Violence against children and adolescents is an unequal power relationship. The Brazilian Child and Adolescent Act adopt a strategy of safety and protection of all suspected cases of abuse. Objectives: The aim of this paper is to analyze the system of general practitioners (GPs) noti cation for child and adolescent mistreatment throughout Ceará State, Brazil. Methods: A structured questionnaire was given to 227 general practitioners in 85 cities across the state. A quantitative analyze was

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... The research was conducted in accordance with recognized ethical standards and national/international laws. Results: The professional average age is 35.7 years (Standard Deviation = 12.2). The GPs have been working on primary healthcare less than 05 years (51.5%). The results illustrate that the majority of GP had no training on child/adolescent mistreatment noti cation (73.6%), but knew the Child and Adolescent Act (72.7%). GPs that trust in protection agencies of child and adolescent are the majority (70.8%) and do not feel under threat by the State (75.8%), for this reason they know how to forward the child/adolescent mistreatment cases (64.2%). Among 227 GPs participants, 53,1% affirmed that they had identified cases of child abuse in their careers (53.1%), nevertheless, just 52.6% of these occurrences of abuse had noti ed. Conclusions: These ndings show that as less training GPs are, less noti cation of abuse problem they do. This is under the Brazilian National Health System (SUS) expectation and an abuse noti cation system on the SUS must to be done, looking for changes on the GPs noti cation.