“Tudo para mulher na justiça é difícil”: atuação da Defensoria Pública do Estado da Paraíba junto a acusadas de crimes de drogas

Abstract

Between 2006 and 2025, the Brazilian prison population increased by 134%, while the number of women in prison grew by 207%, with 50% of female criminal cases related to drug offenses. This information points to the selective imprisonment of women as an impact of brazilian drug policy. In this context, the Public Defender's Office, as the institution responsible for providing comprehensive and free legal defense to vulnerable individuals, has a crucial role to play. This dissertation aims to analyze public defenders’ perceptions of the work of the Public Defender’s Office of the State of Paraíba in cases involving women accused of drug-related crimes. To achieve this objective, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 08 public defenders from the state of Paraíba who had already worked on at least one case involving a woman accused of a crime under Law Nº 11.343/2006. A total of 04 men and 04 women participated in the study, half of whom self-identified as black and the other half as white.The interviewees were mostly people over 40 years of age, who had passed a public exam and had been working as public defenders for a maximum of 10 years. Regarding the results, the defenders perceive an increase in female incarceration since Law Nº 11.343/06 came into force and affirm that the number of women accused of offenses established under this statute who are assisted by the Public Defender's Office is significant. Given this scenario, all of them prepare individualized defenses for their assisted women, but most stated that their contact with them is limited to the evidentiary and judgment hearing and that they rarely manage to present witnesses for this moment. From the defenders perspective, these women's entry into drug trafficking is multifactorial, with all of them pointing to the link with a male figure as one of these motivations. Regarding the participation of these women, most defenders indicated that they perform activities that, in the drug trafficking hierarchy, are considered subordinate and that they are criminalized for small amounts of drugs, so that most of the interviewees understand that there are differences in the criminalization processes that affect men and women, so much so that they present different defenses for them. In this vein, most stated that they knew what a gender-sensitive defense was, but only half said they drafted procedural documents along these lines. In the end, participants pointed out that the main obstacles to defending women accused of drug crimes were the Public Defender's Office's insufficient human resources, the difficulty of contacting them, and the conservative stance of the Judiciary. It can be concluded that public defenders recognize the vulnerability of women before, during, and after criminal proceedings, especially those related to drug trafficking, but that they still reproduce violent discourse toward them, in divergence with the institutional commitment, failing to exploit the institution's full transformative potential. Thus, in light of the Public Defender's Office's mission, but in view of its difficulties, the final suggestion of this dissertation was to develop a gender-sensitive assistance protocol, strategically designed at the individual and collective levels, in order to increase the chances of acquittal for these women and to combat gender discrimination in particular.