The recently released edition of the Violence Atlas, organized by the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea, in Portuguese), shows that the homicide rate among Black women rose by 0.5% in Brazil between 2020 and 2021. In the same period, there was a 2.8% decrease among non-Black women, which include white, Asian and Indigenous women.
In 2021, 2,601 Black women were victims of homicide in the country. This number represents 67.4% of all women killed. It also corresponds to a rate of 4.3 female victims per 100,0000 population. This is a rate 79% higher than that of non-Black women.
“Historically, Black people are the primary victims of violence in Brazil, a fact that, unfortunately, is discussed year after year in the Violence Atlas. When we talk about violence against women, data don’t change: fatal violence prevails among Black women more than non-Black women,” the document concludes.
Some reasons are presented to explain this scenario, including economic factors. Racial and gender discrimination in the marketplace and the consequent lower income of Black women compared to non-Black women also make the former more dependent on their partners and more prone to suffering gender violence.
The Violence Atlas is based mainly on data from Brazil’s Mortality Information System (known in Portuguese as SIM) and the Notifiable Diseases Information System (Sinan, in Portuguese), both under the management of the Ministry of Health. The document also considers data from the demographic mapping released by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE, in Portuguese) and the Brazilian Public Security Forum. The historic series of homicides was updated with information from 2021.
Women murdered
According to the Atlas, between 2020 and 2021, 14 Brazilian states had a rise in female homicide rates. São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Santa Catarina and the Federal District recorded the lowest rates.
At the same time, Roraima was at the top of Brazilian states with the highest female homicide rates in 2021: 7.4 women killed per 100,000 population. Ceará was in the second position, followed by Acre. “It is noteworthy that Roraima, despite showing a decrease of almost 41%, remains the state with the highest rate of female homicides in the country,” reports Ipea.
Three causes are listed as reasons for the rise in gender violence against women in recent years. Firstly, the relevant decrease in the federal budget for public policies to combat the problem. According to the Atlas, the budget proposed by the previous government, led by Jair Bolsonaro (Liberal Party), reduced by 94% the estimated resources. Another factor is political radicalism, which supposedly strengthened patriarchal values.
The third reason listed was the COVID-19 pandemic, which produced five consequences: restrictions to the functioning of protective services, less social control due to isolation, an increase in conflicts associated with longer periods of coexistence, an increase in divorces and relative economic loss of women's families.
Gender violence
Data from the Brazilian Public Security Forum 2022 - gathered in the Violence Atlas - provides information that reinforces the panorama of increasing gender-based violence.
"When the respondents were asked if they had been hit, pushed or kicked in the last 12 months, 11.6% of women responded positively, compared to a rate of 6.3% in the 2021 survey," the publication informs.
According to the Violence Atlas, the numbers show only the tip of the iceberg. “Governments were never interested in producing, on a national scale, a house survey with a robust methodology, random sampling and the necessary methodological requirements so that the interviewees could truly report the facts on this very delicate topic,” it reads.
Besides, it must be recalled that femicide has been a crime since 2015, which is still recent. Consequently, public security agencies are still learning about this criminal classification. The crime of femicide is characterized as murder that involves domestic and family violence, disregard for or discrimination against the condition of women. Therefore, not every homicide that has a woman as the victim qualifies as femicide.
Most women killed in Brazil die in places other than their homes. However, data shows that, while the murders of women fell from 2018 on, following the general homicide rate, the rates of the murders of women inside their houses kept more or less the same. When looking at age, however, there were changes.
“It is interesting to realize that, throughout time, there are proportionally fewer homicides of women within homes for age groups under 24. At the same time, there is relative stability in this proportion for young adults between 25 and 29 years old, and a proportional increase in the lethality of women over 30 years of age,” the Atlas concludes.
It can be explained by two factors: the decrease in the young population due to population ageing and a higher tendency of younger generations to refute patriarchal values.
The Black population
Even when the data consider the Black population as a whole, the scenario is similar. In 2021, 79% of all homicide victims in Brazil were Black. The publication points out that socioeconomic conditions make this population more vulnerable, but indicates it is also necessary to consider another factor.
"Two people with the same characteristics (education, sex, age, marital status), who live in the same neighborhood, but one is Black and the other is white: the former has a 23% more chance of being murdered compared to the latter. In other words, in addition to the indirect channels through which structural racism operates to leave a higher lethality rate among the Black population, there is racism that kills, operating directly in lethality against Black people through an atavistic process of dehumanization, which prints a stereotypical image of Black people as dangerous, poor and criminal," the publication highlights.
