Educating violent men, Brazil's way of fighting domestic abuse

This publication is part of the “Towards Equality” Sparknews-led program, a collaborative alliance of 16 international news outlets highlighting the challenges and solutions to reach gender equality.

Heitor* used to be sure he knew what it meant to be a man.

“Where my family is from, men need to be aggressive,” says the 33-year-old businessman who lives in Santo André, a suburb of Brazilian megacity São Paulo.

“If you get hit, you need to hit back. You have to be the provider, the one who takes care of everything.”

But when the judge handed him an alternative sentence of 20 weekly sessions with E Agora, José? (What Now, José?), a reflective group for men convicted of domestic violence, he had no idea it would take just half that time to start to change his mind.

“Now I see that women can take care of things too,” he says. “They’re completely capable and I’m not in charge of what they do. If I could keep coming here longer than 20 weeks, I probably would. I’ve had conversations here that I’ve never even thought of having before.”

That change in perspective is what groups like E Agora, José? hope to see in all their participants. It’s the result of experts shifting their focus from punishing offenders to rehabilitating them to prevent further violence.

And in Brazil, which continues to register some of the highest rates of domestic violence, gender-based violence and femicide in the world, many therapists, prosecutors, judges and women’s rights activists are increasingly acknowledging that it’s men who need to do the work.

Domestic violence

According to the Brazilian Public Security Forum’s latest report on violence against girls and women, the number of femicides increased by 2.6 per cent in the first half of 2023 when compared to the previous year, reaching 722.

A 2019 annual report from Human Rights Watch highlights the thousands of domestic violence cases in Brazil that are not properly investigated each year, and the many that are never prosecuted. The non-profit’s 2023 World Report also notes that, in September 2022, just 77 shelters for survivors of domestic violence were operating in a country with a population of 215 million.

Under then-President Jair Bolsonaro, the 2022 federal budget to fight violence against women was reduced by 90 per cent when compared to 2020, a decision considered disastrous by experts, as domestic violence rates skyrocketed during the pandemic.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who sanctioned the Maria da Penha law during his first term as president, altered the legislation in 2023 to provide immediate protective measures for women when they report domestic violence to police, no matter their relationship to the aggressor. He also included in the law a provision of six months’ rent for victims of domestic violence who are socially and economically vulnerable.

At group meetings around the country, men who have been convicted of domestic abuse are learning about how the patriarchy shapes their behaviour, and what they can do about it.

Named after a poem by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade about feelings of loneliness and abandonment, E Agora, José? focuses on a different theme at each of its weekly meetings — "what it means to be a man”, “division of labour between men and women”, “how we become men” and “sexual violence”, are among them — allowing the men to discuss misogynistic and patriarchal ideologies through their own experiences.

This Thursday, the topic is stereotypes about men and women. The evening starts with a discussion of a common assumption: Men are aggressive.

“But is that wrong?”

The question comes from Heitor. He’s sitting in a circle with seven other men who come together every Thursday at 6pm.

One of the facilitators, known as Dentinho, commented that men’s aggressiveness has almost become invisible because it is considered natural in society and part of the culture, leading Heitor to question why men being aggressive is seen as a negative.

“There are other ways to be a man,” Dentinho says. “Men can be affectionate, emotional, well-mannered, and respectful.”

It’s a statement that makes them sit back and think.

Patriarchal beliefs

Without the group, the men would have received sentences of six months to two years in prison for crimes that are considered less severe — including threats, disturbing the peace and non-life-threatening physical harm — under Brazil’s 2006 Maria da Penha law. The law is often lauded as one of the best examples of domestic violence legislation in the world, despite it being difficult to implement due to the deep-rooted patriarchal beliefs the reflective group programmes are intended to counter.

While it is difficult to measure reoffending rates due to the under-reporting of domestic violence, and often a lack of follow-up for the cases that do make it to prosecutors, the programme has been successful by its own measures — only two of the some 2,000 men who have been through the programme have come back, Dentinho says.

But whether or not these programmes are making a larger and long-standing impact is still hard to say.

“We know that holding perpetrators to account, and keeping perpetrator's risk in view are both essential components of a whole of system response to domestic violence,” says Kate Fitz-Gibbon, a leading scholar in violence against women and professor at Monash University.

“We do not yet know how effective perpetrator programs are at stopping abuse and at preventing escalation of abuse. Governments must invest in evaluating the effectiveness of perpetrator interventions.”

Despite the lack of government data and federal oversight of programmes in Brazil like E Agora, José?, those that exist have reported similar success. One started by prosecutor Erica Canuto in the north-eastern state of Rio Grande do Norte reports a return rate of zero per cent. Prosecutor Gabriela Manssur’s São Paulo program Tempo de Despertar, or Time to Wake Up, saw just two per cent of participants re-offend between 2014 and 2016. Before she started her group, the overall re-offending rate was 65 per cent.

As the Thursday night group continues its discussion, Walter,* a 62-year-old electrician, says he agrees that men are aggressive, but that some women are too.

“That’s true,” says Rangel, another facilitator leading the discussion, “but we have to be careful not to blame women for aggression done to them.”

It’s Walter’s 13th meeting with the group and his point of view has already started to shift.

“The first time I came I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’” he says. “But now, when it’s over, I think I’ll miss it.”

*Participants ordered by the court to attend the group cannot be identified.