Translator: Maurício Kakuei Tanaka Reviewer: David DeRuwe
When my daughter was eight years old,
we were on vacation at an amusement park,
and she asked me to go alone on a ride for the first time.
She was always a very responsible girl, and she knew I could trust her,
that she wouldn’t get lost and would know how to behave,
and at the time, I said yes,
but when I saw the line for the ride, I kept counting,
and I realized that she would be riding in the same cart with a man and two boys.
I said, “I’m sorry, but you’re not going.”
She asked, “Why?”
and I said, “Because something bad could happen to you.”
I had to give her this explanation that no mother wants to give.
I said, “Imagine if you’re up there, and someone touches your leg?
I wouldn’t be able to help you.”
This really scared her, and that broke my heart.
I didn’t want to take her freedom away,
but the truth is that we all live with less freedom for fear of abuse.
So why do I mention it,
why did this story of touching her leg come to my mind?
Because it happened to me before.
I’d experienced this kind of situation before.
I was a college student, coming home from college late at night on the bus.
I was sleeping against the window,
and after a while, I woke up with this guy’s hand on my leg,
and he was staring at me.
I don’t know how I managed to get him to leave my side.
He left, but he spent the entire trip staring at me.
I was scared to death, and I got off the bus a stop early.
By the way, I’m sure every woman who rides public transport
has experienced something like this.
And that’s why, for all of us -
for me, for my daughter who’s now 16 years old -
I decided to research this subject that is, sadly, so present in our lives:
sexual violence.
For four years, I traveled all over Brazil.
Here, I am on a motorboat in Pará with Sister Henriqueta Cavalcante,
a nun who advocates for human rights in Pará.
I went to every region,
interviewed victims, imprisoned rapists,
specialists, and scholars on the subject
to try to understand the reason for this violence,
and mainly, what we can do to change it.
When we talk about sexual violence,
what comes to mind are horrible crimes of rape that make the news,
often involving death or cases of gang rape.
But the truth is that sexual violence is very present in our everyday life:
it’s on public transport,
it’s in the work environment,
and it’s at school.
It’s so out in the open and become so commonplace
that we don’t see or notice it anymore.
This is quite normal for abusers, by the way.
I say that every woman has a story to tell.
I just said that here.
Now, how many men do you know who are, in fact, abusers?
How many men admit that they’ve actually abused?
They often don’t feel like abusers
because these behaviors are often normalized.
So, on the one hand, we have many women.
We all have stories, and we all know these stories,
but we don’t know who these abusers are,
because these people are among us and by our side.
When I was in jails, interviewing rapists, what I heard most from men,
some who had been arrested and convicted three or four crimes of rape,
was, “No, I’m not guilty,”
and the famous “She brought it on herself, she provoked me, she wanted it.”
Sometimes that was referring to six- or seven-year-olds.
I also went to a course about reflections
for men caught abusing women on public transport,
and one of them told me he’d started making out with a woman
he’d never seen in his life, with whom he hadn’t exchanged a word
because he thought that she would like it.
At the time, she was paralyzed, scared, afraid, and wondering what to do;
it’s a very common reaction to be paralyzed in this moment.
He figured she was enjoying it, and he continued,
until the subway stopped at the station - this case was in São Paulo -
and she managed to ask a security agent for help.
Then this man was arrested.
But there are also victims who don’t realize they’ve been abused.
For example, children.
Sometimes they’re very small,
and sometimes they even understand that something wrong happened,
but they don’t really know what it was.
Women who drank too much think they facilitated it,
that there was no rape.
But there was.
Professionals who are often harassed in the work environment
should confront abusive colleagues or bosses,
but they think, “Oh, that’s just how it is,
and I have to learn how to get by in this environment.”
Do you want to see another example that’s not talked about often?
Rape within marriage.
There are many men who feel
that because they’re in a relationship, they have the right to demand sex,
and also many women who feel that they are obligated to give in.
