Women’s Police Stations: Gender, Violence, and Justice in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Assistant professor of the Department of Sociology at University of San Francisco, Ceclia Macdowell Santos, writes an impressive book called “Women’s Police Stations: Gender, Violence, and Justice in Sao Paulo, Brazil, ” in hopes of observing the dynamics of the relationship between women and the state in a political regime. In Cecilia Macdowell Santos’s book, it exudes an investigation of the ever changing and complicated association between the women and the state, and the idealized formation of gendered citizenship of Brazil. It describes police stations being run entirely by policewomen for women. With the police stations having women police officers in charge, the policewomen have the ability to scrutinize and investigate criminalities against women, such as battery, rape, battering, and domestic violence. São Paulo, being the home to the first such police station, and now having more than three hundred women's police stations throughout Brazil, it becomes a huge factor in their government.

The impacts of these police stations run by women police officers become a beneficial factor for the local women of Brazil. Not only does it help the women with violence, but also it becomes a model of feminist mobilization inherent and an influence of female empowerment in a male-dominated civilization. Cecilia Macdowell Santos describes how the theories of gender affects the history of the world's first women's police station, with the benefits and identities of the policewomen, including feminist deliberations about the true meaning of what violence against women is, to constructing crimes in the framework of a paradoxical citizenship, and to the rise of assaulted women's sense of rights.

In the early 1980’s, the re-democr...

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...g class women to predominantly abused women, to be able to report the violence that they had been suffering in quietness.

Santos studies police stations in Latin American in scrutinizing the social and political developments, “sharing the dynamics of the complex and contradictory complex relationships between women and the state from both a macro and micro perspective” (p. 180). Santos contributes the feminist state theory and explores the formation of gendered citizenship, “as a result of connections between special social actors such as feminists policewomen and complainants” (p. 180). Because of these political conjunctures, interactions have progressed because of the hegemonic masculinist police culture and the improvements of the feminist discourse on violence against women (p. 180). This impaction has constructed a contradictory gendered citizenship.