Violence, democracy and human rights

Enforcing law and order and protecting human rights are fundamental themes of the Center for the Study of Violence (NEV), and the main challenge is to understand why democracy in Brazil has not translated into the safeguarding to the citizens.

By Claudia Izique

Agência FAPESP – The rate of homicides per 100,000 Brazilians increased from 11.7 in 1980 to 26.2 in 2010. The same period also saw an increase in the number of summary executions, many of them involving civil and military police, drug trafficking associated with the struggle to conquer territories, and conflicts in interpersonal relationships resulting in fatal outcomes.
 
The change in the rate of violence over the last three decades has surprised those who were counting on the democratization process to translate into a peaceful society that reconciled safety with respect for human rights. “The expectation was that the end of random acts would give way to the rule of law, but what occurred, along with institutional reform, was an explosion of violence,” asserts Sérgio Adorno, coordinator of the Center for the Study of Violence (NEV), one of the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs) funded by FAPESP.
 
Urbanization and migration to cities, which intensified during the 1980s, as well as the social and economic deficits of the past and successive economic crises, have fed an environment of tension as the State has proven itself to be ineffective in the role of conflict mediator. “The police do not investigate and the criminals are not tried or punished, revealing a gap between the potential for more violence in society and the State’s capacity to contain it within the framework of the rule of law,” says Adorno.
 
The statistics bear this out: between 1998 and 2003, only 6% of the 344,000 police reports in 16 precincts in the city of São Paulo resulted in police investigations. Impunity does not prevent violence, and it feeds the public’s distrust. “We’re living a situation of misalignment between citizens and their institutions,” reasons Adorno.
 
Enforcing law and order and protecting human rights are fundamental themes of the Center for the Study of Violence, which began at the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1987. From the beginning, the main challenge of the NEV – established as an RIDC in 2000 during the first round of calls for proposals under the Program – was to understand why democracy in Brazil has not translated into the safeguarding of human rights.
 
Studies have gradually shown that the Brazilian criminal justice system works like a funnel: it is wide at the base (police reports) and narrow at the neck (the number of cases that make it through the judicial system, including sentencing).
 
To complete this picture, the researchers began to scrutinize official statistics, but had to resort to other methodologies because the available formation did not allow them to monitor the progress of cases within the criminal justice system. For example, they needed to individualize records, monitor notices published in newspapers and even create a database to further the research.

“The police only register homicides, attempted homicides, assaults that result in death, and the discovery of a body. If researchers don’t use other sources, they have no way of finding the perpetrators or learning the circumstances in which these crimes occurred,” explains Nancy Cardia, coordinator at the RIDC. Although Brazil has accounted for crimes since the time of the Emperor, public safety institutions do not utilize statistics to learn about the social phenomena that engender crimes, nor do they coordinate information about public safety.
  
By using secondary information, the researchers were able to thoroughly analyze 197 criminal proceedings instituted and heard in one of the capitol’s courts to determine those responsible for homicides and establish a profile of the victims, aggressors, witnesses and even legal professionals.

They were surprised by the “banality of the deaths,” and the inability of justice to “translate the differences and inequalities in human rights,” says Adorno in the article “Crime, criminal justice and judicial inequality,” published in Revista USP issue 132, which reviews previous studies. He noted, for example, a higher incidence of guilty verdicts in cases where the defendants were represented by court-appointed attorneys, which are those named by the judge for individuals who cannot afford to pay for their own attorney.
 
Judicial sluggishness
 
The studies also revealed that the wheels of justice move very slowly. In analyzing 68 cases of lynching, executions and police violence during the 1980s, for example, they determined that a criminal proceeding could last up to 120 months (10 years) and that only one case took 10 of the 16 months the Code of Criminal Procedure calls for to complete all judicial and extrajudicial proceedings.

It was found that this excessive amount of time is spent, for example, in trying to obtain documentary proof and locating and questioning defendants and witnesses. “It’s as if the courts lent support to the popular saying: bandits should be dead,” recalls Cardia.
 
Performance by the police, the Office of the Prosecutor of the Public Interest, and judges, among other actors in the legal system, was monitored by the Center for the Study of Violence. “We obtained information about the selection process, training, incentives and promotions and were able to determine that high-performing police officers become chiefs – and the same goes for judges and prosecutors – with no clear criteria, and this affects the daily life of the courts,” Cardia observes.
 
This conclusion, in fact, gave rise to a 180-hour public safety course developed in partnership with the School of Economics and Business Administration (FEA), the USP Polytechnic School, the Getúlio Vargas Foundation and the World Bank. “There were two class versions and one online version in high demand,” remarks Cardia.

To circumvent the absence of information from the courts themselves, the RIDC together with the Ford Foundation published, through USP, six works on topics related to public safety and human rights. “The seventh, on torture, will be released later this year. It is the result of a seminar organized to discuss instances of human rights violations after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” she explains.
    
