Talking About Violence: Women Reporting Abuse in Brazil

This thesis reports the findings of conversation analytic studies exploring women's
experiences reporting abuse to the police and to professionals working in a care
centre for abused women. The focus of the thesis'is on the women's interactions
with the police and, more specifically, on instances in which difficulties in
reporting become apparent. Research suggests that only a minority of cases of
violence against women are reported. Women's Police stations were created in
Brazil to address the problem of women not being taken sed,ously when reporting
domestic violence and to encourage women to report. However, reporting rates of
this violence are still low and the experience of reporting abuse has not become
unproblematic. Drawing on a naturalistic data set of over 36 hours, this study·
contributes to the understanding of women's experienced difficulties in reporting
their abusers, covering issues which range from them being denied a police report
even when their case is considered to be 'policeable' (Chapter 4); difficulties
regarding how the police interactions are conducted which reveal a problem about
how.women are not informed about the police procedures nor the consequences of
their report (Chapter 5); and clashes of perspectives (between officers and
complainants) and how those misalignments are addressed in interaction (Chapter
6). Moreover, it discusses methodological issues (such as translation and ethics)
with the aid of fragments of actual instances of interactions (Chapter 2); shows
culture is manifest in talk by presenting clashes between the 'world' presupposed in
the official forms and the 'world' of the complainants (Chapter 2), and in the way
that references to the abusers show the cultural understanding that women suffer
violence at the hands of men in close relationships with them (Chapter 7). In
technical terms, this thesis contributes to responses to yIN Interrogatives in
Brazilian Portuguese (Chapter 3) and to the study of repair and of technologies for
dealing with misunderstandings and misalignments in interaction (Chapter 6).
Overall, ~his thesis conn:ibutes to the, understanding of problems of women
reporting abuse in Brazil, to the services or abused women in Brazil by providing
some suggestions to improving the interactions, and to conversation analysis.