“I’m here because I had a daughter with beautiful green eyes.” This is how a father introduced himself to sociologist Eva Alterman Blay during a meeting at her apartment in the Santa Cecília neighborhood in central São Paulo, nearly 20 years ago. Blay, who has been involved in addressing violence against women since the 1970s, often welcomed people connected to social movements into her home. The man, brought by a colleague of the sociologist, came with a confession and deep regret. He revealed that when his daughter told him she planned to leave her husband due to abuse, he had urged her to be patient: “Maybe he’ll change, you’ll change, and things will work out.” Days later, her partner shot her in the eye and killed her. “I’m also here because I believe the work you do must continue,” the man concluded.
He knew that Blay had served in the state government of Franco Montoro (1983–1987), which established Brazil’s first Women’s Defense Police Station (DDM) in São Paulo in 1985. But he seemed to be asking for more, something to ensure that his daughter’s murder would not be just another case. “As a sociologist, I know that by the time a law is passed, society has already advanced and is demanding that solution,” says Blay, professor emeritus at the School of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo (FFLCH-USP). “The Femicide Law is recent and important, but it doesn’t solve the problem by itself. Just look at the rising number of cases in the country in recent years.”
According to data from the Brazilian Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the number of femicides in Brazil rose from 527 cases in 2015 to 1,510 in 2024—an increase of 186.53%. Over this period, 11,714 women were victims of femicide, averaging three murders per day. Among Brazilian states, São Paulo ranks highest, with 1,590 recorded deaths by 2024, followed by Minas Gerais (1,501) and Rio Grande do Sul (935).
On March 9, the Femicide Law (No. 13,104) marked its 10th anniversary. Legally, femicide is defined as the killing of a woman “for reasons of her female gender,” which includes two key factors: domestic and family violence, and acts of contempt or discrimination based on gender.
The law originated from the Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPMI) on Violence against Women, active in the National Congress from March 2012 to August 2013. The commission’s efforts not only led to amendments to the Penal Code, making femicide an aggravating circumstance of homicide, but also classified it as a heinous crime.
Last year, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed Law No. 14,994, which strengthened the original legislation by defining femicide as an autonomous crime (with its own specific characteristics) and extending the maximum sentence to 40 years in prison, the most severe penalty under the Penal Code.
In response to growing public pressure, additional measures have been introduced in recent years. Among them is Ligue 180 (Dial 180), a public service that provides support and guidance to women facing violence. Created in 2005, the hotline began receiving and forwarding reports to the appropriate authorities in 2014.
Other initiatives include the Maria da Penha Patrol, first launched in 2012 in Rio Grande do Sul. This program conducts regular visits to victims of domestic and family violence who are under protective measures. Another measure is the use of electronic ankle bracelets to monitor aggressors during the enforcement of emergency protective orders in cases of domestic and family violence—a practice that became mandatory in 2025.
Despite tougher penalties, the state’s failure to ensure effective protection for women has become increasingly evident. “Technically, when a woman’s death is classified as femicide, it reflects a recognition that public services failed to prevent a crime that, in most cases, could have been avoided,” says lawyer Fabiana Cristina Severi of the Department of Public Law at the Ribeirão Preto Law School at USP. “It doesn’t happen overnight, but on a large scale.”
In specialized literature and by international human rights organizations, femicide is understood as the fatal outcome of a continuum of violence against women and girls, especially domestic and family violence. It represents the lethal tragedy at the end of a cycle of vulnerability.
Valentina Fraiz
Since 2015, academic research on femicide has focused not only on identifying flaws and progress in the implementation of the law, but also on compiling more reliable data and understanding the scale and impact of femicide across various contexts.
Last year, Severi led a study conducted by the Research Group on Human Rights, Democracy, and Inequalities at USP in Ribeirão Preto. Currently under review by a scientific journal, the study analyzed approximately 20,000 cases of homicides of women tried since 2015 by the São Paulo State Court of Justice (TJSP), with the goal of identifying how cases recognized as femicide differed from those that were not.
