While murder rates fall in Brazil, femicide remains on the rise

Cuiabá, Brazil — Murder rates in Brazil are falling. In 2019, the number of victims of violent crimes fell 19 percent from 2018, down to 41,634, the lowest number since the Brazilian Public Security Forum began collecting data in 2007. In fact, those numbers have steadily been declining since 2018, after hitting a peak of nearly 64,000 murders in 2017.

While President Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters are quick to claim credit, the decline can be largely attributed to the end of violent conflict between rival criminal factions, who have long fought for control of the country’s drug trade; measures taken by the government under former President Michel Temer — which, among other things, has improved the coordination of police forces; and state-level interventions in prisons, such as isolating leaders of criminal groups to make it more difficult to coordinate actions beyond prison walls.

And yet, femicide in the country remains on the rise.

A longstanding scourge

According to a survey conducted by Brazilian news site G1, and based off official data, Brazil experienced a 7-percent increase in femicides from 2018 to 2019, as the number of recorded cases jumped from 1,173 murders in 2018 to 1,314 murders in 2019. And the 2018 figure was already a 12-percent increase over the year before.

Femicide is described as “any crime that involves domestic violence, contempt, or discrimination against women, which results in their death.” It was codified as a criminal offense under the country’s Femicide Law of 2015, which was announced by then-President Dilma Rousseff on International Women’s Day, and added harsher penalties for specific cases, such as when violence is committed against pregnant women, girls under 14, women above 60, and women and girls with disabilities.

“It has taken us a long time to say that the killing of a woman is a different phenomenon,” Nadine Gasman, then-head of UN Women in Brazil, told Reuters. “Men are killed in the street, women are killed in the home. Men are killed with guns, women with knives and hands.”

That legislation further strengthened the Maria da Penha Law of 2006, which increased sentences for abusers, established special domestic violence courts, and required the authorities to open 24-hour shelters for abused women. The law, also sanctioned by Rousseff, was the first real instrument to protect women against abuse and violence.

Femicide cases often stem from existing abuse by an intimate partner. The perpetrator usually already cohabits with the victim and resorts to violence “out of jealousy or [anger from an attempt] to separate, using household weapons such as knives,” said Elaini Cristina Gonzaga da Silva, director of the Orbis Center for Studies in Law and International Relations and a law professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).

Rosana Leite Antunes de Barros, a public defender and coordinator for the National Commission for the Promotion and Defense of Women’s Rights — a collegiate body of public defenders that addresses issues related to violence against women — believes that there might also be a correlation between femicides and women’s growing independence. Women in the country are growing as both independent earners and heads of households. In 2015, about 30 million households were headed by women, more than double that recorded in 2001.

“With financial independence, the woman no longer tolerates aggressions, leaving the relationship,” said de Barros. “The man, dissatisfied with the end of the relationship, commits femicide.”

Brazil’s Minister of Justice and Public Security Sérgio Moro took this explanation one further. In his opening remarks at an event commemorating Maria da Penha Day last August, the minister took the opportunity to reiterate his belief that violence against women was a “negative side effect” of women’s growing participation and involvement in society. The day before, he said that men resorted to violence out of intimidation. “Domestic violence is due to this cultural defect, often an addiction, a criminal spirit,” he said.

da Silva disagreed, countering that, “besides naturalizing the behavior, [Moro] removes it from its political context, demonstrating ignorance of the reality of violence against women.”

What accounts for the rise in cases?

Since the Maria da Penha Law was enacted, murders of women began to be analyzed more rigorously, explained Barros. “Thus, domestic and family violence started to ‘appear’ in Brazil.”

And since passage of the Femicide Law, “the number of femicides has been more effectively monitored,” said Jozirlethe Criveletto, chief of the Cuiabá Specialized Police Station for the Defense of Women in the state of Mato Grosso — a west-central state bordering Paraguay and largely covered by the Amazon rainforest. She believes that the relatively recent classification of femicide as a separate crime from homicide could account for the rise. “It is [only] natural that better reporting contributes to the increase of femicide rates,” she said.

Still, better monitoring has its own impediments. Women’s police stations are specialized stations designated to handle gender crimes with sensitivity, but they are few in number. There are only five specialized police stations in Mato Grosso — a state with a population of 3.4 million — and one of them is in the capital, Cuiabá, which is meant to serve a population of approximately 612,000.

“We have cases happening in municipalities in the interior of the state that do not have specialized police stations — some don’t have police stations at all,” said Criviletto, admitting that access is its own obstacle.

Mato Grosso also has a dearth of public defender’s offices in smaller cities, Criviletto said, which could have otherwise served women victims of violence in lieu of the specialized stations.

‘We are talking about breaking the cycle’

While existing legislation imposes tougher penalties for perpetrators of domestic violence and femicide, many believe that the weight of the effort to combat violence against women should be on prevention.

Barros noted that femicide “is not the first crime against the woman [but] a heralded crime,” pointing to the many signs of abuse that eventually culminate in femicide.

“When we talk about femicide and preventive public policies,” added Criviletto, “we are talking about breaking the cycle at the very beginning, when physical assaults and threats manifest.”

Among the initiatives Criviletto believes would help is including women’s rights education in school curricula, along with the instruments for protecting those rights, such as the Maria da Penha Law itself. Another, she suggests, is men’s rehabilitation. In early April of this year, an article of the Maria da Penha Law was amended to include re-education for domestic violence perpetrators as part of their rehabilitation. “This re-education of aggressors is fundamental so that they can get rid of the deep-rooted prejudices that only reinforce the practice of violence, which generally [promotes] possession and the idea that everything can be solved through violence,” said Criviletto.

For the government’s part, the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights’ press office told Women Under Siege via email that it is preparing a national plan to combat femicide, which the ministry will present at the end of July. According to the ministry, the plan promises “a new perspective on the issue,” both in terms of how the government first approaches abuse victims as well as how it will create and maintain support networks for them. However, the ministry declined to disclose any part of the plan.

Advocates for change are not relying on the federal government for leadership.

Even as the rate of femicides continues to climb, federal funding for the few initiatives addressing violence against women is dwindling just as quickly. Last year, the budget for the Secretariat of Policies for Women was reduced by 27 percent, according to data obtained by Human Rights Watch through a Freedom of Information (FOIA) Request. “If we take the budget as evidence of the importance given to the issue,” said da Silva, “the fight against violence against women is at the bottom of the list.”

Indeed, there is little to suggest that combatting violence against women is a priority for Bolsonaro, whose track record hardly points to support for women’s rights and protection. Five years before Bolsonaro was sworn in as president in 2019, and was subsequently dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics,” he made international headlines as the Brazilian congressman who told fellow lawmaker Maria do Rosário, a former human rights minister, “I wouldn’t rape you because you’re not worthy of it.”

In 2015, he voted against the Femicide Law.

And as recently as the end of March, Bolsonaro made a flippant comment about domestic violence being a faultless crime under lockdown orders amid the COVID-19 pandemic: when deliberating whether to issue a decree to return Brazilians to work, he said, “There’s a woman being beaten at home. Why is that? There are homes where there’s no bread, everybody’s fighting and nobody’s right. How do you put an end to it? You have to work, my God. Is it a crime to work?”

Without buy-in — much less leadership — from the highest positions in government, the fight ahead to end femicide in the country is a long one indeed. All the while, femicide rates continue to rise.

*Irenilda “Irezinha” dos Santos contributed to reporting.