Since 2015, femicide has been considered a crime in Brazil; throughout history it has been one of the most perverse demonstrations of the patriarchy in society. According to Eleonora Menicucci, sociologist and ex-minister for the Department for Women’s Policies, femicide is a hate crime whose concept emerged in the 1970s, to recognize and provide visibility to the violent deaths of women resulting from discrimination, inequality, oppression and systematic violence According to a G1 (Globo News) survey based on official data from Brazil’s states and the Federal District, in 2022, in Brazil an average of one woman was killed every 6 hours, simply for being a woman. This is 1.4 thousand women whose lives were cut down – the highest recorded number in Brazil since the femicide law came into force.
If the official data is frightening, the crimes that don’t even enter the statistics provide further evidence of the severity of the situation. It was in their search to investigate this information in greater depth and to strengthen the feminist struggle against violence that the Ceará Women’s Forum (Fórum Cearense de Mulheres: FCM), part of the Association of Brazilian Women (Associação de Mulheres Brasileiras: AMB), launched the “FCM/AMB 2023 Dossier: Counter-data on Femicides in Ceará,” in March this year. The project, which was supported by CESE, provides statistics about the killings of girls and women in Ceará in 2019 and 2020, and challenges the data published by the government, revealing the under-reporting of femicide in the state.
Rose Marques, lawyer and activist at the FCM/AMB, noted that producing the dossier was a necessary task to provide more legitimacy to the feminist movement’s claims, given that it is constantly delegitimized. “We saw that producing data was the necessary condition to continue our critical mobilization of support for public policies to confront violence against women and against femicide. This strategy has also served to ensure we are heard and recognized as a critical and proactive movement, with reliable knowledge and the necessary conditions to pressurize for a change in the course of public policies,” she explained.
Challenges to producing the data
The research and systematization of information was quite complex, as Rose explained. “Our methodological approach was to organise the data in a spreadsheet and individually analyse cases from newspapers and other media outlets. For each case, we sought to understand what gender components were present, looking at each crime’s circumstances and how the data was treated by the security bodies.” The research also ran into other difficulties, such as an absence of data from the Ceará government about the race of femicide victims. For Rose, this attitude reinforced the racism in the Public Authorities.
“While more comprehensive research, such as that of the National Public Security Forum, indicates an increase in the killing of black women, in Ceará we don’t even have the essential data. Denying or hindering the production of this data directly involves the racist patriarchy, which affects black women and girls most perversely,” she denounced.
Pressure on public bodies
Even prior to the launch of the dossier, the FCM had run initiatives to expand dialogue with society and challenge the Public Authorities in relation to the data. In November 2022, at the height of activities for the month of the struggle against violence against women, a public hearing was held in the Ceará Legislative Assembly in partnership with its Human Rights Commission and mandated by State Deputy Renato Roseno, the Commission’s President. “At the time, we presented the research data, which was still being systematized. Nevertheless, it had an impact on the public and on the authorities, since the discrepancy with official data on femicide is immense, to the order of dozens of times higher,” Rose noted.
Following the official launch of the document in March this year, wide-scale repercussions were felt in the press and there has been an impact on government action. “In March, we had a meeting with the State Secretary of Public Security and representatives from various departments and bodies in the Public Security and Social Defence Department (Secretaria de Segurança Pública e Defesa Social do Ceará: SSPDS) of Ceará State. After presenting and debating the data, the SSPDS committed to promoting changes in the way lethal gender violence is processed. In the following week, the SSPDS published news in the Official Gazette about the adoption of certain changes discussed at the meeting. Further, some of the public policies and/or measures we have been demanding since 2018 have been implemented by the new government,” she noted.
She emphasized the importance of CESE’s support in building this initiative. “We are very grateful to CESE for this partnership. Not only for the financial, but also for the political support, trusting in the technical capacity and commitment of activists in our movement and in the power of our struggle,” She continued by asserting that the women remain firm in their collective struggle for justice and equality. “Women organized from a feminist perspective fight! They fight for themselves and for other women. Without the feminist struggles, which denounce and challenge these relations, there would be no way to build a freer, fairer and more autonomous life for women. For all women,” she concluded.