This article proposes a reflection on the practices of reading and writing as important pedagogical and cultural mediations within the processes of emotional recovery and elaboration of experiences in children and young people who are victims of violence, such as displacement, abandonment, forced recruitment, extreme poverty, domestic abuse, etc. With the ethical sense and memory as conceptual focuses, we approach the reading experiences of children and young people to give an account of the possibilities that the word opens for the encounter and recognition of themselves, others and the world.