Women are the hidden victims of a Brazilian security policy that favors warlike confrontations with drug gangs, Amnesty International said in a report released yesterday.
While women account for a fraction of homicides and are rarely listed as victims of police bullets, the violence in Brazil’s shantytowns often shatters lives and leaves families without their main breadwinners.
“I think by highlighting the plight of women, you see how the problem of public security affects the community as whole,” report author and Amnesty Brazil campaigner Tim Cahill said by telephone from London. “It takes away the discourse of war and conflict that has always been empty.”
Amnesty said the problem is particularly acute in the poor hillside neighborhoods above Rio de Janeiro, where police routinely trade fire with heavily armed drug gangs. Thousands are killed each year in the violence.
Almost all the dead are officially labeled “bandits” and the killings acts of self-defense. That designation denies the victims’ families the possibility of compensation or redress. Meanwhile a scarcity of police in the shantytowns leaves women vulnerable to be preyed upon by drug lords, said the report, which was based on interviews with women in six Brazilian states in 2006 and last year.
“The state violates the rights of these women in three ways,” Cahill said. “It supports policing practices that lead to killings, perpetuates a system that ensures access to justice is extremely difficult, if not impossible, and condemns them to intense hardship.”
The country’s top official for women’s policy, Nilcea Freire, said the government was working on many of the areas mentioned in Amnesty’s report.
“The situation of women worries us, but it is possible to turn it around,” Freire said. “But it won’t be from one moment to the next. The government is taking a series of measures.”
Cahill said the government needs to provide hostels to protect women from violence and needs to improve treatment of women in prisons.
The report referred to the widely publicized case of a 15-year-old girl who was kept for 24 days in a holding cell with 20 to 30 men in Para state. The girl said she was raped by the men repeatedly.
Cahill said the girls’ case was not an isolated incident: “Now we have situations like the girl in Para popping out of the woodwork.”
The report praised the government for a new law to protect women from domestic violence, but said the measure had yet to be fully implemented.
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