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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
RSS