Boxed Inserts on Comparative Criminology and Gender

Invisible Woman, 3rd Ed.

Joanne Belknap

2005

Chapter 10

Women’s Police Stations in São Paulo, Brazil

In the early 1980s, Brazilian feminist activists helped elect the Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, an opposition party that gained control in many state governments including São Paulo, Brazil (Santos, 2004). The newly elected governor of São Paulo, Franco Montoro, established Conselho Estadual da Condição Femininina (the State Council on the Feminine Condition) in 1983, staffed primarily by intellectual and middle-class feminists (ibid). Concerned with intimate partner abuse and sexual victimization, these women helped implement Delegacia da Muher (DdM), the world’s first all woman police station, in 1985, designed to respond to violent crimes against women (ibid).

Notably, many of the women officers (delegacias) were transferred (unwillingly) from the regular police departments to DdM, and did not identify as feminists. They viewed feminists as “against men,” particularly against male police officers (ibid). Even the first head of DdM, the world’s first women’s police station, Rosemary Corrêa, was not pleased about her appointment because she perceived that this would ruin her career in policing, she didn’t view violence against women as a “real” crime that should be addressed by the police instead of social workers, and she believed the regular police departments didn’t discriminate against women clients (Santos, 2004, 38). Thus, her belief that the DdM was unnecessary was severely challenged when 500 women lined up to file complaints the first day the DdM opened. Corrêa not only changed her idea that the DdM was unnecessary, but she grew to see her job and the DdM as extremely important and to “love” her work, and to understand feminism as “a movement struggling for women’s rights” rather than being “against men,” and began to publicly identify as a feminist (ibid).

Corrêa served as a great director/chief (delegada) of the DdM, partly because she understood so well how the delegacias(women police) working under her were reluctant to work in the DdM for the same reasons she had been reluctant to head it (e.g., felt like their new job was not true policing and viewed responding to women victims of male violence as unimportant policing work). Similar to Corrêa, many of the women she supervised changed their views about women victims of male violence, the need for the DdM, and their lack of power compared to male officers (although none of them adopted the identity of “feminist” for themselves (ibid).

Source: Santos, Cecília M. 2004. En-Gendering the Police: Women’s Police Stations and Feminism in São Paulo. Latin American Research Review 39:29-55.