According to Severi, the cases analyzed by her and three other colleagues at USP reveal that the perspective of public security and justice system officials, ranging from police officers to prosecutors, tends to prevail. While these professionals typically have no hesitation in classifying deaths caused by intimate partners within a domestic setting as femicide, they are often more reluctant to apply the same classification in cases involving more casual relationships or when the murder is motivated by misogyny, even when such motives fall under the legal definition of contempt or discrimination against women.
Another issue related to the wording of the Femicide Law is the use of the term “sex” instead of “gender.” Even before the law was passed in 2015, there was already a well-established body of research linking domestic and family violence not to biological sex, but to the unequal social position of women and their limited access to rights in society. However, just before the bill was brought to a vote, then-President of the Chamber of Deputies, Eduardo Cunha, demanded the replacement of the word “gender” with “female sex”—threatening to remove the proposal from the agenda if the change was not made.
This shift in terminology from “sex” to “gender” distances the Femicide Law from cases involving violence against transgender women. “In most cases, trans women are killed because of their ‘deviation’ from socially expected gender norms,” says Severi. “By limiting the definition to sex, the Femicide Law fails to protect these citizens.”
A report released in January by the National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals (ANTRA) revealed that Brazil recorded 122 killings of trans individuals and travestis in 2024—ranking first globally in this category for the 16th consecutive year. The term travestis, used in Latin America and Brazil, refers to a person assigned male at birth who adopts a feminine gender expression but does not identify strictly as a man or a woman. Most victims were young, Black, and poor, with an average life expectancy of just 35 years.
In international treaties to which Brazil is a signatory, including the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women (Convention of Belém do Pará), adopted on June 9, 1994, the term used to define violence is gender, not sex. For this reason, legal scholars argue that in interpreting domestic law, sex should be read as gender to better align with the principle of conventionality control, which ensures national laws are compatible with international treaties.
According to sociologist Ana Paula Portella, a visiting researcher at the Center for Population Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, the concept of gender—or its absence in legal language—is closely tied to other issues, such as race and the broader questions of security and violence in the environments where women live. “The risk faced by a woman in a socially precarious environment is very different from that of a woman with access to healthcare and transportation,” she explains.
Within this broader context of precarity, Portella highlights the role of organized crime, particularly the illicit drug trade, as a significant source of lethal risk for women. “These criminal groups are typically controlled by men driven by a violent form of masculinity, which extends into gendered power dynamics where women become the primary victims,” she adds.
According to the researcher, the profile of the perpetrators in these cases often mirrors that of the victims: young, Black men with low levels of education, living in socially vulnerable areas. In such settings, firearms are the primary weapon used to kill women. In domestic violence cases, however, the profile of aggressors spans a much broader range. “Any man—regardless of social class, age, race, or level of education—is capable of committing femicide,” Portella states.
Author of the book Como morre uma mulher? (How does a woman die?; Editora UFPE, 2020), an adaptation of her doctoral thesis defended in 2014 at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), the researcher notes that bladed weapons remain predominant in the family environment, although the use of firearms is increasingly common in these settings as well.
In another doctoral thesis, defended in 2024 at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ), Luciane Stochero examined a different context of heightened vulnerability for women facing violence in Brazil: rural areas. Her research focused on two small cities in northwestern Rio Grande do Sul—Bossoroca, with a population of about 6,000, and São Miguel das Missões, with approximately 7,000 residents.
The use of the term “sex” in the law, rather than “gender”, may hinder the assessment of cases
“Geographical isolation is one of the main barriers preventing rural women from accessing social protection services, when such services are even available,” Stochero explains. “One of my interviewees, who was pregnant at the time, told me that when her husband came home drunk and violent, she would walk for miles in the dark with her three children to seek refuge at the nearest neighbor’s house.”
These regions also lack reliable internet and phone service, as well as public transportation. Even when a household owned a vehicle, most of the women interviewed said they did not know how to drive. In her study, Stochero challenges the stereotype that rural men are inherently more violent than urban men. “What happens is that rural settings offer conditions that facilitate violence, especially isolation. No one sees them beating their wives. There are no witnesses,” she says.
