Brazil’s “Nobody deserves to be raped” campaign
When I did my doctoral research in Brazil during the 1990s there was a pervasive fear of the police. I remember once watching as the police hunted someone who had gone into hiding, while I sat safely in a tram in central Rio de Janeiro. As the police poked into alleys and boxes, the other passengers had a look of disgust on their face, while the people on the street looked terrified. I escaped any serious crime while living in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and 1993. But I knew many people who had stories about carjackings, muggings and worse. When I did fieldwork in Sao Paulo in 2005 for my book in HIV in Latin America, I interviewed drug traffickers and users, most of whom were using crack, although injecting drugs were also common amongst an older generation of drug users. I went into the favelas, many of which were totally under the control of the drug lords at that time. One day I was at an NGO that did harm mitigation work around drugs. We were supposed to work in a favela that afternoon, but then a phone call came. The drug lords had closed the favela to protest some action that the government had taken, and nobody could enter it that day. …
