Shocking Brazilian survey fuels 'I don't deserve to be raped' campaign

Terrence McCoy

According to a recent survey, 65.1 percent of Brazilians think that if a women “dresses provocatively” she deserves to be “attacked and raped.

‘I don’t deserve to be raped’ campaign responds to shocking Brazilian survey

By Terrence McCoy
April 3 at 4:15 am

Women who belong to the Bastardxs Movement hold protest signs on Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, Jan. 18, 2014. Protesters said they were demonstrating against physical and psychological violence against women by wearing a range of clothing, from fully covered to almost nothing, to make the point they have the right to wear whatever they want. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)

There are few statistics more jarring than this one: According to a survey released late last week, 65.1 percent of Brazilians think if a woman is “dressed provocatively” she deserves to be “attacked and raped.” Here’s another one: 59 percent of the 3,810 respondents across 212 cities said if a Brazilian woman “knew how to behave” there would be fewer rapes.

Source: Dossiê Mulher 2013, Brazil’s Institute of Public Safety. Graphic: Tobey – The Washington Post.

And then there’s this whopper: More than two-thirds of the respondents were women.
News of the Institute for Applied Economic Research survey fueled an existing movement and unleashed a tidal wave of new outrage. It crested with the hashtag #ninguemMereceSerEstuprada — I don’t deserve to be raped — and crashed across all forms of social media. Many tweeted photographs as emotive as they were triumphant. Depicting women in various states of undress, they juxtaposed sensuality with strength. Some women were topless, expressions austere, clutching a poster condemning the survey’s results.
The survey and the resulting backlash highlight broader tension in Brazilian society over gender equality and the role violence can play in domestic relationships. The findings are, however, in some ways paradoxical. Brazil’s president is a woman. So is the head of national oil company, Petrobras. The nation, which will host the World Cup in June, has special police stations that are staffed almost exclusively with women. And according to this telling New York Times article, “there is a general view that holds women as equal, fully capable of excelling in even the most powerful posts.”
But there are also cultural fissures. In 1830, the Brazil penal code eliminated the death penalty for rapists and introduced a qualifier of whether the victim was “honest” or “dishonest.” Rape of an “honest” woman was met with a prison term of three to 12 years. But the rape of a “dishonest” women only meant one month to two years in prison, according to a 1991 Human Rights Watch report.
In 1991, more than 160 years later, problems remained in enforcing sexual assault law. One officer who worked with victims told Human Rights Watch researchers, “Most cases happen because the woman consents, because she wants it. Then she regrets it and comes to play victim, comes [and] reports. Many women create favorable conditions for the crime.”
Today, reports of rape and sexual assault continue to increase in cities like Rio de Janeiro. According to the U.S. State Department, the number of instances reported surged there from 1,996 in 2009 to 4,796 in 2010 after a federal law was enacted broadening the definition of rape. Then in 2012, the figure in the city jumped up to 6,029 reports of rape, the Institute of Public Safety reports. That’s an average of 16 per day.
To be sure, every country struggles with sexual assault. But recent anecdotes in Brazil have endowed the country with a special distinction.
Once, a man pressed a gun to the head of a 30-year-old woman while he raped her on a bus barreling down Rio’s main avenue. In another shocking instance, a blue-collar woman was captured and raped inside a transit van while it navigated busy roads. The police only investigated after the same men captured an American woman a week later last March and did the same to her in an assault that captured international attention.
The increase in rapes, not to mention the results of the recent survey, has stirred alarm in the highest echelons of Brazilian office. Late last week, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff tweeted, that the country has “a long way to go on combating violence against women.”
Earlier this week, after the local journalist who started the “I don’t deserve to be raped” campaign claimed she had received messages threatening her with sexual assault, Rousseff rose to her defense again. She “deserves all my solidarity and respect,” the president said. “No woman deserves to be a victim of violence, whether it be physical or in the form of intimidation.”

Terrence McCoy is a foreign affairs writer at the Washington Post. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Cambodia and studied international politics at Columbia University. Follow him on Twitter here.

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Brick in the wall teacher leave them kids alone

10:11 AM GMT-0300

Not everyone in the world self-identifies first by political party-race-gender, as is the tradition of the left in the USA.

If women are judging other women harshly in Brazil, they may self-identify on appearance, economic class, social class, education, home location or some other common grouping.