Beyond the difficulty of reaching research participants, Stochero also highlights the challenge of accessing reliable data on rural areas. Official databases such as the Mortality Information System (SIM) do not include a variable that distinguishes whether a woman’s death occurred in a rural or urban area.
The researcher made extensive use of the Notifiable Diseases Information System (SINAN), analyzing reports of violence against women in rural Brazil between 2011 and 2020. In total, 79,229 cases were recorded, primarily involving physical, psychological, and sexual violence. The victims were predominantly young, Black, married women, with most assaults taking place in the home and committed by their own partners. In her study of the two rural municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul, the researcher documented 6,335 reports, including incidents of physical and psychological violence as well as suicide attempts.
Homicide, when a body is found, is relatively straightforward to document due to mandatory reporting requirements. Femicide, however, remains difficult to track because it requires classification as an intentional killing of a woman, as sociologist Silvana Aparecida Mariano of the State University of Londrina (UEL) in Paraná points out.
“If we rely on police records, the data reflects one reality. If it comes from the judiciary, it tells another story. And if we use independently produced data, as has been the case since January 2003, the numbers are different again,” says Mariano, who coordinates the Laboratory for the Study of Femicide (LESFEM), which manages the Monitor of Femicide in Brazil (MFB).
A collaborative initiative involving UEL, the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), and other partner institutions, the MFB gathers data by continuously monitoring media reports that contain evidence of femicide.
The project uses typologies and definitions established by the UN Women’s National Guidelines for Investigating, Prosecuting, and Judging Violent Deaths of Women (Femicide) from a Gender Perspective, as well as the Latin American Map of Femicide, developed by the Franco-Argentine civil association MundoSur, which works to expose gender-based violence across Latin America.
The data collected is supplemented with information from public databases. The monitoring includes not only completed femicides but also attempted femicides—cases in which a woman survived an attempt on her life motivated by gender-based violence.
The report Femicides in Brazil: January–June 2024, published by LESFEM, outlines the methodology used by the MFB in Brazil. News items are initially detected using two digital tools developed through the “Data Against Femicide” project, affiliated with the Data + Feminism Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. These tools, created in collaboration with activists worldwide, have been adapted into Portuguese.
The first tool, Email Alert, identifies news articles potentially related to femicide. It scans for keywords using a machine-learning algorithm trained by activists who specialize in femicide data collection. The algorithm filters relevant articles from the Media Cloud database (an open-source platform that tracks the global flow of news and information). Registered users receive alerts about the flagged articles via email.
LESFEM uses this system alongside another tool called Data Marker, a Chrome browser extension that highlights relevant keywords on web pages, making potential femicide cases easier to identify. Like the platform itself, the extension works in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. It also allows users to record data and share information with collaborators in real time.
Valentina Fraiz
After collecting and categorizing news articles detected through the Data + Feminism Lab platform, LESFEM conducts a second verification using Google’s search engine. This additional step helps identify news reports that may have been missed by Media Cloud, the database used by the MIT lab’s platform.
The findings published by MFB are referred to as “counter-data” because they are independently produced with the aim of challenging, supplementing, or exposing gaps in official statistics. According to LESFEM’s calculations, there were 1,859 completed femicides in Brazil in 2024—349 more than the 1,510 reported by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, which relies on data submitted by state governments and the Federal District.
“There is a type of violence we account for in this context, which is symbolic violence,” explains Mariano. “When attackers target the genitals, breasts, or face, cut the victim’s hair, or stuff lingerie into her mouth. These acts represent contempt, humiliation, and hatred toward women.”
LESFEM also tracks attempted femicides. In 2024, the laboratory recorded 2,286 such cases. This monitoring is justified by the profound impact these attacks have, not only on the women who survive them but also on their families, communities, and society at large.
The data also serves as a basis for evaluating the effectiveness of protective measures outlined in the Maria da Penha Law, enacted in 2006. This law criminalized domestic and family violence against women and established legal mechanisms for prevention, protection, and punishment. In the state of São Paulo alone, 103,519 protective orders were issued in 2024, according to the TJSP Protection Panel.
