RIO DE JANEIRO — Sometimes, when Alexsandra Moreira went to visit her parents in northeastern Brazil, the family noticed she had bruises on her arms and legs. But there was always an explanation — and never one tied to her husband, Marcos de Macedo.
“We thought their marriage was good,” Moreira’s sister Andreza da Silva remembers.
It wasn’t.
Macedo had beaten Moreira and her four children for many years. Moreira managed to break free, but it would cost her her life. One day when she was on her way to her new job at a supermarket, Macedo jumped on board her bus, pulled out a knife and fatally stabbed her 21 times.
Moreira’s death in 2014 is far from an isolated incident. There are five women beaten every two minutes in Brazil, and an average of 13 murdered every day, according to the nonprofit Mapa da Violencia. The rate of violence against women, including homicide, is so high that femicide became a specific crime in March 2015.
Violence against women is a worldwide problem, with up to 70 percent of women experiencing violence in their lifetime. But the issue is particularly pronounced in Latin America, the region with the most female murders on earth. The phenomenon, which grabs headlines from Argentina to Guatemala, is often seen as a result of continuing gender inequality. In Brazil, the violence has unique roots — and is inspiring a growing group of tech-savvy female activists determined to squash it.
Brazil stands out from its Latin American peers by the division of female murder victims along racial lines. Black women are statistically almost twice as likely to be murdered than white women. There were 2,875 black women murdered in 2013, compared to 1,576 white women. Blacks make up slightly more than half of the population.
Brazil received the highest number of slaves in the Americas, and was also the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery, in 1888. Some believe the attitude among men who view women — particularly black women — as their property, with which they can do as they please, is a legacy of that history.
“It is like a cultural trace which is very much present in Brazil today, this idea of people as property, an inheritance from the patrimonialist and patriarchal past,” says Brazilian journalist Rogerio Pacheco Jordao, who wrote a doctoral thesis on the legacy of slavery in Brazil. “Slavery was abolished 130 years ago — it’s not so distant. That is only three, four generations ago.”
Fueling the violence, experts say, is a police force that doesn’t always take allegations of violence toward women as seriously as it should.
Silva, for example, believes her sister could still be alive today if police had reacted appropriately to the family’s calls for help. Just weeks before the murder, Macedo went to Moreira’s parents’ home, where she was staying, and threatened to kill everyone. The family called the police, but they never came.
“When a woman walks into a precinct, she never knows if she is going to be treated well or badly — even if the police officer is going to come on to her,” says Hildebrando Saraiva, a civil police inspector in Rio de Janeiro.
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Combating violence against women means challenging the kind of entrenched, macho attitudes in the police force and elsewhere in Brazilian society. And it’s a tough moment to do so. Conservative lawmakers are pushing against efforts to teach a domestic violence law in schools and contemplating introducing a bill that could make it more burdensome to report cases of physical assault. A recent survey by the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety found that a third of Brazilians believe if a woman is wearing provocative clothes and is raped, she is to blame.
But some in Brazil are rising to the occasion.
The common Brazilian expression “Em briga de marido e mulher, ninguem mete a colher,” means roughly, “You should not interfere in arguments between a husband and wife.” In March this year, a group of women from northeastern Brazil took the phrase as the inspiration to build an app, Mete a Colher, which encourages people to do exactly that.
The tool links women in abusive or violent relationships with others who can help them — from lawyers and psychologists to other women who have also been mistreated. The idea is to encourage women to recognize signs of physical or emotional abuse and leave violent or abusive relationships before they escalate.
The app has a Snapchat-like security function where conversations are immediately deleted — a plus for women who fear repercussions from violent partners if their conversations are discovered. The tool has received an initial round of funding and will be available throughout Brazil in 2017. A group of Facebook supporters anticipating the app’s release have already started connecting women to the help they need.
Determined to raise awareness that violence is not always physical, the women behind the Mete a Colher app ran a hashtag campaign this past June on social media, #elenaotebate (he doesn’t hit you), encouraging people to relate instances of emotional abuse.
“He doesn’t hit you, but he makes you apologise for his mistakes,” read one. “He doesn’t hit you, but he tells his friends you are crazy and hysterical,” said another post.
[READ: When Women Wear Blue Helmets.]
“People love what we have done so far, but there is still a lot of work to be done,” says Aline Silveira, a developer and co-creator of the app. “We must keep fighting for equality, respect and against rape culture, for the next generations to be better than ours.”
While resistance to change is strong, some are convinced Brazil is experiencing a “Women’s Spring” led by online groups.
“Increasingly, magazines and newspapers are covering feminist issues or looking at things from a feminist perspective, and lots of great projects are coming up,” says Gabriela Loureiro, a journalist who writes for feminist site Think Olga.
She points to the recent hashtag #PrimeiroAssedio [first assault], which invited women to tweet about their first experience of sexual harassment or assault. The social media trend raised awareness of the issue and encouraged people to let abused women know they are not alone.
“It is a boom which started a few years ago, and keeps getting bigger all the time,” she says.
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In Brazil, Online Activists Fight Violence Against Women originally appeared on usnews.com
