Violence against indigenous women in Brazil: invisibilities, experiences and challenges for psychology in the performance of indigenous “mental health”.
indigenous woman; violence against indigenous women; psychology; indigenous health.
The present thesis sought to carry out an investigation on the topic of violence against indigenous women in the context of health granted to these populations through SESAI. In this work, in addition to the interviews and data obtained, the field diary records of the researcher who worked as a psychologist for nine years in this place were used. Thus, five articles were written, the first of which was a systematic literature review of productions in the field of psychology on mental health and indigenous peoples, between the years 2014-2020. The results showed a shortage of production in this area, as well as the need to better qualify the epistemologies used in the proposed discussions. The topic of violence against indigenous women proved to be almost non-existent. The second article sought to carry out a survey and analysis of data on violence against indigenous women between 2007 and 2017, available in the Viva/SINAN and SIASI systems of the Ministry of Health. There was evidenced an important mismatch of information between the systems and a significant number of cases of violence against indigenous women, accounting for 60.51% of the total number of cases of violence reported in this population. The third article proposed to characterize the profile of psychology professionals working at SESAI/MS through a semi-structured questionnaire. Most of the participants, although they perceive domestic violence against indigenous women as one of the most frequent problems in the village communities, do not feel confident to act on this situations, either because of their fragility in their training, or because of the lack of internal institutional support and network in those cases. In the last two articles, field immersions were carried out in an indigenous territory in the interior of northeastern Brazil. It is a about a resurfaced ethnic group in which the author proposed to assist groups of women and follow up on cases of violence. The fourth article is an analysis of multiple cases, in which 4 stories of prototypical violence against women in the community were selected. In the last article, a case study was carried out on the rape story of a young indigenous woman with a severe mental disorder, whose right of access to legal abortion was not being guaranteed. In the end, conclusion it is considered that the present work sought to portray the trajectory and performance of Brazilian psychology in the context of indigenous health, through the focus of violence against women. Here, we sought seeked to rethink the production of psychological knowledge and practices from a decolonial perspective and from a community feminism.