Introduction:

Despite the fact that gender inequality is a problem reaching virtually every country in the world, tackling it directly and realistically is limited to a small number of societies and contexts.Even after continuous efforts and progress in several areas, no country has yet accomplished true gender equality, suggesting complex structural causes. This encourages the quest of alternatives to implement concrete policies aimed to reduce gender inequalities. Also, it forces us to rethink the paradigms used to be invoked when thinking about gender development and inequality.

Gender inequality manifests in wage differences, job and education access, health care opportunities, use and access to infrastructure and economic assets, but one of the most vivid manifestations is gender-based violence. Historically, women are the greatest victims of such violence, which is often perpetrated by a spouse, former spouse, partner, ex-partner or boyfriend (i.e. domestic violence). Besides economic explanations, theories of domestic violence abound across the social sciences including anthropology, psychology, law, political science and sociology.

Some of the highest documented rates of domestic violence are in Brazil, and so there is an urgent need to understand the causes and consequences of domestic violence in Brazil. Currently, however, Brazil lacks representative data and therefore does not have the analytic ability to understand the complicated interrelationship between the economic and social context, the intricate relations of power and decision-making within households and families, and their consequences for domestic violence. For these reasons, efforts to create a longitudinal database representative of the population which allows us to understand dynamics of domestic violence in Brazil and its relationship to economic and social development processes seems a priority topic on the agenda concerning development and gender inequality. The major motivation in proposing this project is to develop this dataset, and this workshop represents a first attempt to discuss its initial results.

Workshop Program in pdf file

This event has been funded by a French government subsidy managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under the framework of the investissements d'avenir programme reference ANR-11-LABX-0052.

Reference

Domestic Violence in Brazil, Toulouse, France, September 12–13, 2016, room MF 323.