Brazil reeling from Brutal gang rape
LAST WEEK, tens of thousands of women took to the streets of Brazil to protest the alleged gang rape of a 16-year-old girl by up to 33 men.
Horrific mobile phone footage of the naked, semi-conscious girl was uploaded to Twitter in Rio de Janeiro at the end of May. In the 40-second film, two men, laughing, pose next to her genitals.
‘This one’s been impregnated by more than 30,’ one of them says. ‘Look how it is. Bleeding. That’s where the train passed.’
According to the victim, she visited a boyfriend’s house in a favela west of the city on a Saturday afternoon. From then, she only remembers waking up the next day, drugged and naked, in another house in the same area surrounded by armed men.
As the news spread, Brazilians reacted with outrage – ongoing demonstrations are demanding justice and calling for an end to a culture of sexual violence.
Speaking at a rally in downtown Rio on Friday, Alice Duvalle, a 45-year-old communications specialist, told Grazia she felt compelled to do something. ‘This was an act of barbarity,’ she said.
After receiving death threats, the victim and her family are now under police protection. Two men have been arrested, and the police are searching for four more.
The case has sparked serious soulsearching in a country often portrayed as a joyful carnivalesque land of sexual liberation, but where the vast majority of women live in fear of sexual violence.
Rio’s O Globo newspaper columnist Dorrit Harazim compared this attack to the brutal gang rape – and subsequent death – of the 23-year-old Indian woman Jyoti Singh in December 2012.
But while a public outcry in India led to the creation of special courts to accelerate rape trials, Harazim wonders whether Brazil will face up to the problem.
A Brazilian woman is raped every 11 minutes. But two recent national surveys found that less than 10% of rapes are actually reported to the police, compared with an international average of 35%.
Police in Brazil are widely distrusted, particularly in poorer communities, and in this most recent case, some police officers mocked the victim’s claims on Facebook. The police comissioner initially assigned to the case publicly doubted her version of events and asked the victim whether she engaged in group sex.
Despite the rallies in her support, many Brazilians have also questioned the girl’s statement and local media have reported extensively on her troubled home life. But as Luise Bello, an advocate from the feminist non-governmental organisation Think Olga, says, ‘Whatever decisions she may have made in the past, the crime is still a crime.’
For Ivana Bentes, a professor of communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s chauvinism has deep roots. ‘It started with colonists raping indigenous women and carried on as slave-owners abused slaves. Even now, maids working for Brazil’s elite are expected to be at the service of their masters.’
Steadily, however, Bentes believes that Brazil is changing, though that change can be hard to spot. Dilma Rousseff, their first female president, was removed from power in May and is facing impeachment.
Still for Luise Bello the furore around the rape shows progress. ‘This is a very important moment for talking about women in Brazil,’ she says.