This is quite common, and it’s very difficult to understand.
In my book, I tell about a course by the Military Police of Bahia,
where they went to other cities
to talk about gender violence and how victim care should be provided.
They were doing this course for municipal guards in the interior of Bahia,
and when the police talked about rape within marriage,
there was a commotion among the guards.
They said, “What are you talking about?
Rape within marriage? But the woman is mine.”
Look, this is a totally backward notion that “the woman is mine”
as if she were a piece of property, and I can do what I want -
these municipal guards, law enforcement officers,
didn’t even have a notion that there could be rape within marriage.
But there is; our law is clear about that in the penal code.
The Brazilian Civil Code even talks about marital obligations,
but if you look at it, there’s nothing about sex.
It talks about mutual assistance, fidelity, and respect on both sides,
and even if some of these obligations are breached,
the most that can be done is to file for divorce
or even an annulment of the marriage.
There is not and never has been any law that authorizes,
that obliges someone to have sexual intercourse.
By the way, the other day, I received a statement from a woman
saying that when she doesn’t want to have sex with her husband,
he doesn’t resort to physical violence, no,
but he starts to make a fuss inside the house, screaming,
and their son wakes up.
She often ends up giving in, just so their child doesn’t wake up.
This is a kind of violence too.
It’s psychological violence; it’s moral violence.
We also have to pay attention to that.
Do you want to see another very common situation
we don’t even pay attention to anymore?
Men who mess with women on the street.
I’m sure all of us here have been there.
You’re walking down the street;
the guy starts to mess with you, whistling, calling you hot,
and you’re embarrassed.
And look how cruel it is.
It starts from a very early age because I remember,
as a teenager, I experienced a lot of situations like these.
I would see a small group of men,
I’d go to the other side, try to cross the street.
When that didn’t work, I would lower my head and move on,
listening to those barbarities
that they were saying to a 12- or 13-year-old girl.
But look, I want to tell you how I once got revenge, OK?
As a more confident adult, not so afraid to answer,
I was walking nearby, in Leblon, when a man started to mess with me,
calling me hot, whistling.
Now, instead of sneaking past, I stopped, looked back, returned,
and asked, “Are you talking to me?”
He was totally embarrassed, “No, sorry ma’am, I’m sorry.”
“No, you can talk.
I’m here. I stopped to listen to you. What do you want to talk about?”
(Laughter)
He said, “No, nothing,” and he left.
So he sneaked out, right? At least this time.
The truth is that our life as a woman
is filled with physical, mental, and psychological strategies
for us to try to escape abuse and avoid being touched against our will.
For example, who here has never pretended to be on the phone with someone
when alone inside a taxi or app car?
Who here has never signaled to an imaginary person on the street
when you were alone?
The most wonderful of these strategies I ever heard was from an opera singer
who told me that she once was leaving a rehearsal, late,
from a theater on a totally deserted street.
A man was coming towards her -
those tense seconds, nobody here, what do I do?
Do I run out? Go back to the theater? -
and then she started singing an opera aria,
and she was a soprano.
There was an “Oh” on the street.
The man was more afraid of her than she was of him.
(Laughter)
She pretended to be crazy there, but she escaped safely.
Once again, guys, this is an example of these strategies.
It’s very sad to see how this starts so early.
Teenagers inside the school have to keep avoiding that teacher
who has a habit of massaging their students and touching their hair.
Children -
I say girls and boys too -
who often stay put,
trying to avoid that relative who wants them to sit on their lap,
who wants to hug in a totally inconvenient and inappropriate way,
and who kisses in an uncomfortable way.
And look, in the case of women, it’s not so hard to understand
why this concern starts from such an early age.
I have data here,
the last data disclosed by the Public Security Forum
about sexual violence.
In the year 2000,
we had 60,926 cases of rape registered at the police station.
It’s always good to make it clear that this is a small indicator.
