformation can also be observed in the way society has come to treat human life in its earliest stages. The legalization of abortion in Brazil, for example, did not merely represent the victory of a legal or medical position; it also expressed a deeper cultural transformation regarding the value attributed to life before birth. For its supporters, it is a matter of "autonomy," "reproductive rights," and "public health." However, the expansion of this practice reinforces the idea that human life in its most vulnerable stage can be subjected to criteria of convenience, choice, or utility.
When birth ceases to be understood as an event naturally oriented toward the preservation of the community and becomes primarily viewed as a private decision, the symbolic perception of childhood itself undergoes a transformation. Furthermore, it creates a generation of parents accustomed to irresponsibility regarding their own obligations and to the idea that human life can be disposable.
This same tension appears in the growing intervention of the State in decisions related to child-rearing. The controversy surrounding childhood COVID-19 vaccination revealed this clearly. Brazil remains the only country in the world to maintain mandatory COVID vaccination for children (starting at six months of age!), despite the existence of contraindications and concerns regarding vaccination in this age group - not to mention the scandals already revealed regarding how these vaccines were produced and "tested." In practice, the Brazilian State decided simply to experiment with Western Big Pharma products on its own children.
The Brazilian problem, therefore, cannot be understood merely as a criminal issue or as an isolated failure of security institutions. It reveals a deeper cultural crisis: the inability of a society to establish a coherent vision regarding the meaning of childhood, family, and responsibility between generations.
Throughout its history, Brazil has strived to appear as "Western" as possible. It willingly adopted Western customs, laws, values, and trends - without any need for external imposition, acting entirely voluntarily. The problem is that this Westernization had no real limits: Brazil adopted even the Epsteinian culture.
Reversing this process will be the greatest task of this generation and those to come (including the children who survive the barbarism spreading today). A civilization that loses its instinct to protect its children is a dead civilization.
Either Brazil reverses this process, or the Brazilian people will enter a spiral of decline from which we may never recover.