O crime de feminicídio e a percepção dos agentes da justiça: uma análise sociológica a partir dos Tribunais do Júri de João Pessoa, Paraíba

Abstract

The feminicide can be understood as a social phenomenon and a sociological category that has acquired legal status. On March 9, 2015, Law 13.104, approved by the National Congress, defined the violent deaths of women committed for reasons of the status to be a woman as qualifying the crime of homicide and, therefore, the gravity of being a heinous crime. The category involves two circumstances: domestic and family violence and the contempt or discrimination against the status of being women. Considering this legislative change I adopt the legal practices as object of study and I seek to investigate the perception of the justice agents regarding those type of crimes, in the first years in which the feminicide category was inserted in the legal world. The chosen justice agents were Judges, Prosecutors and Public Defenders who were members of Jury Trials in João Pessoa, Paraíba. As well jurors, citizens who represent society in the institutional function of "doing justice”. I understand the feminicida as the murders of women deriving from misogynistic practices fomented by the culture of gender inequality that normalize the way as female subjects must perform their acts, gestures, attitudes, desires, according to certain social and moral frames of being a woman. In face of the growing number and/or announcement of lethal violence against women, it has become imperative to know the states of apprehension and intelligibility of the senses and the breadth of gender inequality that would make the circumstances of the murders of women recognizable. Therefore, the resources of sociological research have instrumented the analysis from the first notions and meanings that have been incorporated into the crime of feminicide; they help to understand how women and men have been performed through the moral discourses and legal arguments manipulated when justice agents think and/or act on the trials of women's murders. In order to do so, the qualitative research was the best way for this analysis so we could achieve my objective at the defined period of research. Thus, the techniques of semi-structured interviews – in order to facilitate the obtaining of no programmed information – and the ethnography view of the sessions of the trials composed the study material. I applied the interviews mostly in the second half of 2016 to ten law professionals and between August 2016 and August 2017 to eighteen jurors. In addition, I observed twelve trials of cases where woman were victims, during the four-year of my Ph.D. The research findings raised notions about a "double construction" of State and gender, when we see gender meanings entering criminal justice apparatuses and demanding apprehension by part of their agents, while those manipulate speeches and trigger the language of gender according to the position they occupy in the scenario of the Jury and of the intelligibility apprehended.