Brazil fights domestic abuse by educating violent men

We are sharing this article, originally published in Glorieuses, as part of our collaboration with the Spark News Towards Equality Initiative for International Women’s Day. 

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.

According to the Brazilian Public Security Forum’s latest report on violence against girls and women, the number of femicides increased by 2.6% 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 nonprofit’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% 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.

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 labor 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 6 pm.

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, respectful.”

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

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.