BRASILIA, July 14 : Twenty-eight Brazilian children and adolescents are murdered every day, double the number a quarter century ago, when Latin America's biggest country passed a law to protect minors, UNICEF said on Monday.
The United Nations children's rights agency contrasted Brazil's dismal toll -- 10,500 murders of minors in 2013 -- with Congress's focus on a law lowering the age of adult criminal responsibility from 18 to 16.
The death rate for minors, UNICEF said, is higher than typical even for warzones.
"You can see a push from parts of society to make adolescents responsible for the violence," the report said.
"In reality, there are death sentences every day on adolescents, especially those who are black, across the whole country."
The youth mortality comes against a background of widespread violence in most Brazilian cities, with just the city of Rio de Janeiro, for example, already seeing 534 murders and more than 1,000 attempted murders in the first five months of this year.     ?AFP