“Isso para um homem é feio, imagina para uma mulher”: mídia sensacionalista, guerra às drogas e criminalização de mulheres na Paraíba

Abstract

The involvement of women in drug trafficking is currently one of the biggest contributors to the high number of female incarcerations in Brazil. Informal control is a key factor in criminalization processes, especially regarding ―female criminality‖, swallowed and suppressed in the face of a prohibitionist populist rhetoric aimed at the persecution and annulment of those who are the enemies of a social order. The sensationalist media, as a subject that integrates the tangle of sources of informal control over these women, based on discourses that inflame the unrestrained and irrational application of penal norms and greater incarceration, contributes to their criminalization processes becoming increasingly ever stronger. In this sense, this dissertation has the general objective of investigating the stigmatizing media discourses produced by the sensationalist media and what is its role in the production of criminalization processes of women supposedly involved in drug trafficking, also having specific objectives of analyzing the criminalization processes media and the stereotypes produced, and how this contributes to the criminalization of women, discussing the war and drugs in Brazil, observing the characteristics of the Criminal Drug Policy with a focus on issues related to gender, problematizing narratives conveyed through a television newspaper from Paraíba ―Correio Verdade‖, to verify the political and ideological positions that accompany the discourses that relate women to drug trafficking. To this end, thirteen videos of news published by a Paraíba newspaper in 2020 were selected, which composing the corpus of this research, were categorized, transcribed and used for the analysis and investigation of the discursive elements that are present in the presentation of the news. The debates presented from the investigation of the content of the videos are predominantly made up of a critical theoretical framework, where the categorization of the videos is aimed at exploring theories of Critical Criminology. In general terms, it was observed that the sensationalist media, from the stigmatized representation of supposedly criminal women through the use of moral and economic values linked to gender, with the incidence of race and class factors, contributes to a process of female criminalization, intensifying a systemic selection of these women and encouraging human rights violations based on a marginalizing criminal policy.