Violence Against Women in a Pandemic Period: Challenges and Innovations in the Action of Specialized Police Stations for Assistance to Women.
Gender; COVID-19; Social isolation; Violence; Women.
This work seeks to discuss the numbers of cases of violence against women in the period of social isolation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, observing secondary data available on the platform of the Secretary of Public Security of the Federal District (SSP-DF), data from the Dial 180 and DATASUS statistics platform notifications data. To this end, it is important to think about the phenomenon of violence against women from the perspectives and knowledge of gender, in correlation with the historical processes that have been consolidated over time and constituting paths of subjectivation that guarantee greater privilege for the men and greater vulnerability for women, vulnerabilities that were accentuated in periods of quarantine, when public territory is restricted. Despite data from the UNDP-UN indicating an increase of at least 35% in reports of domestic violence in several countries around the world - this also happened in Brazil according to the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights - secondary data from the Secretariat Public Security about the numbers of police reports did not indicate a significant increase in the quarantine period. Furthermore, data from the Statistical Platform - DATASUS - on notifications of violence against women that reach primary health care professionals indicate exponential growth from 2009 to 2019, with an upsurge precisely during the pandemic. In view of this, one can think about the difficulties of women in accessing state apparatus in moments of greater invisibility of violence (because violence occurs mainly in the territory of intimacy) and fragility of support and protection networks.