Still, Mariano notes that the number of attempted femicides is likely underreported, as such cases often go unmentioned in the media when they do not result in immediate death.
The “Data Against Femicide” project at MIT is currently developing an artificial intelligence tool, in partnership with Brown University’s Data in Society Collective (Disco Lab), to identify and mitigate biases in media reporting on femicide. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, the media remains the primary source of information for activists tracking femicide, with over 12,000 such murders recorded in the region in 2024.
“We’re now creating a taxonomy of words divided into two broad categories—one highlighting harmful media practices related to violence against women, and the other promoting positive reporting standards,” says Brazilian researcher Alessandra Jungs de Almeida, who is part of the “Data Against Femicide” team.
With a background in international relations, Jungs de Almeida also edited and organized the book Estudios feministas de seguridad desde América Latina y el Caribe (Feminist security studies from Latin America and the Caribbean), published by the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). Released in February 2025, and currently available only in Spanish, the volume compiles contributions from authors across 14 countries in the region.
One chapter explores the concept of transnational femicide, referring to the killing of girls and women in contexts such as organized crime, forced migration, and militarization, for example. Another focuses on the murder of women environmental leaders.
Violence against women is far from a recent phenomenon. In her doctoral research, defended in February at the State University of Maranhão (UEMA), historian Nila Michele Bastos Santos analyzed a crime with all the hallmarks of femicide that occurred on August 14, 1873, in São Luís, Maranhão. It is known as the Pontes Visgueiro case or, as the researcher prefers to call it, the murder of Mariquinhas.
Judge José Cândido Pontes Visgueiro (1811–1875) was a magistrate who, in his 60s, became infatuated with a young woman named Maria da Conceição, nicknamed Mariquinhas, who was between 15 and 16 years old and widely regarded at the time as a prostitute. Enraged by a lack of control over her life, he premeditated her murder with the help of an employee. Visgueiro drugged, stabbed, and dismembered the teenager, then concealed her remains in a zinc-lined trunk, which he buried in the backyard of his home.
When the crime came to light, the judge was sentenced to life in prison, though the law at the time allowed for the death penalty. In her research, Santos highlights the role of the women who had supported and cared for Mariquinhas and their erasure from history.
“The victim’s mother, sister, and friends played a crucial role in uncovering the crime. They applied pressure on the police and stood watch outside the judge’s residence,” says Santos. “The reports show they already believed Mariquinhas was dead, and they kept vigil to make sure her body wasn’t thrown into the nearby sea.”
Another revelation emerged not only from newspaper archives but also from literature: over the years, Mariquinhas—described in the forensic report at the time as White—was gradually portrayed as Black. According to Santos, this racial component reinforces the image of debauchery that came to mark her over time.
The dissertation inspired the creation of a graphic novel titled Mariquinhas: Crime and Female Resistance in São Luís do Maranhão in 1873, designed for readers aged 14 and up. The historian plans to release it this year. “The goal is to bring academic research into basic education, helping to spark dialogue about gender and violence in a way that is accessible,” says Santos.
The above interview was published with the title “A work in progress” in issue 353 of July/2025.
Books
ALMEIDA, A. J. (ed.). Estudios feministas de seguridad desde América Latina y el Caribe. Florianópolis: UFSC, 2025.
PORTELLA, A. P. Como morre uma mulher? Recife: Editora UFPE, 2020.
Reports
Dados Nacionais de Segurança Pública. Brasília: Ministério da Justiça e Segurança Pública, 2024.
BENEVIDES, B. G. Dossiê: assassinatos e violências contra travestis e transexuais brasileiras em 2024. Brasília, DF: ANTRA, 2025.
CRUXÊN, I. & JUNGS DE ALMEIDA, A. Dados contra o feminicídio. Ativismo de dados contra o feminicídio. London: Queen Mary University of London, 2025.
Informe feminicídios no Brasil janeiro-junho de 2024. Londrina: UEL, 2024.
