By Veronica O’Kelly

I write with indignation, but also with the suffocating feeling that we are getting used to the unacceptable. Brazil is experiencing a daily barbarism against women. This is not a rhetorical exaggeration. It is official data, it is blood spilled, it is fear embedded in the routine of half of the population.

In 2025, the country registered the highest number of femicides since the crime was typified by the “Femicide Law” in 2015. According to data from the Ministry of Justice and Public Safety, there were 1,470 victims throughout the year, an average of four women murdered per day. The Brazilian Forum for Public Safety points to an even higher number: 1,568 victims in 2025, an increase of 4.7% over the previous year.

Each of these numbers has a name, a story, a family. But the pattern is brutally repeated: black women, murdered indoors, by their own partner or ex-partner. Between 2021 and 2024, 62.6% of the victims were black. Gender violence in Brazil has color and class. It shows that structural machismo is intertwined with racism and social inequality.

In most cases, the femicide had a direct relationship with the female victim: 59.4% were killed by the partner and 21.3% by the ex-partner. In 97.3% of the cases with identified perpetrators, the crimes were committed by men. The lie that the danger is “in the dark street” collapses. The danger lives inside the home.

And even when women seek help, the state fails. One in eight victims of femicide had obtained an emergency protection measure. 13.1% were murdered despite being under judicial protection. This is not a tragedy, it is a state policy.

The case of Tainara Souza Santos, a 31-year-old woman, exposed this brutality. She died after almost a month in hospital, after being run over and dragged for about a kilometer by a car driven by an ex-partner, in the middle of Rebouças Avenue. It was a femicide committed in broad daylight, on one of São Paulo’s main avenues. Patriarchal violence is not hidden: it feels authorized, encouraged.

Added to this is the naturalization of the rape culture. In Copacabana, teenagers practiced gang rape, in the middle of the tourist area of Rio de Janeiro, and the girls did not report it for fear of not being believed. This silence is not a choice. It is the product of a society that blames the victims, protects the aggressors and teaches women to survive instead of living.

Don’t tell me that this is an individual, “sick man” problem. If it were, there would be no pattern. There would be no statistics. There would not be this almost mechanical repetition of female bodies murdered inside their homes. Misogyny is structural. It sustains a system that needs women to live in fear in order to accept lower wages, double shifts, economic dependence and silence.

Less than three reales per woman.

In 2024, the Ministry of Women had R$ 256.4 million authorized for three programs of the portfolio. However, only 14.29% of this amount was executed, equivalent to R$36.6 million. In practice, this means that federal investment to address violence against women does not reach R$3 per woman in the country.

The Lula government, throughout its term of office, has not structurally modified this budgetary inequality. A logic is maintained in which women continue to be among the lowest priority areas in the Union. The “Marco “Arcabouço Fiscal” (the national government’s economic plan) imposes limits on the real growth of public spending, compressing social spending. But while payrolls are preserved, the population increases and violence against women intensifies.

Speech does not save lives. A publicity campaign does not prevent a femicide. Without a robust budget, without expansion of shelters, without multidisciplinary teams, without rapid response to complaints, without economic autonomy for victims, everything becomes empty rhetoric.

If we are experiencing an epidemic of femicides, the government needs to act as if it were a national emergency. It is necessary to decree a gender violence emergency and allocate all necessary resources to protect women, shelter victims and guarantee housing, income and security. The State is responsible. It cannot hide behind tax forms while women die four times a day.

I refuse to accept this barbarism as normal. And I know that we are not alone. We socialist women, together with comrades who understand that this struggle is also theirs, continue to organize. We fight not only for immediate policies, which are urgent and indispensable, but also to overthrow the system that transforms oppression into a gear of profit.

Because violence against women is not a deviation. It is functional to an order that needs inequality to exist.

And I choose to fight for another order. For a feminist and socialist world, where no woman has to live in fear in order to keep the system working.