Kayllani Lima Silva
news reporter
Contexts of violence, social vulnerability, lack of financial autonomy and bottlenecks in public policies form part of a structure that victimizes and fuels the statistics of murders against women. In 10 years, Rio Grande had the third lowest rate of reduction in homicides against this population among the 17 states in the country that showed a drop in the rate. In 10 states, the numbers rose. The murder rate fell 14.2% in Rio Grande do Norte, from 4.4 to 3.8 crimes per 100 thousand inhabitants, only greater than the decrease in Maranhão (-6. 3%) and Pernambuco (-11.5%). The index is still below the national average of -19.7%. The data refers to the period from 2011 to 2021 and was released in the 2023 edition of the Atlas of Violence.
Last week, another case of femicide was recorded in RN. Lawyer Andreia Teixeira was shot dead in Nova Parnamirim. Lenivaldo César de Castro, her boyfriend, was also killed. The suspect, Emerson Carlos, committed suicide last Friday after being surrounded by police. According to Andreia’s family, Emerson was the lawyer’s ex-partner and did not accept the end of the relationship. “My mother felt threatened by him. She was already talking to me. We were trying to study some type of measure”, said Ronald Teixeira, Andreia’s son.
Professor Karina Cardoso Meira, from the Postgraduate Program in Demography at UFRN, studies the history of homicides against women in the country and provides an explanation of the State’s data. In her assessment, the low rate of reduction must be analyzed in parallel with questions about the conditions of the policy for preventing violence against women in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. “One of the issues that we need to look at, [por exemplo]is whether there are shelters and how the Women’s Assistance Police Stations (Deams) are functioning”, he mentions.
This is because, as lawyer Juliana Herrera, a specialist in Women’s Law, points out, the homicide against this public presents a previous chain of violence. “Generally, domestic violence escalates in severity and level of violence. It is unlikely that a woman will be immediately physically attacked or killed. Therefore, it is necessary for women to be aware of the signs of an abusive relationship. In most cases, there are verbal and threatened attacks prior to these physical attacks, homicides and attempted murders,” she explains.
On the other hand, to serve the victims, Rio Grande do Norte has only 12 Deam’s. Although she recognizes that a policy is needed beyond the expansion of reporting spaces, Karina Cardoso Meira draws attention to the fact that the lack of a more specialized reception, in the case of complaints made in general police stations and mostly staffed by male officers , tend to increase the chances of women being revictimized in a context of violence.
In addition to this, the professor argues the need for the country’s state structure to provide women with the necessary conditions to safely leave the context of violence during and after reporting. “There are studies that show that women’s financial autonomy is a protective factor against violence and feminicide, depending on local conditions. If it is a highly conservative place in relation to gender roles, having autonomy becomes a risk factor because the man raised in the conservative environment will not admit that she has it. In places where this gender culture is less traditional, it becomes a protective factor,” she explains.
If, on the one hand, homicides against women cut across all classes and have nuances defined by region, on the other, it goes deeper into the breakdown by race. According to data from the Violence Atlas, in ten years, homicides against black women reduced by 0.2% in Rio Grande do Norte, while among non-black women the drop was 18.3%. As Karina Melo explains, being a black woman in the State increased the risk of being murdered, exposing the racism that also permeates the crime.
“These data show us that all women, from all life cycles, are at risk of suffering gender-based violence. However, this risk is differentiated by race and class. So poor black women are much more at risk of suffering violence than white, educated women,” she adds.
Increase in homicides in homes
Although worrying, the data from Rio Grande do Norte are just a snapshot of the national and regional context of violence against women in Brazil. In the research “Homicides perpetrated at home among Brazilian women from 2000 to 2022”, carried out by Karina Cardosa Meira and three other researchers, the Northeast appears with the 3rd highest rate of homicides of women at home. In total, there were 2.07 cases for every 100 thousand women, second only to the North (2.5) and Central West (2.47). The data is based on the SUS Mortality Information System (SIM/DATASUS).
The term “homicides in homes”, points out the Atlas of Violence 2023, is used as an indicator for cases of femicides, since the majority of murders within the residence are responsible for known perpetrators, spouses or family members of the victim. In addition to this, the need for the indicator accompanies the fact that the data used in the document, as well as in the UFRN research, are based on death certificates. These, in turn, do not present variables that can elucidate the woman’s relationship with her aggressor, or whether the crime was a result of the gender violence that characterizes feminicide.
“The majority of feminicides occur within homes. So, although we cannot point out that 100% of homicides that happen at home are feminicides, they give us an idea of how this dynamic of feminicide is happening because they can show whether this trend is increasing or decreasing, and which women are most affected”, highlights Karina Cardoso Meira.
Within this scenario, the Southeast region recorded the lowest rate of female homicides from 2000 to 2021 at home, with 1.38 cases. Drawing a parallel, the professor observes that living in the Northeast within the historical series of the research, for example, increased the risk of women being murdered at home by 1.5% compared to the Southeast. “The Northeast and the North were the only two regions in Brazil that showed an increase in these rates”, she adds.
Faced with increasing cases of violence against women in the country, which still faces a lack of integration of public security and health data to accurately identify cases of feminicide, Karina Cardoso Meira defends intersectionality between sectors of the public sphere to think about policies public. “About [esses dados] We see that we are evaluating the tip of the iceberg because the problem could be much bigger”, he adds.
Lawyer Juliana Herrera shares a similar view. Although she recognizes the increase in women’s access to reporting channels, she warns that violence is still affected by underreporting. According to the Ministry of Women, the number of reports of violence against women grew 23% from 2022 to 2023.
report it
In cases of violence, in addition to Dial 180, lawyer Juliana Herrera states that it is recommended that women identify that they are in an abusive relationship (e.g. threats and verbal attacks), seek a specialized police station and ask for the measure protective.
Numbers
(variation from 2011 to 2021 per 100 thousand inhabitants):
nFemale homicide rate: -14.2%
nHomicide rate of black women: -0.2%
nHomicide rate of non-black women: -18.3%