Survivor Fatigue
 
Little by little, information gathered during the research has been “refined” to reflect the team’s efforts and strengthen the view that “credibility is the foundation of democratic institutions,” underscores Adorno. That perception opened new avenues of investigation and gave rise to new questions: How does the public relate to the violence? What is its perception of justice? Is there a culture of violence in Brazil?
 
“While Adorno worked with police, we began a qualitative study that compared the perceptions of 341 residents of three of the most violent districts of São Paulo – Capão Redondo, Jardim Ângela and Jardim São Luiz – using a sample of 1,000 interviewees from other districts in the capitol for purposes of comparison,” says Cardia.
 
The project coincided with a marked change – for the better – in the homicide statistics in the capitol: between 2000 and 2006, the overall murder rate in São Paulo State fell from 42.07 per 100,000 inhabitants to 19.90. “We were able to document this change and identify its effect on the people who are most exposed to the violence and on their perception of the institutions,” says Cardia.
 
Exposure to violence is measured on a scale that identifies victims, witnesses to the acts of violence and individuals who, within a specific period of time, knew of the involvement of relatives or close friends. “The most intense effects of exposure to violence are noted among children and young people,” states Cardia. “It manifests itself in the form of physical symptoms such as sleep disturbances, anxiety, and depression, among other effects described in the literature as ‘survivor fatigue.’”
 
The counterpart to this symptom, especially among young people – the subject of the group study – is desensitization: “The violence suffered by the victims starts to be considered normal,” she explains in a study published in Lousotopie in 2003. “A belief that violence is the norm also results in a reduced ability to trust in others or to connect with others and fewer inhibitions with regard to the practice of violence.”

The greater the degree of exposure of young people to violence, the worse the image they have of the police, which feeds into the sense of insecurity. “Few believe they would be able to convince a police officer to investigate a case in which they have been a victim,” she states.
 
Fear is a generalized sentiment in Capão Redondo, Jardim Ângela and Jardim São Luiz, and it encourages isolation: neighbors have no contact with each other, they do not talk to each other and children are not allowed to play outside. Meanwhile, the home also fails to ensure the safety of children and young people. “The experience of corporal punishment at home, generally perpetrated by the mother, is more important than we could imagine,” says Cardia. 

The study has shown that violent domestic abuse is a significant experience in the victimization. “We discovered that individuals who report having been victims of violent aggression at home, severe enough to cause injury or trauma, often mention also having been a victim of exposure to street violence: they have friends who were victims or perpetrators of aggression, or they themselves were the targets of actions from third parties or the police.”
 
The scenario that emerges from the qualitative study is worrisome. “We had hoped that, in the generation born after the 1988 Constitution, the repertoire of physical punishment would no longer be used to discipline children. For years, the Spanking Law has been stalled on the floor of Congress after being derided.” Moreover, violence does not only occur at home: spanking is considered a legitimate solution for conflicts at school, and torture seems to be authorized against those suspected of violent crimes such as rape, murder, kidnapping and armed robbery, especially when it involves children.
  
“There are strong indications that exposure to violence may change people’s behaviors, beliefs, values and even personalities. There are also signs that this experience does not encourage greater opening to community life. On the contrary, it encourages people to look for ways to protect themselves and remove themselves from public spaces, becoming increasingly isolated in a process that can have just the opposite effect: instead of becoming more protected, they become more vulnerable,” cautions Cardia.  

Shared knowledge
 
The research agenda qualifies the Center for the Study of Violence as a key partner in forums for public policy debates. Over the last 12 years, this RIDC has actively participated in the establishment of state and national human rights programs, in the implementation of the police oversight board in São Paulo and in engaging debates about changing the jurisdiction for homicide from military to civilian courts, Adorno reports.

Among other steps, it has organized dozens of courses, training classes and conferences regarding issues such as local safety management, geoprocessing and spatial analyses of crime, and the prevention of violence. It has shared its experience in research, georeferencing and data analysis with various public agencies such as the Data Analysis System Foundation (SEADE), the São Paulo Metropolitan Planning Corporation (EMPLASA), the São Paulo Coordinating Office for Health Vigilance and Brazil’s Secretariat for Human Rights (SDH).
 
The partnership with the SDH, for example, has allowed the establishment of a methodology to monitor cases of fatalities that served as input for the production of software to be distributed to police oversight boards to standardize data classification.
 
The Center has also participated in independent external assessments of projects such as Prison Management Improvement, the National Human Rights Program Review, the Manual of Community Policing, and Firearms Violence in Brazil.
  
A significant part of the information from the research, reports, and documents along with a substantial database are available at www.nevusp.org, which has already received nearly 1.5 million visitors between 2008 and 2012.

The research, education and dissemination activities of the Center for the Study of Violence will continue for the next 11 years during the second round of the RIDC Program. The focus of investigation will now be on building legitimacy on the part of institutions in relation to citizens and civil servants.
     
“The public is betting on the institutions, but not those that are currently out there,” says Adorno. “Democracy has become more complex. However, some of the demands of the democratic rule of law, including law enforcement, have not been fulfilled, and it has to be universal. Justice cannot be one-sided. It has to be predictable. There has to be a culture that values human rights, and the main socializing agent is the State.”