Conflict Between Sisters Gives Rise To Gender Violence
Conflicts between two sisters, one of whom refers to the other as a whore and a slut, is it gender-based violence? This analysis is the subject of this week’s episode of the Women and Justice series. Professor Fabiana Severi’s guest to talk about the work of rewriting a judicial decision from a feminist perspective, based on this case, is Carmen Hein de Campos, PhD in Criminal Sciences and professor of the postgraduate course in Law at the Federal University of Pelotas .
Carmen says that, in 2020, based on discussions about decisions on domestic and family violence, based on the Maria da Penha Law, and when analyzing more recent decisions by courts and first degree judges, her research group verified the need to understand why male and female magistrates were linking the concept of gender-based violence to certain requirements not provided for by law, such as, for example, vulnerability, hyposufficiency and subordination. “With this, we believe it is important to discover the first decisions of the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), where these parameters were delimited.”
When analyzing the arguments of the STF, these first decisions verified the existence of certain requirements for the understanding that it would be a case of domestic and family violence the need to establish requirements not foreseen in laws, such as vulnerability and hyposufficiency. From this, the group analyzed a case from 2008, relatively recent in relation to the creation of the Maria da Penha Law, in 2006, and a very different case, in which the domestic violence practiced by a sister against another sister, called a prostitute and a slut, is almost invisible. “The Court understood that the case was a mere disagreement between sisters, that there was no violence based on gender, as there was no subordination and, also, it was not a case of a relationship between a woman and a man, that is, violence by an intimate partner.”
Women who assume gender roles
In the rewrite from a feminist perspective, the researchers discuss the concept of gender-based violence and show that there are cases in which women assume gender roles and reproduce male stereotypes with other women, that is, they verbalize expressions used by men to disqualify women. “By deeply discussing the concept of gender violence, we concluded that, in this specific case, we were dealing with gender-based violence and not merely a disagreement between sisters.”
The main result of the group was to rewrite the judicial decision from a feminine conception of gender, which does not merely mean relations between different sexes, between women and men only. “The first direct consequence of applying feminist gender theory, or gender theories, is to demonstrate that gender relations also occur between women.” The researcher warns of the need to rethink the criteria of the courts that remain and are not provided for by law and were fixed in decisions of 2008, as soon as the Maria da Penha Law came into force. “These criteria restrict the application of the Maria da Penha Law and we want to demonstrate that these criteria violate the legislation itself and make it difficult for women to access justice.” In addition to Professor Carmen, researchers participated in this project.Clarissa Campani Mainieri and Juliana Azevedo de Oliveira Alves.
The Women and Justice series is part of the Rewriting Judicial Decisions in Feminine Perspectives project, a collaborative network of Brazilian academics and jurists from all regions of the country that lends itself to rewriting judicial decisions from a feminist perspective.