O silenciamento da violência conjugal contra a mulher: um estudo de caso na cidade de Cachoeira, Bahia

Abstract

This study focused the conjugal violence in Cachoeira, Bahia, from the point of view of its silencing. Proposed by Boaventura Sousa Santos, the “silencing” would be produced historically and socially for the hegemonic power, occurring an "epistemicide": the murder, in the dominated one, of the possibility to exist as a being endowed of the capacity of thinking by him/herself. The construction of his/her identity occurs through other’s voice. The underlying hypothesis of this study is that a societal "concertation" leads to the “silencing” of the conjugal violence, anchored in several temporalities of social-historical practices. To compose the empirical corpus of this work, there were collected data of diverse and available sources as a panoramic view of the actors of the city: census data; iconographic data; 159 semi-structured questionnaires applied to the following social segments: health: nurse and doctors; education: students and teachers; civil society: traders and market traders; religion: priest, nuns and black women religious order; public power: clerks of the police station, secretaries and politicians; an interview with a woman who suffered violence; crimes processes: five cases, years 1995, 1996 and 2008, Centre of Documentation and Statistical Policewoman (CEDEP), period 2004 to 2007; remembrance: transcription of four cases that shocked the society, years 1955, 1965, 1998 and 2003. Each of these studies was object of a particular analysis followed by a general quantitative analysis. This analysis confirmed that the residents of Cachoeira know cases of violence, but they do not denounce it. In legal terms, the violence against the woman only gains social expressiveness when a woman’s murder takes place. There is no specialized office for the abused women to attend or the public power or schools gave place to focus this theme. The population, in general, omits itself from any responsibility. Even showing an increase of this violence, the data of the CEDEP do not correspond completely to facts. Therefore, this study confirms the silencing of conjugal violence against woman, which is not denounced, in part, because of not being conceived as such. It is proposed an action directed to men and women to making them aware of the "silenced" meanings associated to practices of violence, so that realizing future possibilities as they re-interpret their past, they can acquire means to alter their present.