Child Abuse Cases Shock the Portuguese : Society: Experts say poverty and high rate of child labor, more prevalent in Portugal than other parts of Western Europe, contribute to abuse of children.

Vitor Hugo, 2, lay bruised and battered on a hospital bed. A medic said the comatose child was dying.

Two days later, state television shocked its viewers again with pictures of Catia, another 2-year-old, shown at the trial of a couple accused of beating, starving and sexually assaulting her.

The two cases caused outrage in a country of strong family traditions.

About 6,000 people stormed the court after a jury cleared a 35-year-old man of raping Catia but gave him six years for molesting and beating her. At the funeral of Vitor Hugo, a crowd threatened to lynch a man accused of beating the boy to death.

Child abuse is seldom talked about in this nation of 10 million people, and official figures on the problem are scarce.

Only a few cases reach the courts, but legal experts who conducted a study in 1986 estimated that up to 30,000 children were victims of abuse.

Poverty, illiteracy and alcoholism, all important contributors to child abuse, are more prevalent in Portugal than in most other Western European countries, said Almiro Simoes Rodrigues, who helped prepare the report.

“We need better education, to stop the old idea that children are just the property of the parents, like a dog or cat,” he said.

Catia’s story is typical of many in the backward rural areas of northern and central Portugal, Simoes Rodrigues said.

Like many poor Portuguese, her parents took temporary jobs in Switzerland for wages five times what they could make at home. Swiss immigration laws prevented them from taking their children along.

For 50,000 escudos a month, about $340, another couple in Quinta da Pucarica, a village near the northern city of Guarda, agreed to look after Catia and her two older sisters.

Prosecutor Antonio Tomas said the couple regularly beat the child, starved her, locked her up alone, and left her dirty and tied up with electric cords. The man was convicted Nov. 11 of aggravated sexual assault.

He and his wife are alleged to have consulted a witch, who told them the child was “jinxed and possessed.” People in rural Portugal often seek advice from self-proclaimed witches and soothsayers.

More than a year after being reunited with her parents, Catia still is covered with scars and walks with difficulty, according to reports by Portuguese journalists who visited the family.

Vitor Hugo was found groaning on the floor of his mother’s tiny apartment in Gaia, a northern town, and died in the hospital a week later.

Police arrested Jose Candido, an illiterate, 24-year-old bricklayer who lived with the boy’s mother. The mother left the boy with Candido while she went to her job as a housemaid. Candido claimed that Vitor Hugo fell out of bed.

Many other Portuguese children are driven by poverty to live in the streets. Ragged child beggars are a sight in Lisbon, and social workers say street children often are drawn into prostitution or drug abuse.

In addition, Portugal is estimated to have the highest rate of child labor in Western Europe.

A study by Anti-Slavery International, based in London, said up to 200,000 children work illegally, most of them on construction sites or in textile and shoe factories.

Many are paid less than $55 a month and receive no education, it said.

“A child who doesn’t go to school and is paid very little or practically nothing for monotonous, repetitive work is . . . destined to grow up with a slave mentality,” said lan Whittaker, a spokesman for the organization.