"RESPECT THE POLICE"

POLICE VIOLENCE AS A MANIFESTATION OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN BRAZIL

Abstract

This research aims to understand how police violence affects women in Brazil. For this,
it starts from the question of what are the forms of violence practiced by State agents
against victims. The motivation for this corroborates the exercise of broadening the
debate on gender violence, highlighting the acts of state violence perpetrated by police
officers and justified by the State. The insufficiency of official statistics led to the
analysis of news and, thus, the media emerges as a starting point, or rather, as a
modality of collecting information on expressions of violence that are little investigated
and made visible in research or reports. From the selection of a sample of news, the
study observes that women are exposed to daily violence practiced by public security
agents. Violent demonstrations predominantly occur on public roads, they are physical
and verbal, the latter being explicitly loaded with a sexist, racist and transphobic
grammar. Of the 22 cases analyzed, 8 news items do not express the victim's racial
identity in any way, which makes up 36.4% of the sample. Of the articles that allowed
the apprehension of this category of analysis, in 11 of them the victims were black
(50%) and in 3 the victims were white (13.6%). Most cases occurred in peripheral
neighborhoods of the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Regarding lethal violence,
83% of victims of police lethality were black women. We observed the relevance of
race and territory markers for understanding the phenomenon of police violence
against women, since it disproportionately affects black bodies in racialized territories.
We realize that in the case of police violence against women, a new device comes into
play, which are videos. The images appear as the main instrument for denouncing an
invisible manifestation of state violence in Brazil, even capable of contradicting the
versions of the police.