Brazil posts grim record of four femicides a day in 2023

AFP | Rio de Janeiro

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

An average of four Brazilian women per day were murdered for motives linked to their gender in 2023, according to a study published Thursday on the eve of International Women's Day.

The Brazilian Public Security Forum (FBSP) NGO collected data from police records which showed 1,463 femicides last year, a 1.6 percent increase from 2022.

This data has been collected since 2015, when a law was passed in the country describing femicide as murder "caused by domestic or family violence due to the condition of the female sex."

Since then, 10,655 women have fallen victim to this crime.

"We cannot normalize the deaths of more than 10,000 women murdered in less than a decade just because they are women," said Samira Bueno, the director of FBSP, in a statement.

"This topic has been the object of numerous debates by civil society, but this is not enough to reduce the number of these crimes committed each day in Brazil."

A year ago, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced on International Women's Day a series of measures to combat "the intolerable physical violence against women."

These included an increase in funds dedicated to women's shelters and the reactivation of a monitoring program to prevent repeat cases of domestic violence.