Unpublished data from the Brazilian Public Security Forum (FBSP) show that a woman suffered sexual violence every ten minutes in the Brazil, in the first half of 2021.
From January to June this year, there were 26,709 victims. Compared with the same period of the previous year, the number represents an increase of 8.3%, when 24,664 cases were registered.
According to the Public Security Yearbook, produced by the Forum and published in July this year, around 60% of the victims of this type of violence are children and adolescents up to 13 years old.
And in 85% of cases, the perpetrator of the abuse is a person known to the victim. Also according to the Forum, 99.9% of the perpetrators of the crime of sexual violence are male.
AT CNN, the sociologist and executive director of the Public Security Forum, Samira Bueno, explained that despite the numbers being alarming and serious, there is a lot of underreporting of cases.
The pandemic and social isolation contributed to fewer complaints.
“In cases of sexual violence, the fact that most victims are vulnerable makes things more difficult. A seven- or eight-year-old child reports abuse, and asking for help is more complicated. The school, for example, helps in identifying abuse. It is often the education professional who notices that the child’s performance has dropped, behavioral changes, and calls someone in charge to talk,” he says.
In the first half of this year, Brazil registered 666 cases of femicide, a slight increase of 0.5% compared to the same period in 2020, when 663 cases were registered.
However, in the second quarter of 2021, the cases of femicide were even higher than those in the same period in 2019. There were 348 cases from April to June this year. In 2019, there were 338.
According to Samira Bueno, this is due to the period in which cases of the pandemic started to grow again and some restrictive measures were implemented. As a result, people returned to isolation, which led to an increase in these numbers.
Reference: CNN Brasil
