DECIDING ABOUT THE "OTHERS" WITH INITIAL HEARINGS: defendants and justice agents profiles involved in Bahia.

Initial Hearing. Intersectionality. Criminal Selectivity. Human Rights.

Employing intersectionality as a theoretical framework and as a methodology, specifically with a categorical approach, this work produces a qualitative analysis of Initial Hearings in Salvador, Bahia, in which the defendants are women, emphasizing the description of socioracial and gender profiles of both the defendants and justice agents. Using environment ethnography, the objective is to answer if the difference between the racial profiles of defendants and justice agents leads to discrepancies on the Initial Hearings decisions. Subsequently, a discourse analysis was made in the minutes of aforementioned Hearings, as well as the Autos de Prisão em Flagrante [a document that describes the charges and circumstances of the crime when the defendant is caught in flagrante delicto], seeking to explore said and not said of these official documents. As preliminary results, it was possible to confirm that profiles of justice agents and defendants are, in general, opposite. This discrepancy influences the treatment toward these defendants, and also produces a pre-criminalization of certain corporalities.