It’s estimated that here in Brazil,
90% of sexual abuse cases are not registered at the police station.
So this would be equivalent to 10%,
and even then, that’s a rape every eight minutes.
Almost 87% of the victims are female,
women and girls,
and also 73% of the cases
are victims from 0 to 17 years old -
children and teenagers,
victims of this violence from a very early age.
It’s important for us to note
that the root of these barbaric crimes that end up in the police station
is the same root as the abuses that happen on a daily basis.
It’s the same thought that a man’s desire is more important,
and that women have to submit or be subordinated.
It’s the same power game.
You might even think,
“But I think differently; I’m not like that.
I try to respect to be respected.”
But in practice, we don’t have this equality.
So how can we change that?
For starters, education: education about gender violence.
Unfortunately, among the many gaps we have in this area of ​​education,
there is one that always appears:
Adults, children, and everyone need to learn the notion of consent.
Even in the case of children,
it’s very important that we work
to teach what respect is for our own and others’ bodies,
and what it is to respect others’ limits and desires.
This has to happen at home, of course,
but it’s also very important that it happens at school,
because most abuses against children and teenagers
happen at home,
committed by family members and by people close to them.
The child won’t receive this information in this type of environment.
We, as adults, also have to police ourselves,
and pay more attention to our attitudes and our words
if we wish to educate this child.
Colleges should teach gender violence,
especially those that graduate students
who will later serve victims of sexual violence:
law schools, medical schools, schools of psychology, and of social work.
Here, I’d like to present a case that shows how explicit sexual violence
often intersects with the invisible violence of everyday life.
In my research,
I talked to a survivor of a case that became well-known in Brazil.
Four teenagers were raped in a place called Morro
in the city of Castelo do Piauí.
They were beaten, thrown off a cliff, and one of them died.
A barbarism.
I met with a survivor,
who, after a lot of pain and a long stay in the hospital,
was fine, attending college, and was dating.
I knew that not long ago, she’d gotten married and had a child,
and I asked her,
“So, is this absurd trauma over for you?”
She said, “Look, it’s almost over, but I’m still holding a grudge.”
And this grudge isn’t even against the rapists.
She holds a grudge against the prosecutor who called her one day -
then a 15-year-old girl -
and asked her, “But are you sure you only went there to take a picture?”
like insinuating that somehow, they’d sought out that situation
or that they were responsible for that cruelty that happened to them.
And this is not a unique case, OK?
Several victims told me
that they feel very angry and hold a big grudge against the prosecutor,
the chief of police who mocked them,
the judge who treated them with disrepute,
or the doctor who didn’t want to serve them properly.
So my call here
is for us to not commit or tolerate this violence.
I challenge you to go to any website,
pick a news story about sexual violence, and go to the comments.
You’ll find people who go there who say,
“It’s the victim’s fault; they didn’t take care of themselves”
or “Why were they out on the street so late at night?”
or “They have to be careful; they can’t do that,
they can’t wear those clothes, they can’t drink, talk, stay out late.”
These people are committing another violence against this victim.
So let’s not be those people.
Let’s also not be the people who often see situations happening
on public transport, at work, or at parties
and pretend it’s not about them and don’t take action.
Let’s also not be the people who hear many of these stories,
sometimes even told in a joking tone,
and who laugh or who simply let it go.
No, we have to speak, we have to take a stand.
We have to make it clear
that we don’t tolerate abuse against anyone, whoever they are.
Back at the beginning of our talk,
I was telling you my daughter’s story.
I had forbidden her to go on a ride, and I was wondering,
“Imagine what the world would be like
if we didn’t need to put this fear in children from such an early age?”
So I’d like to present a sentence from an Indian writer,
who survived a gang rape.
I quote her right at the beginning of my book.
She says,
“Our narrow minds aren’t capable of understanding
all we could gain
if women were free to develop without fear.”
Something for us to think about.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)