Boxed Inserts on Comparative Criminology and Gender
Invisible Woman, 3rd Ed.
Joanne Belknap
2005
Chapter 10
Women’s Police Stations in São Paulo, Brazil
In the early 1980s, Brazilian feminist activists helped elect the Partido do Movimento
Democrático Brasileiro, an opposition party that gained control in many state
governments including São Paulo, Brazil (Santos, 2004). The newly elected governor of
São Paulo, Franco Montoro, established Conselho Estadual da Condição Femininina (the
State Council on the Feminine Condition) in 1983, staffed primarily by intellectual and
middle-class feminists (ibid). Concerned with intimate partner abuse and sexual
victimization, these women helped implement Delegacia da Muher (DdM), the world’s
first all woman police station, in 1985, designed to respond to violent crimes against
women (ibid).
Notably, many of the women officers (delegacias) were transferred (unwillingly) from
the regular police departments to DdM, and did not identify as feminists. They viewed
feminists as “against men,” particularly against male police officers (ibid). Even the first
head of DdM, the world’s first women’s police station, Rosemary Corrêa, was not
pleased about her appointment because she perceived that this would ruin her career in
policing, she didn’t view violence against women as a “real” crime that should be
addressed by the police instead of social workers, and she believed the regular police
departments didn’t discriminate against women clients (Santos, 2004, 38). Thus, her
belief that the DdM was unnecessary was severely challenged when 500 women lined up
to file complaints the first day the DdM opened. Corrêa not only changed her idea that
the DdM was unnecessary, but she grew to see her job and the DdM as extremely
important and to “love” her work, and to understand feminism as “a movement struggling
for women’s rights” rather than being “against men,” and began to publicly identify as a
feminist (ibid).
Corrêa served as a great director/chief (delegada) of the DdM, partly because she
understood so well how the delegacias (women police) working under her were reluctant
to work in the DdM for the same reasons she had been reluctant to head it (e.g., felt like
their new job was not true policing and viewed responding to women victims of male
violence as unimportant policing work). Similar to Corrêa, many of the women she
supervised changed their views about women victims of male violence, the need for the
DdM, and their lack of power compared to male officers (although none of them adopted
the identity of “feminist” for themselves (ibid).
Source: Santos, Cecília M. 2004. En-Gendering the Police: Women’s Police Stations and
Feminism in São Paulo. Latin American Research Review 39:29-55.