Maria da Penha: complaint application received 2,500 cases – 03/08/2023 – Daily life

On the day that Amanda arrived at the apartment she still shared with her then husband and saw that her things had been thrown by him in the hallway, she sat on the floor of the building and cried, not knowing what to do. She was in the process of separating, and was kicked out of the apartment — where she lived with her children — suddenly.

Amanda (her name is fictitious) had already filed complaints against her husband. The first was at the beginning of the separation, through 180 — the Women’s Assistance Center. “The process did not evolve, there was no [medida] protective, it was just a conversation with the attendant”, she says. The second was at a police station, one of the times he tried to put her out of the house. “There, they only suggested that I come back with a key ring and change the lock.”

For this reason, she had no expectations when she made a third complaint, via cell phone, with things still sprawled on the floor. Amanda used the Maria da Penha Virtual application, launched in the city of Rio de Janeiro in 2020 and in the rest of the state in 2022.

“I didn’t know how long it would take, but within a week they called me”, he says. A psychologist contacted her to explain the situation. What she had suffered has a name: property and psychological violence —both covered by the Maria da Penha Law. She got a protective measure for 90 days and the feeling, she says, was “of peace”.

By November 2022, the Court of Justice of Rio de Janeiro had received 2,582 complaints through the app —in the last year alone, there were 1,777. of studies on technology and law at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro).

“We saw a report about how domestic violence was increasing in the quarantine without women having the means to report it, because they had closed police stations and they were trapped at home with the aggressors”, says professor Kone Cesário, project coordinator and deputy director of Law School.

“That’s when a student brought me the idea for an app and we took it to court.”

Together with the Court of Justice of Rio, the students developed a form that sends the request for an urgent protective measure directly to the domestic and family violence court. This is done through a website, which can be accessed by cell phone and computer.

“You describe what happened and you can attach photos, which, in my case, was very important because I had recorded what he did with my things, throwing everything in the hallway”, says Amanda.

For Judge Adriana Ramos, holder of the 1st Court of Domestic and Family Violence against Women in Rio, an important point of Maria da Penha Virtual is that it does not store the complainant’s data.

“This was something we thought about from the beginning, because there are women who share the cell phone with the aggressor, or that he could go and touch her phone later”, he says.

According to TJ data, the regional leader in the number of requests for urgent protective measures is Leopoldina, in the North Zone, with 240 uses of the application last year. This is where Complexo do Alemão and Complexo da Maré are located, two of the largest favelas in the city.

“From the granting of the protective measure, another program is activated, the Maria da Penha Patrol, of the Military Police, which ensures that this measure is fulfilled”, explains the judge. Ramos says that he followed a case in which the woman was in private prison with the aggressor, and was rescued from a complaint that she managed to make on her cell phone.

The virtual and direct dialogue between the victim and the Judiciary is of concern to some specialists. According to sociologist Wânia Pasinato, attributing to women the role of providing correct information can be a form of violence.

“That’s why we spend so much time talking about the importance of humane treatment, of training police teams so that this woman is well taken care of”, she says. “We know that care today is not what it should be, but we can’t say ‘it’s horrible, so let’s make them ask for it themselves’.”

In addition, Pasinato claims that the bet on technological tools as a means of correcting the slowness of the judicial system can exclude the poorest and most vulnerable women, without access to the internet, from improvements.

Cesário says that humanization is taken into account in the app, and that women receive psychological support and follow-up after the initial request through the app.

Currently only available in the state of Rio, the project is now expected to be expanded. Rafael Wanderley is the UFRJ law student who came up with the idea for Maria da Penha Virtual. Currently, he is one of the founders of the startup Direito Ágil, and manages the expansion of the technology to other states: in 2023, the model will be taken to Paraíba. A pilot will be implemented in the municipalities of Sousa, Santa Rita and Campina Grande.

In addition, Ramos says that universal access to the project is also being considered. “It would be important to have totems in health units or other environments that women frequent where they could make the complaint without being noticed, or if they cannot use the internet at home.”

This story is being published as part of the “Towards Equality” project, an international and collaborative initiative that includes 14 media outlets to present the challenges and solutions to achieving gender equality.