Jurists, Police, Doctors, and Psychologists: Discussing Sexual Violence in Twentieth-Century Brazil

Abstract

The twentieth century brought several major developments for Brazil, which had recently become a republic (November 15, 1889). São Paulo was its largest and most industrialized city with its population rising from just under 240,000 to around 10 million, while the nation’s total jumped from just over 17 to 180 million. Industrialization led to economic and social changes, such as women joining the labor market and gaining public space. There were profound changes in the family and gender relations too. Divorce, not legalized until 1977, was one of the major concerns in previous decades. The average number of children per woman fell from 6.2 in 1940 to 2.4 in 2000 (IBGE 1940 and 2001). Consensual unions, characteristic of the lower classes at the beginning of the century, were regulated by the 2002 Civil Code and are now part of everyday life for the middle and upper classes. The mass media expanded as major conglomerates took over press, television, and radio, adding online media too at century’s end.

Text translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Nerney.

This text was first written as a chapter for my PhD thesis, titled “Horror, Honor and Rights: Sexual Violence against Children and Adolescents in the 20th Century” (Universidade de São Paulo, 2000). The goal of the thesis was to analyze the main changes in social sensibility toward child sexual violence in twentieth-century Brazil using Elias’s tools and framework. In order to do so I used the following sources of data: (1) the national law and the main international agreements in regard to sexual violence and its changes during the century; (2) expert discourses that reflect differ-ent sensibilities over this topic and that, in some way, influenced legal definitions; (3) international social movements that intended to combat sexual violence and its consequences in Brazil; (4) what was published in this connection by one of the most important daily newspapers in the country (O Estado de S. Paulo).

What I present in this book, Norbert Elias and Empirical Research is, therefore, just one of the chapters of the thesis. The argument and the use of Elias’s framework to analyze a topic like sexual violence becomes more clear and complete in the thesis, of course. I hope the text presented here will be enough to show some aspects of Elias’s tools to analyze the topic.